YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Individuals who feel as though they're experiencing a reduction in their ability to focus on meaningful or cognitively demanding tasks, and who want to improve their ability to block out distractions, design their environment for increased focus, and get their brains back.

*Educators and parents, especially of young children, who are witnessing this same reduction in the ability to focus in their students' lives, and who want to develop an understanding of how exactly they can help reverse this trend.

*Anyone who is concerned about the influence of reduced attention spans on our ability to come together and take effective, collective action toward solving some of the world's biggest and most important problems.

This important book demands the kind of attention and deep, nuanced thought that we as individuals and as a society are becoming less able to devote to anything.

In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari investigates 12 distinct causes of our dwindling attention spans - several of them systematic causes - and offers a degree of hope, even though none of us are able to win the battle for our attention alone.

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire book is that your increasing inability to focus is not completely your fault, and believing that it is a personal failing of yours is simply unhelpful in the very worst way.

The fact is that you and I are living within a society that is systematically siphoning off your attention, and as valuable as self-discipline is, it's not going to be enough to solve what Hari calls "the attention crisis."

And it really is a crisis. I mean, you've got the average American worker being distracted roughly once every three minutes, and even the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day. A day!

As discussed in the Key Ideas section below, the average American in 2017 spent just 17 minutes a day reading, compared to 5.4 hours on their phone. And I'm sure that not many of them were reading books on their phone, either!

The reality is that today, around one in five car accidents is due to a distracted driver, and untold millions of people struggle every day with the simple act of putting down their phones. But it's not their fault, says Hari, because every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you. What kind of personal will or self-discipline can stand alone against that?

So, it's obvious that our ability to pay attention is collapsing, but Johann Hari was determined to find out why this is happening.

In the process of attempting to reclaim his own mind and his own ability to focus, he ended up interviewing a multitude of experts - computer scientists, social scientists, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, technologists, etc. - and the result is this impeccably researched and insightful book.

The attention crisis is partly a personal problem, but like all the most important things in life, it extends much further than just ourselves:

The constant assault on our attention spans by the 12 forces that Hari identifies (Key Idea #3) is one of our most pressing problems because the inability to pay attention and come together to work for common goals impedes our ability to solve our other problems as well:

I highly recommend reading the entire book instead of "just" this breakdown - which is usually the case for books I feature on the Stairway to Wisdom. I choose them because they are excellent, important, and worth reading all the way through.

In the case of Stolen Focus, it's packed with big ideas and alarming facts, but it's also structured in a way that is exciting and compulsively readable. The 12 causes Hari talks about could fill dozens of books each, but he makes his case in a compelling way that's also easy to read.

He starts off detailing his own inability to focus, and the struggles of people he knows personally, finally ending up living alone and screen-free in Provincetown for three months while he tries to make sense of the crisis and its causes. His time there in relative seclusion enabled him to gain a clearer sense of his own self, but also to read books again, think deeply and creatively, sleep better, and ultimately put together this phenomenally valuable book.

Now, obviously, there's an element of "must be nice" about this whole thing, and he recognizes that. Hari doesn't tell us that the solution to our problems is just to go off the grid, move to the woods, and live freely ever after. The solution is going to come from systematic and society-wide changes, along with individual efforts to reclaim our attention.

But it starts with realizing that we have a problem. There's this big beautiful world out there, encouraging us to build the lives we were meant to live, but many people are too busy scrolling to hear the call.

They - and maybe you, too - have to realize that social media is not free. It costs your attention - a piece of your life - and these costs matter. Our lives matter. Our real ones, not the simulacrum of life that exists on screens.

Will we ever take meaningful action to recover our focus? Will we ever stop switching back and forth between tasks, polluting our minds and bodies with chemicals, and letting social media companies control where our attention goes?

#1: Blame the System, Not (Necessarily) the Individual

The current attention crisis has numerous, diverse causes (Johann Hari identifies 12 of them in his book), and it's important to note that most of them don't have to do with individual failures of will.

It's not (necessarily) that we're lazy or undisciplined, and it's certainly not the case that we're completely to blame for our struggles in paying attention. Just as Krishnamurti said that it's a dangerous error to change the system while leaving the individual unchanged, it's not totally a personal problem either. It's both.

The 12 causes that we'll explore in this breakdown work together, immediately and over time, to ruin our ability to focus, and beating yourself up for your supposed "shortcomings" probably isn't going to do you much good. Not when your very environment has been intentionally designed to sap your attention, focus, and willpower, and when the entire system conspires against you in favor of distraction.

There are things you can do as an individual to reclaim at least part of your attention - to start taking back your own mind - but the complete reclamation of what we've lost - what has been stolen from us - will require a collective effort.

