Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
Johann Hari
Introduction: Walking in Memphis
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A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus
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I went to Moscow to interview the most important philosopher of attention in the world today, Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: “If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.” He said that if we want to understand the situation we are in at the moment, it helps to picture something. Imagine you are driving a car, but somebody has thrown a big bucket of mud all over the windshield. You’re going to face a lot of problems in that moment—you are at risk of knocking off your rearview mirror, or getting lost, or arriving at your destination late. But the first thing you need to do—before you worry about any of those problems—is clean your windshield. Until you do that, you don’t even know where you are. We need to deal with our attention problems before we try to achieve any other sustained goal
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when attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down. Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society
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People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions—and less likely to see clearly when they fail
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scientists often disagree with each other about what is happening and why. This isn’t because the science is rickety but because humans are extremely complex, and it’s really hard to measure something as complicated as what affects our ability to pay attention. This obviously presented a challenge to me as I wrote this book. If we wait for perfect evidence, we will be waiting forever. I had to proceed, doing my best, on the basis of the best information we have—while always being conscious that this science is fallible and fragile and needs to be handled with care
Chapter One: Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
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When you fix your gaze on the speedy, you feel pensive, amped-up, liable to be washed away if you don’t move, wave, shout.
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when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from
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“I came to this realization that my job in a way is to think something that is different from everyone else—but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.”
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The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it
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There was a phrase in Sune’s scientific paper, summarizing his findings, that kept rattling around in my head. It said that we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.” When I read this, I realized what I had experienced in Provincetown. I was—for the first time in my life—living within the limits of my attention’s resources. I was absorbing as much information as I could actually process, think about, and contemplate—and no more. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.
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Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.”
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there’s just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain’s ability to understand it instead
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when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus
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instead of acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion
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There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.” There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: “If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.
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Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that “technological distraction”—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
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The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the “screw-up effect.” When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because—Earl explained—“your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off”—and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. “Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking
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Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term—which we might call the “creativity drain.” You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? “Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?” Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how “new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting,” Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts.”
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a fourth consequence, based on a smaller amount of evidence—which we might call the “diminished memory effect.” A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterward they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less
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The size and capacity of the human brain hasn’t significantly changed in 40,000 years, Earl explained, and it isn’t going to upgrade anytime soon. Yet we are deluded about this fact.
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We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction
Chapter Two: Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States
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if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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After investing all this time in creating their paintings, when they were finished, the artists didn’t triumphantly gaze at what they had made and show it off and seek out praise for it. Almost all of them simply put the painting away and started working on another one. If Skinner was right—that human beings do things just to gain rewards and avoid punishments—this made no sense. You’d done the work; now here’s the reward, right in front of you, for you to enjoy. But creative people seemed mostly uninterested in rewards; even money didn’t interest most of them. “When they finished,” Mihaly said to an interviewer later, “the object, the outcome was not important.”
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Mihaly began to wonder if these people were in fact describing a fundamental human instinct that had not been studied by scientists before. He called it a “flow state.” This is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. It is the deepest form of focus and attention that we know of.
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The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swim. You have to resolve to pursue it, and to set aside your other goals while you do. Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. Mihaly found that distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two or more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission
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Second, you have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. This is part of a basic truth about attention: we evolved to pay attention to things that are meaningful to us. As Roy Baumeister, the leading expert on willpower I quoted in the introduction, put it to me: “A frog will look at a fly it can eat much more than a stone it can’t eat
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Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either
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The more he studied flow states, the more Mihaly noticed something else crucial about them. They are extraordinarily fragile and easily disrupted. He wrote: “Many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way” of flow. In the late 1980s, he discovered that staring at a screen is one of the activities we take part in that on average provides the lowest amount of flow. (He warned that “surrounded by an astonishing panoply of recreational gadgets…most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.”) But as I reflected on this in Provincetown, I realized that even though I had set aside my screens, I was still making a basic mistake. “To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly has explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?”
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to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
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we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters
Chapter Three: Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion
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I went to the University of Minneapolis to interview professor of neuroscience and psychology Roxanne Prichard, who has produced some cutting-edge work on these questions. When she started teaching college students full-time in 2004, the first thing that struck her, she told me, was “how just exhausted young adults were.” They would often fall asleep the moment the lecture-theater lights were dimmed, and they were visibly struggling to stay awake and focused on anything. She began to study how much sleep they were getting. She discovered that on average, a typical student has the same sleep quality as an active-duty soldier or a parent of a newborn baby. As a result, the majority of them were “constantly fighting off this drive to sleep…. They’re not able to access their neural resources
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If you chemically induce sleep, it’s not the same kind of sleep.” Remember—sleep is an active process, in which your brain and body do lots of things. Many of these things don’t happen, or happen far less, in drugged or drunk sleep. The different ways of artificially inducing sleep can have different effects. If you take five milligrams of melatonin—which is often a standard dose that’s sold over the counter in the U.S.—Roxanne said you risk “blowing out your melatonin receptors,” which would make it harder to sleep without them
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We evolved to get a rush of energy—a “surge of waking drive,” Charles says—when the sun began to set. This was very helpful to our ancestors. Imagine you’re out camping, and the sun starts to fall—it’s very useful if you then feel a rush of wakefulness, because then you’ll be able to set up your tent before it’s too dark to do it. In the same way, our ancestors got a fresh rush of energy just as the light waned so they could safely get back to their tribe and finish the things they needed to do that day. But now we control the light. We decide when sunset happens. So if we keep bright lights switched on right until the moment we decide to go to sleep, or we watch TV on our phones in bed, when we switch them off we accidentally trigger a physical process—our bodies think this sudden waning of the light is the arrival of sunset, so they release a rush of fresh energy to help you get back to your cave.