Going on a digital detox, or implementing these little tiny lifestyle changes can be helpful, but it's not "The Answer," for the same reason that wearing a gas mask a few times a week isn't the answer to global pollution. As Johann Hari rightly says:

#2: The Four Forms of Attention

Before getting into the deeper causes of our attention crisis and why people are having more trouble than ever focusing, it's helpful to define what exactly your attention actually is. Your attention can be broken down, Hari believes, into four distinct forms. They are:

First: Your Spotlight is what you use to perform immediate actions, such as typing a sentence, lifting weights, making yourself a cup of coffee, etc. It involves a narrowing of your focus down to the minutest of actions, and when this form of attention is disrupted, you get derailed from your intention to perform these specific actions and tasks.

Second: Your Starlight is the focus you bring to bear on longer-term goals or projects with longer time horizons. Writing a book, winning a fitness competition, earning a promotion - these are things that can't be checked off a "To Do" list, but rather they take shape over time. It represents your direction, because when you feel lost, you look up at the stars and remember where you're headed. Lose this, and you don't stand a chance of accomplishing anything meaningful across time.

Third: Your Daylight is what allows you the mental space and clarity to know what your long-term goals actually are in the first place. Without it - without being able to reflect on your life in the light of day - you won't be able to clarify your direction to yourself, and you become lost in your own life.

Fourth: Our Stadium Lights are, according to Hari, our ability to see each other, hear each other, and work together to formulate and fight for collective goals. We turn on our stadium lights and we realize that we're all in this together and that we never have to be alone again. There are thousands, millions, billions of us, and if, as individuals, there are limits to our potential, together, there's virtually nothing we can't do.

#3: The 12 Causes of Our Fractured Attention

You could fill dozens of books with discussions and analyses of each of the 12 causes of our attention crisis that Hari identifies, but here they are, in outline form:

Cause #1 - The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering: Information is being fired at us faster and faster, and as the volume of that information increases, it becomes more and more difficult to filter it effectively. We don't know what to pay attention to, so we try to pay attention to everything, and we're quickly overwhelmed.

Worse, we think we can "multitask," which is essentially a lie because trying to do that comes with "switching costs." We're not really doing two things at once, but switching back and forth between them, and every time we do that, we dilute our attention.

Cause #2 - The Crippling of Our Flow States: A flow state is what we experience when we're completely immersed in a pleasurable and/or sufficiently challenging activity - when our attention is totally consumed by the task at hand, and we feel "weightless," as though the work is being done of itself. It's effortless.

Flow states arrive when we're doing one single thing at a time - something that's both meaningful to us and right at the edge of our current abilities, not too hard and not too easy.

When we keep getting distracted, however, we preempt the necessary conditions for flow, and we lose the ability to perform deep, meaningful work.

Cause #3 - The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion: Several of these causes feed into each other, and perhaps nowhere is this more self-evident than in the case of our physical and mental health.

The constantly-expanding workweek and the proliferation of demands on our attention and focus are directly contributing to overwhelm, and this, combined with our unhealthy diets and increased stress - not to mention the pollution hanging over our heads - all takes a toll on us.

Cause #4 - The Collapse of Sustained Reading: In 2017, the average American spent just 17 minutes a day reading, while spending a troubling 5.4 hours on their phones.

Many of us are reading less than we used to, and less often purely for pleasure, and this works to undermine our ability to pay attention as well. Reading trains our attention, and when we spend hours with a great book, we're also learning how to focus on one thing for extended periods of time.

In contrast, social media trains us to be superficial in our reading habits, and to flit back and forth between insubstantial and inconsequential material until we've done it so often and for so long that we don't know how to read anything longer than a status update anymore.

Cause #5 - The Disruption of Mind-Wandering: Far from being a sign of laziness or lack of discipline, mind-wandering is essential to creativity, and for allowing us the space with which to make sense of our own lives.

However, when we reflexively fill every spare moment with stimuli - constantly distracting ourselves from the possibility of ever spending one, unstimulated moment alone with ourselves - these crucial periods of free thinking start to disappear.

Cause #6 - The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You: Also referred to as "surveillance capitalism," Hari found that the modern social media landscape is intentionally and specifically designed to pull you away from your own life.

These social media companies make money every time they show you an advertisement, and to be able to show you more advertising, they need to keep you on the apps for longer. They lose money whenever you put your phone down.

You may have exceptional self-control, but is it really strong enough to withstand the greatest psychological manipulators and tech engineers in the entire world? The tech companies are betting that it isn't, and the massive ad revenues these companies pull in are evidence that they're right.

Cause #7 - The Rise of Cruel Optimism: I had never heard this term before reading Stolen Focus, but now, I can't unsee it. I discuss this idea further, below, but cruel optimism is basically when you take a really big problem, one with various, deeper causes in our culture, and then you offer people simplistic, individual solutions that barely make a difference in addressing the real problem.

Where it relates to attention is that we're told that we can just disable our notifications, put on noise-canceling headphones, etc., and our attention problem will be solved. In reality, there are vast, systemic causes contributing to our collective failure of attention, and these piecemeal, personal "solutions" are not the whole answer. To pretend that they are is just cruel optimism.

Cause #8- The Surge in Stress: Stress is expensive, and it costs us the resource of our attention. The majority of doctor's visits today have their origins in stress- and anxiety-related causes, and this isn't surprising in the least, given what unchecked stress levels can do to our immune systems.

Where it concerns our attention, stressful situations - stressful lives - cause us to be hypervigilant, always on the lookout for new threats. The pace of the modern world being what it is, with all these stressors piling up on us at once, is causing us to revert to these hypervigilant states, and it's ruining our ability to pay attention.

Cause #9 - Our Deteriorating Diets: The foods that most of us are consuming are literally poisonous to the only bodies we will ever have.

See, many of these causes work together, because taking care of yourself in a high-stress environment usually takes a back seat to simply staying alive.

If information is coming at you faster and faster, and your responsibilities are looming large in front of you, with your focus already weakened by addictive apps and games, you're not going to have the energy to cook a decent meal at home.

So, you take shortcuts with your health and choose the cheaper, faster, deadlier option. But even this is harming your ability to focus, because of all the sugar and caffeine that's in everything. Not only are you consuming this garbage as fuel for your body, but it's taking its toll on your mind, too, in the form of sugar crashes and caffeine withdrawal.

Cause #10 - Rising Pollution: The tenth cause that Hari identifies is one that we don't normally associate with the attention crisis, but it's perhaps the most widespread problem that he deals with in the book. We're destroying the only planet we've ever been blessed to call home and the air that we breathe is literally turning on us, crippling our brains' ability to focus.

Cause #11 - The Rise of ADHD: This is the chapter that Hari found most difficult to write, and he goes into it more deeply in Key Idea #7. There are a number of competing views on the ADHD epidemic, with world-class experts disagreeing with each other on even basic facets of the problem, such as its underlying causes. I highly recommend you read Key Idea #7 below for more information on this.

Cause #12 - The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically: The basis of our ability to pay attention is formed in childhood, and this is the final cause that Hari identifies for attention problems in later life.

We're overprotecting and overdirecting our children (full disclosure: I write this as someone without kids of my own, so please, come to your own conclusions), and as a result, they're not developing in a way that's conducive to being able to focus as an adult.

We've already mapped the territory, writes Hari, and we're basically telling children that it's no longer safe to explore, make mistakes, ask questions, and face danger - that it's no longer safe to be a child.

The "cult of safetyism" is depriving children of key developmental opportunities that will allow them to pursue what interests them, and forge their own identity. We tell them what to study, when and for how long, and whom they're allowed to study with, and remove any and all possibility of ever getting hurt in any way. Then, once they become adults, they have to face the adult world lacking these crucial skills.

#4: Depth Takes Time

Life is far too wide for any single individual to stand high enough above it and take it all in. Some people may try to get around that by jumping frenetically back and forth and across between all these different sights, attractions, distractions, opportunities, mysteries, etc. But life is endlessly mysterious, and we'll never be able to see all that there is to see.

But life is also deep - perhaps as deep as it is wide - and again, no single human being will ever reach the "core" of life.

Whether we decide to go wide or go deep, become specialists or generalists, there will always be more "life" out there than we'll ever have time to attend to. We'll never get to the end or the bottom, for sure, but we won't ever even come close to finding out what life is all about if we sacrifice depth, and that's exactly what we do when we consistently choose width at the expense of depth.

It doesn't take any time at all to move from one thing to the next thing, but depth takes time, and the evidence says that society as a whole is getting shallower every year. For example:

That was 2016. By now, it's almost a certainty that we're spending less than 11.9 hours on one thing before quickly moving on to something shinier. A common complaint is that the world seems to be speeding up, and it is, but it's primarily the increase in the volume of information that creates this sensation.

Life is being fired at us point blank, and the rapid-fire movement of our feeds across our eyes tells us that our lives are passing us by more quickly now than ever.

We should have seen this coming. As Hari writes in Stolen Focus:

#5: Conflicts of Interest and Big Money

Facebook knows what they're doing. It's not like they're blissfully unaware that their service - and others like it - are causing so much harm. They are complicit, and, for reasons that will surprise no one, it's because of the advertising dollars.

The business model of these social media companies is to sell your attention to advertisers. If users are content to see an ad or two placed between every few posts on their feed, then the platform can charge big money to businesses in order to place their advertisements there.