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All this leads to one last big question about sleep—how do we solve this crisis? There are several layers to the solution. The first is personal and individual. As Charles explains, you need to radically limit your exposure to light before you go to sleep. He believes you should have no sources of artificial light in your bedroom at all, and you should avoid the blue light of screens for at least two hours before you go to bed
Chapter Four: Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience—you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall
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Anne Mangen is a professor of literacy at the University of Stavanger in Norway, and she explained to me that in two decades of researching this subject, she has proved something crucial. Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. “We’re more likely to scan and skim” when we read on screens, her studies have found—we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need. But after a while, if we do this long enough, she told me, “this scanning and skimming bleeds over. It also starts to color or influence how we read on paper…. That behavior also becomes our default, more or less.” It was precisely what I had noticed when I tried to settle into Dickens when I arrived in Provincetown and found myself rushing ahead of him, as if it was a news article and I was trying to push for the key facts.
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Anne has conducted studies that split people into two groups, where one is given information in a printed book, and the other is given the same information on a screen. Everyone is then asked questions about what they just read. When you do this, you find that people understand and remember less of what they absorb on screens. There’s broad scientific evidence for this now, emerging from fifty-four studies, and she explained that it’s referred to as “screen inferiority.” This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary-school children, it’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension
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Every time a new medium comes along—whether it’s the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter—and you start to use it, it’s like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently.
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McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself
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This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site—it doesn’t matter whether you are Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge—you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them
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How about Facebook? What’s the message in that medium? It seems to be first: your life exists to be displayed to other people, and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting. Third: somebody is your “friend” if you regularly look at their edited highlight reels, and they look at yours—this is what friendship means.
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How about Instagram? First: what matters is how you look on the outside. Second: what matters is how you look on the outside. Third: what matters is how you look on the outside. Fourth: what matters is whether people like how you look on the outside.
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Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right—you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter—in terms of followers and retweets—are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attention-deprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site—but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade.
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The same goes for Instagram. I like looking at pretty people, like everyone else. But to think that life is primarily about these surfaces—getting approval for your six-pack or how you look in a bikini—is a recipe for unhappiness. And the same goes for a lot of how we interact on Facebook too. It’s not friendship to pore jealously over another person’s photos and boasts and complaints, and to expect them to do the same for you. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of friendship. Being friends is about looking into each other’s eyes, doing things together in the world, an endless exchange of gut laughs and bear hugs, joy and grief and dancing. These are all the things Facebook will often drain from you by dominating your time with hollow parodies of friendship.
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What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
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I realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me. And I don’t agree with the messages in the medium of social media. I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature. It is why spending time on these sites—even when, by the rules of the game, I am doing well, gaining likes and followers—leaves me feeling drained and unhappy. I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.
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When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way
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fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people—which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have
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The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy
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Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your head. “It’s being structured—but our attention is in a very unique place, fluctuating both out toward the page, toward the words, and then inward, toward what those words represent.” It’s a way of combining “outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention.” When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, “trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.” You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.
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Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy—the realization by at least some white people that other ethnic groups have feelings and abilities and dreams just like them; the realization by some men that the way they have exerted power over women was illegitimate and caused real suffering; the realization by many heterosexuals that gay love is just like straight love. Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more
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It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels
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We’re all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading toward a catastrophic end potentially. If we are going to solve these problems, we can’t do it alone,” he said. “That’s why I think empathy is so valuable.”
Chapter Five: Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind-Wandering
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He had some patients strapped in for a PET scan, and those patients were waiting for him to give them a task and just letting their minds wander. As he got the task ready, he glanced at the machine, and he was puzzled. Their brains, it seemed, were not inactive, as his med-school tutors had said they should be. Activity had shifted from one part of the brain to another—but the brain was still highly active. Surprised, he began to study this in detail. He named the region of the brain that becomes more active when you think you’re not doing much “the default mode network”—and as he studied this more, analyzing what people’s brains do when they seem to be doing nothing, he could physically see this region light up on the brain scans. As he looked at them, Marcus said, “God, there she was. The whole thing. It was just stunning
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when you look back over the history of science and engineering, many great breakthroughs don’t happen during periods of focus—they happen during mind-wandering.
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Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.” Mind-wandering allows “more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made
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frenetic digital interruption is “pulling our attention away from our thoughts,” and “suppressing your default mode network
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In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.
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I wanted to know what was preventing me from doing what I wanted, in the better part of myself, to do
Chapter Six: Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)
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It’s really about the limits of attention.” The job of a magician is—at heart—to manipulate your focus. That coin didn’t really vanish—but your attention was somewhere else when the magician moved it, so when your focus comes back to the original spot, you’re amazed. To learn magic is to learn to manipulate someone’s attention without them even realizing it—and once the magician controls their focus, Tristan realized, he can do what he wants. One of the things that he was taught at camp is that a person’s susceptibility to magic has nothing to do with their intelligence. “It’s about something more subtle,” he said later. It’s “about the weaknesses, or the limits, or the blind spots, or the biases that we’re all trapped inside of
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It is hard to convey, Tristan believes, quite what it was like to go to work for Google at that moment in history, in 2011. Every day, the company he worked for—from its base, the Googleplex in Palo Alto—was shaping and reshaping how one billion people navigated their way through the world: what they got to see, and what they didn’t. He told one audience later: “I want you to imagine walking into a room. A control room, with a bunch of people, a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials—and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today. I know, because I used to work in one of those control rooms.”
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Tristan was assigned for a while to work on the development of Gmail, Google’s email system—precisely the app that was driving him wild, and that he suspected might be using some manipulative tricks he hadn’t yet figured out. Even as he worked on it, he would obsessively check his email, making him less focused, and whenever he looked at a new message, he found it took him a long time to get his mind back to where it had been before. He started trying to think through how you might design a system of email that was less prone to nuking your attention—but whenever he tried to discuss this idea with his colleagues, the conversation didn’t seem to go far. At Google, he quickly learned, success was measured, in the main, by what was called “engagement”—which was defined as minutes and hours of eyeballs on the product. More engagement was good; less engagement was bad. This was for a simple reason. The longer you make people look at their phones, the more advertising they see—and therefore the more money Google gets. Tristan’s co-workers were decent people, struggling with their own tech distractions—but the incentives seemed to lead only one way: you should always design products that “engage” the maximum number of people, because engagement equals more dollars, and disengagement equals fewer dollars.
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As the number of people using Google and Gmail continued to spike up, Tristan started to ask his colleagues: “How do you ethically persuade two billion people’s minds?…How do you ethically structure two billion people’s attention?” But instead, he found that most other people in the company were being pushed to ask simply, “How can we make this more engaging?” And that meant more attention-sucking, more interrupting—on and on it went, with better techniques being discovered every week. One day, when we were walking in San Francisco, Tristan said to me: “Things look pretty bad from the outside, but when you’re on the inside, things can look even worse.” Tristan was starting to realize: It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. Your distraction is their fuel
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I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted.” He explained: “Distraction matters to me, because time is all we have in life
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He was trying to give his colleagues a sense of the weight of the decisions they made every day: “We shape more than eleven billion interruptions to people’s lives every day. This is nuts!” The people sitting around you in the Googleplex, he explained, control more than 50 percent of all the notifications on all the phones in the whole world. We are “creating an arms race that causes companies to find more reasons to steal people’s time,” and it “destroys our common silence and ability to think.” He asked: “Do we really know what we’re doing to people
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Aza became a precocious young coder, and he gave his first talk about user interfaces when he was ten years old. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was at the forefront of designing some of the first internet browsers, and he was the creative lead on Firefox. As part of this work, he designed something that distinctly changed how the web works. It’s called “infinite scroll.” Older readers will remember that it used to be that the internet was divided into pages, and when you got to the bottom of one page, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page. It was an active choice. It gave you a moment to pause and ask: Do I want to carry on looking at this? Aza designed the code that means you don’t have to ask that question anymore
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One day, when he was thirty-two, Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter. (For many people, Aza believes, it’s vastly more.) Sticking with this low-ball percentage, Aza wanted to know what it meant, in practice, if billions of people were spending 50 percent more on a string of social-media sites. When he was done, he stared at the sums. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes—every moment from birth to death—is now spent scrolling through a screen. These hours would otherwise have been spent on some other activity.
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he began to think that “one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn’t mean it’s good for humanity
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He carried on designing more things in the vein of infinite scroll, and getting more and more uncomfortable. “It was about the time that we were getting to be really successful at this that my stomach started to drop,” he told me. He felt that he was seeing people become more unempathetic, angry, and hostile as their social-media use went up
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“one of the ironies is there are these incredibly popular workshops at Facebook and Google about mindfulness—about creating the mental space to make decisions nonreactively—and they are also the biggest perpetrators of non-mindfulness in the world.”
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“Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.”
Chapter Seven: Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part Two)
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imagine that “inside of Facebook’s servers, inside of Google’s servers, there is a little voodoo doll, [and it is] a model of you. It starts by not looking much like you. It’s sort of a generic model of a human. But then they’re collecting your click trails [i.e., everything you click on], and your toenail clippings, and your hair droppings [i.e., everything you search for, every little detail of your life online]. They’re reassembling all that metadata you don’t really think is meaningful, so that doll looks more and more like you. [Then] when you show up on [for example] YouTube, they’re waking up that doll, and they’re testing out hundreds of thousands of videos against this doll, seeing what makes its arm twitch and move, so they know it’s effective, and then they serve that to you.” It seemed like such a ghoulish image that I paused. He went on: “By the way—they have a doll like that for one in four human beings on earth.
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their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.”
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Tristan has seen, on the inside, how these business incentives work in practice. Imagine this, he said to me: An engineer proposes a tweak that improves people’s attention, or gets them to spend more time with their friends. “Then what happens is they will wake up two weeks to four weeks later, and there’ll be some review on their dashboard looking at the metrics. [Their manager will] be saying, ‘Hey, why did time spent [on the site] go down about three weeks ago? Oh, it’ll be [because] we added these features. Let’s just roll back some of those features, to figure out how we get that number back up.’ ” This isn’t some conspiracy theory, any more than it’s a conspiracy theory to explain that KFC wants you to eat fried chicken. It’s simply an obvious result of the incentive structure that has been put in place and that we allow to continue. “Their business model,” he says, “is screen time, not life time.”
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The arrival of the smartphone would always have increased to some degree the number of distractions in life, to be sure, but a great deal of the damage to our attention spans is being caused by something more subtle. It is not the smartphone in and of itself; it is the way the apps on the smartphone and the sites on our laptops are designed.
Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention. He wants us to understand that this design is not inevitable. I had to really think this over, because, of all the things I learned from him, this seemed the most important.
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the existence of the phone and the internet is the sole driver of this problem, we’re trapped and in deep trouble—because as a society, we’re not going to discard our tech. But if it’s the current design of the phones and the internet and the sites we run on them that is driving a lot of the problem, there’s a very different way they could work that would put us all in a very different position.
After you’ve adjusted your perspective in this way, seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?
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we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm.
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Scientists have been proving this effect in different contexts for a long time—if they showed you a photo of a crowd, and some of the people in it were happy, and some angry, you would instinctively pick out the angry faces first. Even ten-week-old babies respond differently to angry faces. This has been known about in psychology for years and is based on a broad body of evidence. It’s called “negativity bias.”
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On YouTube, what are the words that you should put into the title of your video, if you want to get picked up by the algorithm? They are—according to the best site monitoring YouTube trends—words such as “hates,” “obliterates,” “slams,” “destroys.” A major study at New York University found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a tweet, your retweet rate will go up by 20 percent on average, and the words that will increase your retweet rate most are “attack,” “bad,” and “blame.” A study by the Pew Research Center found that if you fill your Facebook posts with “indignant disagreement,” you’ll double your likes and shares. So an algorithm that prioritizes keeping you glued to the screen will—unintentionally but inevitably—prioritize outraging and angering you. If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging
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If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, it “turns hate into a habit.” You can see this seeping into the bones of our society. When I was a teenager, there was a horrific crime in Britain, where two ten-year-old children murdered a toddler named Jamie Bulger. The Conservative prime minister at the time, John Major, responded by publicly saying that he believed we need “to condemn a little more, and understand a little less.” I remembered thinking then, at the age of fourteen, that this was surely wrong—that it’s always better to understand why people do things, even (perhaps especially) the most heinous acts. But today, this attitude—condemn more, understand less—has become the default response of almost everyone, from the right to the left, as we spend our lives dancing to the tune of algorithms that reward fury and penalize mercy.
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First, these sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hunger for hearts and likes
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Second, these sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you normally would—to pick up your phone, or click over to Facebook on your laptop. When you do this, all the costs to your attention caused by switching—as I discussed in chapter one—kick in. The evidence there shows this is as bad for the quality of your thinking as getting drunk or stoned.
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Third, these sites learn—as Tristan put it—how to “frack” you. These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways—they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers—what, specifically, will distract you
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Fourth, because of the way the algorithms work, these sites make you angry a lot of the time. Scientists have been proving in experiments for years that anger itself screws with your ability to pay attention. They have discovered that if I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of arguments around you, and you will show “decreased depth of processing”—that is, you will think in a shallower, less attentive way
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Fifth, in addition to making you angry, these sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger. This can trigger a different psychological response in you.
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Imagine that one day you are attacked by a bear. You will stop paying attention to your normal concerns—what you’re going to eat tonight, or how you will pay the rent. You become vigilant. Your attention flips to scanning for unexpected dangers all around you. For days and weeks afterward, you will find it harder to focus on more everyday concerns.
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Sixth, these sites set society on fire. This is the most complex form of harm to our attention, with several stages, and I think probably the most harmful.
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At every stage, averting this risk to our species required us to be able to pay attention as a society—to absorb the science; to distinguish it from falsehood; to band together to demand action; and to pressure our politicians until they acted.
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false claims spread on social media far faster than the truth, because of the algorithms that spread outraging material faster and farther
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If we are lost in lies, and constantly riled up to be angry with our fellow citizens, this sets off a chain reaction. It means we can’t understand what is really going on
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Tristan testified about this before the U.S. Senate, he asked: “How can we solve the world’s most urgent problems if we’ve downgraded our attention spans, downgraded our capacity for complexity and nuance, downgraded our shared truth, downgraded our beliefs into conspiracy-theory thinking, where we can’t construct shared agendas to solve our problems
Chapter Eight: Cause Seven: The Rise of Cruel Optimism
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“An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state,” he told me. “It’s all about avoidance. It’s all about—how do I get out of this uncomfortable state?” He believes we all need to explore our triggers nonjudgmentally, think about them, and find ways to disrupt them. So whenever he felt that prickling feeling or boredom or stress come to him, he identified what was happening, and picked up a pack of Post-it notes, and he wrote on it what he wanted to know. Later, when he had finished a good stretch of writing, he would let himself google it—but only then.
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there was something about what he said that made me feel uncomfortable, and for a while, I couldn’t articulate it. Nir’s approach is absolutely in line with how the tech companies want us to think about our attention problems. They can no longer deny the crisis, so they are doing something else: subtly urging us to see it as an individual problem that has to be solved with greater self-restraint on my part and yours, not theirs
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My unease about this approach only became clear to me when I turned to the book Nir wrote a few years before he produced his work about how to beat distraction. It was written for an audience of tech designers and engineers, and it was named Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He described it as a “cookbook” containing “a recipe for human behavior.” Reading Hooked as an ordinary user of the internet is strange—it’s like the moment in an old Batman movie when the villain is caught and reveals everything he did all along, step by step. Nir writes: “Let’s admit it: we are all in the persuasion business. Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.”
He lays out the methods to achieve this, which he describes as “mind manipulation.” The goal, Nir says, is to “create a craving” in human beings—and he cites B. F. Skinner as a model for how to do it. His approach can be summarized by the headline on one of his blog posts: “Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy.”
The goal of the designer is to create an “internal trigger” (remember them?) that will keep the user coming back again and again. To help the designer picture the kind of person they are targeting, he says they should imagine a user he names Julie, who “fears being out of the loop.” He comments: “Now we’ve got something! Fear is a powerful internal trigger, and we can design our solution to help calm Julie’s fear.” Once you have succeeded in playing on feelings like this, “a habit is formed, [and so] the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line,” he writes approvingly.
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there was a worrying mismatch between his two books. In Hooked he talks about using ferociously powerful machinery to get us “fiendishly hooked” and in “pain” until we get our next techno-fix. Yet in Indistractible he tells us that when we feel distracted by this machinery, we should try gentle personal changes. In the first book, he describes big and powerful forces used to hook us; in the second, he describes fragile little personal interventions that he says will get us out
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Ronald Purser, who is professor of management at San Francisco State University. He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “cruel optimism.” This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.
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the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.” If you don’t have health insurance and you have diabetes and you can’t afford insulin, or if you are forced to work sixty hours a week by a bullying boss, or if you are watching your colleagues get laid off one by one and you suspect with a sickening feeling that you will be next, your stress is not “something we impose on ourselves.” It is something imposed on you.
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the example of a company that was cutting back on providing healthcare to some people—and was, at the same time, congratulated by the same New York Times writer for providing meditation classes to its employees. You can see clearly how this is cruel. You tell somebody there’s a solution to their problem—just think differently about your stress and you’ll be fine!—and then leave them in a waking nightmare. We won’t give workers insulin, but we’ll give them classes on how to change their thinking. It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present
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To tell people—as Nir does, and as the wider tech industry increasingly does—that it’s “pretty simple” and that they should just “push the fucking button” is to deny the reality of most people’s lives.
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most importantly, people shouldn’t have to do it. Cruel optimism takes it for granted that we can’t significantly change the systems that are wrecking our attention, so we have to mainly focus on changing our isolated selves. But why should we accept these systems as a given? Why should we accept an environment full of programs designed to “hook” us and drive us “crazy”?
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There was a different way we could have reacted to the obesity crisis when it began forty or so years ago. We could have listened to the evidence that purely practicing individual restraint—in an unchanged environment—rarely works for long, except in one in twenty cases like Nir’s. We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways. We could have used government policy to make fresh, nutritious food cheap and accessible, and sugar-filled junk expensive and inaccessible. We could have reduced the factors that cause people to be so stressed that they comfort eat. We could have built cities people can easily walk or bike through. We could have banned the targeting of junk food ads at children, shaping their tastes for life. That’s why countries that have done some of this—like Norway, or Denmark, or the Netherlands—have much lower levels of obesity, and countries that have focused on telling individual overweight people to pull themselves together, like the U.S. and U.K., have very high levels of obesity. If all the energy people like me have put into shaming and starving ourselves had been put instead into demanding these political changes, there would be far less obesity now, and a lot less misery.
Chapter Nine: The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution
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Tristan and Aza explained that there are plenty of historical precedents for something becoming so widespread, only for society to discover it actually causes a lot of harm and ban the market in it. Think about lead paint. It was in a majority of American homes—then it was discovered to damage the brains of kids and adults, making it harder for them to focus
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At the moment there is a fundamental clash between your interests—to be able to focus, to have friends you see offline, to be able to discuss things calmly—and the interests of the social-media companies
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Facebook’s scientists concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth
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I realized that if Facebook won’t stop promoting fascism—promoting Nazism in Germany—they will never care about protecting your focus and attention. These companies will never restrain themselves. The risks of letting them continue behaving the way they have are greater than the risks of overreacting. They have to be stopped. They have to be stopped by us
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Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.
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Tristan’s mentor, Jaron Lanier—a veteran Silicon Valley engineer—told me he used to be a consultant for loads of dystopian Hollywood movies, like Minority Report, but he had to stop because he kept designing ever-more-frightening technologies to warn people of what was coming—and designers kept responding by saying: That’s so cool; how do we make that?
Chapter Ten: Cause Eight: The Surge in Stress and How It Is Triggering Vigilance
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the business model behind the tech was more important than the tech itself
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“Hypervigilance is essentially when you’re looking out for the bear around every corner. Your attention is focused on cues for potential danger, as opposed to being focused on being present with what’s going on, or the lesson you’re supposed to be learning, or doing the work you were supposed to be doing.
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To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic
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narrowing your focus is “a really good strategy in a safe environment, because it means you can learn things and flourish and develop. But if you are in a dangerous environment, selective attention [where you focus on just one thing] is a really dumb strategy
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what’s the right way to respond? How could she help Robert, and all the other kids in her care like him? She told me that she starts by explaining to parents: “I believe this [inability to focus] is being caused by your [child’s] body making too many stress hormones. So here’s how we fix them. We have to create an environment. We have to limit the amount of scary or stressful things that [your child] is experiencing and witnessing. And we have to layer on lots of buffering, lots of caregiving, lots of nurturing. In order for you to be able to do that, you, Mom, have to recognize and address your own history of what’s gone on in your life.”
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There’s a Buddhist saying—be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.”
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Finland showed that a universal basic income—enough to give a baseline of security, but not so much that it disincentivizes work—improves people’s focus by dealing with one of the causes of our hypervigilance.
Chapter Twelve: Causes Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution
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Dale, and other experts on this question I spent time with across the world, went on to outline three broad ways in which how we eat now is harming our focus. The first is that we currently eat a diet that causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes.
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if you’re consuming those kinds of foods with caffeine, the effect on blood sugar is exaggerated even further: “If you had a croissant on its own, your blood sugar will obviously spike, but if you had it with a coffee, it would spike even higher, and you would get a much more aggressive crash
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The second way in which our diets affect our focus is that most of us now eat in a way that deprives us of the nutrients we need for our brains to develop and function fully
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70 percent of the kids who cut out the preservatives and dyes improved their ability to pay attention, and the average improvement was a remarkable 50 percent
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“nutritional psychiatry”—a new field that is teasing out the connection between the way we eat and our psychological challenges.
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The third reason our food harms our focus is different. Our current diets aren’t just lacking in what we need—they also actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains almost like drugs. For example, in 2007 a group of scientists in Southampton in Britain got 297 normal kids, who were either three years old or between eight and nine, and they split them into two groups. One group was given a drink containing common food additives that appear regularly in our diets, and the other group was given a drink that didn’t contain them. They were then monitored to see how they behaved. The kids who drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive. The evidence for this was strong and decisive enough that in the aftermath of this discovery, many European countries banned these dyes—but the U.S. regulators refused to, and they are still being consumed every day in some of the country’s most popular cereals and snacks. I wondered if this could help to explain some of the gap in ADHD rates between Europe and the U.S.
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They’re all leaving out the refined carbohydrates, the processed food, the junk oils. They’re all building their foundations on whole foods….
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every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers behind the screen trying to get you to pick it up again, every time you try to give up processed food, there’s a team of expert marketers trying to get you to crack and come back to it. From long before you were even consciously aware of it, they have been working at getting you to associate positive feelings with unhealthy food. They programmed me perfectly to feed their profit margins rather than my brain health, and I’m not alone. That machinery needs to be turned off, so it can’t distort the tastes and steal the focus of another generation.
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if you live in a major city today, every day you are breathing in a chemical soup—a mixture of many different contaminants, including those spewed from car engines. Your brain did not evolve to absorb these chemicals, like iron, through the respiratory system, and it doesn’t know how to handle them. So just by living in a polluted city, she said, you are experiencing a “repeated chronic insult to your brain,” and it will react by becoming inflamed. I asked her: What happens if that goes on for months and years? She said it “is going to lead to damage to the nerve cells, to the neurons. Depending on the dose [i.e., how bad the pollution is], depending on your genetic susceptibility, eventually, over time, your brain cells will be damaged
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decision to allow leaded petrol to dominate the market stole a large amount of focus from people all over the world
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It sometimes seems like the same story that played out with lead is now happening with other attention-damaging chemicals. The industries that profit from using them fund the vast majority of the research into them; they systematically promote doubt about the possible harms; and they argue that if there’s any doubt at all about the danger of their products, they should be allowed to carry on using them.
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kept thinking about what Barbara Demeneix said to me: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” It’s possible that a hundred years from now, when they look back at us and ask why we struggled to pay attention, they will say, “They were surrounded by pollutants and chemicals that inflamed their brains and harmed focus. They walked around exposed to BPA and PCBs, and breathing in metals. Their scientists knew what it did to their brains and their ability to focus. Why were they surprised they struggled to pay attention?” Those people in the future will know whether, after learning this, we banded together to protect our brains—or whether we allowed them to continue to degrade
Chapter Thirteen: Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It
01/28/23Chapter Thirteen: Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It: 135
As he described what happened to these horses, he used a phrase that struck me. He said these horses are suffering from “frustrated biological objectives.” Horses want to roam and run and graze. When they can’t express their innate nature, their behavior and focus go awry, and they start to act out. He told me that “the pressure of having your biological objectives thwarted is such that it opens a Pandora’s box,” where you’ll try to find any behavior that will “alleviate this crushing psychological pressure or inability to do anything…. Horses spend about 60 percent of their time in the wild grazing, so it’s not surprising that one of the things that gives them release is a sort of fake grazing, which is what cribbing is.”
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“ADHD is not a diagnosis. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s just a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together. That’s all it is.” All you are saying, when a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, is that a child is struggling to focus. “It doesn’t tell you anything about the ‘why’ question.” It’s like being told that a child has a cough, listening to the cough, and then saying “yes, the child has a cough.” If a doctor identifies a child with attention problems, that should be the first step in the process—not the last.
01/28/23Chapter Thirteen: Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It: 160
I went to Minneapolis, where they conducted their research, to meet them. In 1973, Alan Sroufe, who became a professor of child psychology there, started a massive collective research project, which was designed to answer a really big question—what factors in your life really shape you? We met in the café of a garden center in the city’s suburbs. Alan is a gentle, soft-spoken scientist who, at the end of our conversation, went to pick up his grandchildren from school. For more than forty years, Alan and his team have been studying the same two hundred people, who were all born into poor families. They have been tracked and analyzed from birth all the way into middle age. These scientists measured a huge range of factors in these people’s lives—from their bodies to their home lives, from their personalities to their parents. One of the many things they wanted to figure out is: What factors in a person’s life can lead to them developing attention problems
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But why would a child growing up in a stressful environment be more likely to have this problem? I of course thought back to everything I had learned from Nadine Burke Harris. Alan began to offer an additional layer of explanation—one that is compatible with her findings. He explained that when you’re very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you are soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalize the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed-out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children—because they are so amped-up themselves. That means that their children don’t learn how to calm and center themselves in the same way. Their kids are, as a result, more likely to respond to difficult situations by getting angry or distressed—feelings that wreck their focus
01/28/23Chapter Thirteen: Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It: 143
It has been proven—in a different set of scientific studies—that identical twins do not actually experience the same environments as non-identical twins. Identical twins spend more time together than non-identical twins. They are treated more alike—by their parents, friends, and schools (indeed, often people can’t tell them apart). They are more likely to become confused about their identity and to feel merged with their twin. They are psychologically closer. Jay told me that in most respects, “their environment’s more similar…. They’re copying each other’s behavior more. They’re being treated more alike. All of these things lead to more similar behavior—whatever the behavior may be
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Genes are turned on and off in response to environmental input.”
Chapter Fourteen: Cause Twelve: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically
01/28/23Chapter Fourteen: Cause Twelve: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically: 149
you’re a kid and you’re on your own with other kids, “you figure out how to make something happen,” Lenore says. You have to use your creativity to come up with a game. You then have to persuade the other kids that your game is the best one they could play. Then “you figure out how to read people enough so that the game keeps going.” You have to learn how to negotiate when it’s your turn and when it’s their turn—so you have to learn about other people’s needs and desires, and how to meet them. You learn how to cope with being disappointed, or frustrated. You learn all this “through being excluded, through coming up with a new game, through getting lost, through climbing the tree and [then] somebody says, ‘Climb higher!’ and you can’t decide if you will or you won’t. Then you do, and it’s exhilarating, and then you climb a little higher the next time—or you climb a little higher and it’s so scary that you’re crying…. And yet—now you’re on top.” These are all crucial forms of attention
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Professor Jonathan Haidt—a leading social psychologist—has argued that there has been a big rise in anxiety among children and teens, in part because of this play deprivation. When a child plays, he learns the skills that make it possible to cope with the unexpected
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it’s easier to focus on something, and stick with it, if your motives are intrinsic—if you are doing something because it’s meaningful to you—than if your motives are extrinsic, and you’re doing it because you are forced to, or to get something out of it afterward. The more intrinsic your motivation, the easier it will be to sustain your attention.
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“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”
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In 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which massively increased standardized testing across the U.S. In the four years that followed, diagnoses of severe attention problems in children rose by 22 percent
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The country that is often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world, Finland, is closer to these progressive models than anything we would recognize. Their children don’t go to school at all until they are seven years old—before then, they just play. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, kids arrive at school at 9 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m. They are given almost no homework, and they take almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is at the beating heart of Finnish kids’ lives: by law, teachers have to give kids fifteen minutes of free play for every forty-five minutes of instruction. What’s the outcome? Only 0.1 percent of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems, and Finns are among the most literate, numerate, and happy people in the world.
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When adults notice that children and teens seem to be struggling to focus and pay attention today, we often say it with a weary and exasperated superiority. The implication is: Look at this degraded younger generation! Aren’t we better than them? Why can’t they be like us? But after learning all this, I think about it very differently. Children have needs—and it’s our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. In many cases, in this culture, we aren’t meeting those needs. We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.
Conclusion: Attention Rebellion
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The first layer of your attention, he said, is your spotlight. This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book.
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The second layer of your attention is your starlight. This is, he says, the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time
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The third layer of your attention is your daylight. This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place
01/28/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 162
I began to wonder if there is, in fact, a fourth form of attention. I would call it our stadium lights—it’s our ability to see each other, to hear each other, and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 163
One: I used pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much. Pre-commitment is when you realize that if you want to change your behavior, you have to take steps now that will lock in that desire and make it harder for you to crack later.
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 163
Two: I have changed the way I respond to my own sense of distraction. I used to reproach myself, and say: You’re lazy. You’re not good enough. What’s wrong with you? I tried to shame myself into focusing harder. Now, based on what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi taught me, instead I have a very different conversation with myself. I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.
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Three: based on what I learned about the way social media is designed to hack our attention spans, I now take six months of the year totally off it. (This time is divided into chunks, usually of a few months.)
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 164
Four: I acted on what I learned about the importance of mind-wandering. I realized that letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention, but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right. It is when you let your mind drift away from your immediate surroundings that it starts to think over the past, and starts to game out the future, and makes connections between different things you have learned. Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my attention space to roam, my thinking is sharper, and I have better ideas.
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 164
Five: I used to see sleep as a luxury, or—worse—as an enemy. Now I am strict with myself about getting eight hours every night. I have a little ritual where I make myself unwind: I don’t look at screens for two hours before I go to bed, and I light a scented candle and try to set aside the stresses of the day. I bought a FitBit device to measure my sleep, and if I get less than eight hours, I make myself go back to bed. This has made a really big difference.
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 155
Six: I’m not a parent, but I am very involved in the lives of my godchildren and my young relatives. I used to spend a lot of my time with them deliberately doing things—busy, educational activities I would plan out in advance. Now I spend most of my time with them just playing freely, or letting them play on their own without being managed or oversupervised or imprisoned. I learned that the more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention. I try to give them as much of that as I can
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 165
Covid gave us a glimpse of the future we were already skidding toward. My friend Naomi Klein, a political writer who has made many strikingly accurate predictions about the future for twenty years, explained to me: “We were on a gradual slide into a world in which every one of our relationships was mediated by platforms and screens, and because of Covid, that gradual process went into hyper-speed.” The tech companies were planning for us to be immersed in their world to such an extreme extent in a decade’s time, not now. “The plan was not for it to leap in this way,” she said. “That leaping is an opportunity, really—because when you do something that quickly, it comes as a shock to your system.” We didn’t slowly acclimatize to it, and get hooked on its increasing patterns of reinforcements. Instead, we got slammed headfirst into a vision of the future—and we realized “we hate it. It’s not good for our well-being. We desperately miss each other.” Under Covid, even more than before, we were living in simulations of social life, not the real thing. It was better than nothing, to be sure—but it felt thinner. And all the while, the algorithms of surveillance capitalism were altering us—tracking and changing us—for many more hours a day.
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 166
Naomi told me that the way we felt when we were spending all day in lockdown on Zoom and Facebook was awful but “also kind of a gift,” because it showed us the road we were headed down with such clarity. More screens. More stress. More collapse of the middle class. More insecurity for the working class. More invasive technology. She calls this vision of the future the “Screen New Deal.” She told me: “The ray of hope in all of this is that we are in touch with how much we dislike this vision of the future that we have just trial run…. We weren’t going to have a trial run. We were going to have a gradual rollout. But we got a crash course.”
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 166
For a long time we took our attention for granted, as if it was a cactus that would grow in even the most desiccated climate. Now we know it’s more like an orchid, a plant that requires great care or it will wither.
01/29/23Conclusion: Attention Rebellion: 166
I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper.
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Think, he said, about how we did it with coal. Man-made global warming is a rapidly unfolding disaster, but—like our attention crisis—it can easily seem pretty abstract, and far away, and hard to get a handle on. Even once you do understand it, it can seem so huge and overwhelming that you are often left feeling powerless to do anything. When Ben first drew up his plans, there was a coal-fired power station in Britain named Kingsnorth, and the government was planning to authorize the construction of another coal station right next to it. This, Ben realized, was the whole global problem in microcosm. So after a lot of planning with his allies, he broke into the power station and rappelled down its side, painting onto the side of the building a warning about the extreme weather events that coal unleashes across the world.
They were all arrested and put on trial—which was part of their plan. They intended to use the justice process—in a jujitsu move—as a perfect opportunity to put coal itself on trial. They called some of the leading scientific experts from all over the world to testify, to explain what the burning of coal is doing to the ecosystem. In Britain there’s a law that says that in an emergency, you can break some rules—you don’t get charged with trespassing, for example, if you break into a burning building to save people. Ben and his legal team argued that this was an emergency: they were trying to prevent the planet from being set on fire. Twelve ordinary British jurors considered the facts—and they acquitted Ben and the other activists on all counts. It was a sensational story, reported all over the world. In the wake of the negative publicity around coal that emerged out of the trial, the British government abandoned all plans to build new coal-powered stations—and began to shutter the ones that remained.
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Why has this been happening so long? This trend far precedes Facebook, or most of the factors I have written about here. What’s the underlying cause stretching back to the 1880s? I discussed it with many people, and the most persuasive answer came from the Norwegian scientist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who is a professor of social anthropology. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea—economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy—and each individual company in it—should get bigger and bigger. That’s how we now define success. If a country’s economy grows, its politicians are likely to be reelected. If a company grows, its CEOs are likely garlanded. If a country’s economy or a company’s share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organizing principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world.
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If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.
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I suspect that, in the long run, it will ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. I can’t tell you I have all the answers to how we do that—but I believe that if an Attention Rebellion begins, we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself
Notes
In the fall of 2006, B.J. testified before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warning that there was a “potential dark side” looming, where it will be hard for you to tell “when you are being persuaded and when you are not”: You can watch Professor Fogg’s important testimony about the dangers of what he saw as persuasion profiling and sounding the alarm bells here: https://vimeo.com/117427520. And you can read it here: https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_events/protecting-consumers-next-tech-ade/transcript_061107.pdf. (Both as accessed May 20, 2022.)
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“I want you to imagine walking into a room. A control room, with a bunch of people, a hundred people”: T. Harris, “How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day” (TED talk), TED2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_how_a_handful_of_tech_companies_control_billions_of_minds_every_day?language=en.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
On average, we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm: C. H. Hansen and R. D. Hansen, “Finding the Face in the Crowd: An Anger Superiority Effect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 6 (1988): 917–24, cited in P. M. Litvak et al., “Fuel in the Fire: How Anger Affects Decision-Making,” in International Handbook of Anger, ed. M. Potegal, G. Stemmler, and C. Spielberger (New York: Springer, 2010), 287–310; R. C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990); and C. Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
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Even ten
They have discovered that if I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of arguments around you: G. V. Bodenhausen et al., “Happiness and Stereotypic Thinking in Social Judgment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66, no. 4 (1994): 621–36, cited in Litvak et al., “Fuel in the Fire”; and D. DeSteno et al., “Beyond Valence in the Perception of Likelihood: The Role of Emotion Specificity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 3 (2000): 397–416.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Finland decided to stop talking and actually try it: J. Howego, “Universal Income Study Finds Money for Nothing Won’t Make Us Work Less,” New Scientist, February 8, 2019, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2193136-universal-income-study-finds-money-for-nothing-wont-make-us-work-less/.
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