I would say that almost everyone knows that by now. But there's a second element of their business model that most people forget about.

Over time, as you keep entering your data while browsing these apps, social media companies slowly build a profile on you, your habits, and your preferences over time. They start to learn what you like and don't like, what you're likely to click on, and what is more or less likely to make you leave the app.

You can think of it almost like a voodoo doll made in your likeness, made up of little fragments of your personality, preferences, and tastes. You enter some info, and the doll starts to look a little bit more like you, and then a little bit more, and then before you know it, they have this frighteningly complete picture of who you are, stored on some server somewhere that they can then sell to advertisers. This lets them hyperfocus their ads so that they only show you what you're likely to click on and then buy.

But it goes deeper than simple commerce because it's not just companies that want to find willing customers, but also hate groups and proponents of dangerous ideologies that want to find willing adherents, and they're also on social media, putting out content, polarizing people, and turning them against each other.

Because of the way the human brain works, material that angers you and arouses strong emotions is more engaging and will tend to hold your attention for longer. Content creators of all types know this, and in a weird way, the interests of extremist groups and advertisers are aligned with those of Facebook, Instagram, and others:

In the interests of keeping you engaged on the platform, the YouTube algorithm is going to keep showing you more engaging and enraging content, and eventually, you're going to find yourself recommended a video from some hate group. It's not that YouTube or any other platform is trying to radicalize you - any more than Exxon Mobil wants to melt the icecaps - it's just the inevitable consequence of their business model and their algorithms.

Eventually, these fringe views start to filter through society, and the entire social fabric begins to wear thin:

#6: Cruel Optimism

Both Johann Hari and I - and Nir Eyal, whom you'll meet in just a few sentences - are in favor of personal responsibility, and of taking ownership of your own role in reclaiming your attention and your ability to focus.

Individual solutions do help, but as Hari explains, they are just not enough. To ply people with the idea that they might be - and to tell them that if they fail it's because they're "bad people" who just aren't trying hard enough - is cruel optimism at best.

One of the technologists that Hari interviews for the book is Nir Eyal, the author of two completely opposite books called Hooked, and Indistractible. The former is a playbook for how to create the most addictive app that you possibly can, and the latter is about how individuals can protect themselves from the people who have read Hooked. I've read both, and enjoyed them both, but here's what Hari has to say:

We're basically told that it's not the apps' fault that we can't focus, and that we should really be more disciplined. If we had stronger willpower or were more "virtuous" or whatever, then maybe we wouldn't have these kinds of attention problems. But Hari goes on:

This is cruel optimism in practice, and it doesn't look like anyone's trying very hard to hide it. Hari uses the example here of workplace "mindfulness" seminars that are supposedly believed to compensate for people drowning in stress and overwhelm:

#7: Double Standards for Our Children

#8: Essential Nutrients for the Mind

#9: What Can Be Done?

Yeah, right, "ban surveillance capitalism." Just tell the social media giants that they'll have to give up billions of dollars in market share because we can't focus anymore on reading Don Quixote or go 10 minutes without clutching at our phones, right?

Well, maybe it's not so far-fetched! In the book, Johann Hari uses the example of several human rights campaigns that were long thought to be hopeless, yet are areas in which we've made astounding progress, such as the rights of women.

It wasn't too long ago that men controlled basically everything and that if you ever said that a woman might run for President of the United States you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet here we are.

There is historical precedent for taking on established powers and wresting freedom from totalitarianism, so the dismantling of surveillance capitalism isn't such a massive stretch.

At the very least, social media apps could be designed to be less addictive, and even to help us achieve our goals, rather than distract us from them. It's a matter of political will, not an inherent difficulty.

It's even possible that social media sites could become subscription-based, and no longer rely on advertising revenue. We see this already in the case of Substack. Right now, social media is designed to shape your priorities and thought processes, but it could also be designed to help you understand your most basic intentions and drives, and then help you actualize them in the world.

Then there's the 4-day workweek and the right to disconnect. In France, there are actually laws that prevent your employer from contacting you outside of work hours, and this is just the beginning.

The right to disconnect is an important right, but a 4-day workweek has actually been shown to increase productivity in the places where it's been tried. Even though Henry Ford's original intention for creating the "weekend" was to give people time to shop and spend money on his cars, he hit upon an important concept and one that we could think about expanding.

And then, finally, there's the third goal of rebuilding childhood around free play. This isn't about letting kids do whatever the hell they want to, but about encouraging them to actually be kids.

We have the resources and the knowledge to make our children's lives a wonderful adventure, change the entire trajectory of their lives, and give them the best possible chance at succeeding - in every sense of the word: