“I went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, only to find she is now permanently hidden behind a rugby scrum of people from everywhere on earth, all jostling their way to the front, only for them to immediately turn their backs on her, snap a selfie, and fight their way out again. On the day I was there, I watched the crowd from the side for more than an hour. Nobody - not one person - looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds."

“For a long time, I reassured myself by saying this crisis was really just an illusion. Previous generations felt their attention and focus were getting worse too - you can read medieval monks nearly a millennium ago complaining that they were suffering from attention problems of their own."

“Later, I asked him - if I put you in charge of the world, and you wanted to ruin people's ability to pay attention, what would you do? He thought about it for a moment, and said: 'Probably about what our society is doing.'"

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

“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.'"

“Internally, at Google, the unofficial motto among the staff is 'If you're not fast, you're fucked.'"

“He has analyzed what happens to a person's focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount.

I asked him why. He said that 'we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.' If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But 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.

'That's why those disciplines make you smarter. It's not about humming or wearing orange robes.' Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it."

“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. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day.

If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life."

“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."

“So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you'll make more mistakes, you'll be less creative, and you'll remember less of what you do."

“How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?”

“By the time the war ended, Europe was in ruins, and his family had lost everything. They got word that one of his brothers had been killed in the fighting, and another, Moricz, had been taken by Stalin to a Siberian concentration camp. 'By the time I was ten years old,' he remembered years later, 'I was convinced that grownups didn't know how to live a good life.'"

“If you’re not sleeping well, your body interprets that as an emergency.”

"Once I was in Zimbabwe and I spoke to some rangers who - as part of their jobs - had to knock out rhinos in order to give them medical treatment. They explained that they did it by darting them with a very powerful tranquilizer. As they described how the rhinos would stagger about in a panicked funk and then crash to the ground, I thought, hey, that's my sleep routine too."

“In Provincetown, I noticed I wasn't just reading more - I was reading differently. I was becoming much more deeply immersed in the books I had chosen. I got lost in them for really long stretches, sometimes whole days - and I felt like I was understanding and remembering more of what I read. It seemed like I traveled farther in that deck chair by the sea, reading book after book, than I had in the previous five years of shuttling frantically around the world."

“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.

So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps 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."

“When they got the results, they were clear. 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."

“Fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.

Each of us can only ever experience a small sliver of what it's like to be a human being alive today, Raymond told me, but as you read fiction, you see inside other people's experiences. That doesn't vanish when you put down the novel.

When you later meet a person in the real world, you'll be better able to imagine what it's like to be them. Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn't have this empathy-expanding effect."

“Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.”

“When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of other people over long periods of time, that will repattern your consciousness. You, too, will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic.

If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, and less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies."

"If we're just frantically running around focusing on the external world exclusively, we miss the opportunity to let the brain digest what's been going on."

“The more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organized personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind drift, and slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life."

“Creativity is not where you create some new thing that's emerged from your brain. 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."

“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."

“We don’t just pay attention as individuals; we pay attention together, as a society.”

“She got the message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was.”

“It doesn’t talk about the crisis in our food supply, which surrounds us with addictive, highly processed foods that bear no relationship to what previous generations of humans ate. It doesn't explain the crisis of stress and anxiety that drives us to overeat. It doesn't address the fact that we live in cities where you have to squeeze yourself into a steel box to get anywhere.

Diet books ignore the fact that you live in a society and culture that are shaping and pushing you, every day, to act in certain ways. A diet doesn't change your wider environment - and it's the wider environment that is the cause of the crisis. Your diet ends, and you're still in an unhealthy environment that's pushing you to gain weight.

Trying to lose weight in the environment we've built is like trying to run up an escalator that is constantly carrying you down. A few people might heroically sprint to the top - but most of us will find ourselves back at the bottom, feeling like it's our fault. If we listen to Nir and the people like him, I fear we will respond to the rise of attention problems in the same way that we responded to the rise in weight problems - and we will end up with the same disastrous outcomes.

It's not just Silicon Valley that pushes this approach. Almost all the existing books about attention problems (and I read a lot as research for this book) present them simply as individual flaws requiring individual tweaks. They are digital diet books. But diet books didn't solve the obesity crisis and digital diet books won't solve the attention crisis. We have to understand the deeper forces at work here."

"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 the 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."

“Children who had experienced four or more types of trauma were 32.6 times more likely to have been diagnosed with attention or behavior problems than children who had not experienced any trauma."

“Sami does still occasionally continue the prescription of stimulants to children, but it's rare, it's short-term, and it's after trying all other options. He said that with the vast majority of cases of kids with attention problems that come into his office, if he listens carefully and offers practical support to change the child's environment, it almost always reduces or ends the problem they have."

“Parenting takes place in an environment - and if that environment floods parents with stress, it will inevitably affect their children."

“The scientific evidence we have so far suggests 'there are three main areas [of child development] where play has a major impact. One is creativity and imagination' - it's how you learn to think about problems and solve them.

The second is 'social bonds' - it's how you learn to interact with other people and socialize. And the third is 'aliveness' - it's how you learn to experience joy and pleasure.

The things we learn from play aren't trivial add-ons to becoming a functioning human being, Isabel explained. They are the core of it. Play builds the foundation of a solid personality, and everything that adults sit down and explain to the child afterward builds on this base.

If you want to be a person who can pay attention fully, she told me, you need this base of free play. Yet suddenly, we have been 'taking all this out of kids' lives,' Lenore says. Today, even when children do finally get to play, it's mainly supervised by adults, who set the rules and tell them what to do."

“Free play has been turned into supervised play, and so - like processed food - it has been drained of most of its value."

"Adults are saying: 'Here's the environment. I've already mapped it. Stop exploring.' But that's the opposite of what childhood is."

“If your attention is constantly managed by other people, how can it develop? How do you learn what fascinates you? How do you find your intrinsic motives, the ones that are so important to developing attention?"

“Her struggles to get him to read had ended, because now he was reading all the time about how to build stuff. It struck me: When L.B. was being told what to do constantly - when he was being forced to act on extrinsic motivations - he couldn't focus, and he was bored all the time.

But when he was given the chance, through play, to find out what interested him - to develop an intrinsic motivation - his ability to focus flourished, and he worked for hours and hours without a break, building his boats and wagons."

“I felt a flush of anger, and looked around me. I thought, Wait, what's happening here? Who are these people to tell me what I will be doing at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning? I haven't committed any crime. Why am I being treated like a prisoner?"

“After a week, I was told to ‘shut up and learn.’”

“The more something is meaningful, the easier it is to pay attention to and learn, for adults and kids."

“Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once - and by doing this, they 'overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can't be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.' It crashes. This is called a 'denial-of-service attack.' James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds.

'We're that server, and there's all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us...It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.' We are so inundated 'that it fills up your world, and you can't find a place to get a view on all of it and realize that you're so distracted and figure out what to do about it.'"

"A heat wave was just starting in Siberia - a sentence I never thought I would write."

“He was on his phone almost every waking hour, seeing the world mainly through TikTok, a new app that made Snapchat look like a Henry James novel."

“When I look now at the orange, fire-scarred skies over San Francisco on this grainy webcam, I keep thinking about the light in Provincetown in the summer I spent there without my phone or the internet, and how pure and perfect it seemed.

James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown, I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life - my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light - the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive - and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.

When I hung up on my friend in Sydney so he could unscrew his fire alarm and switch it off, I thought, if our attention continues to shatter, the ecosystem won't wait patiently for us to regain our focus. It will fall and it will burn.

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W.H. Auden - when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans - warned: 'We must love one another, or die.' I believe that now we must focus together - or face the fires alone."

“The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don't want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don't want to look, because if we do, we may change.

We don't want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.

The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you've held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away?"

“But I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it on faith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before."

“The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows."

“We spend a lot of time looking for happiness when the world right around us is full of wonder. To be alive and to walk on the Earth is a miracle, and yet most of us are running as if there were some better place to get to. There is beauty calling to us every day, every hour, but we are rarely in a position to listen."

“What we are experiencing is experiential poverty. Such poverty may not only be about a lack of experiences, where nothing is happening. An abundance of activities can also create a feeling of experiential poverty. And this last point is interesting. Things just get to be too much. The problem, according to Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, is that we carry on seeking ‘increasingly more powerful experiences’ instead of pausing to breathe deeply, shut out the world and use the time to experience ourselves.

The idea that boredom can be avoided by constantly pursuing something new, being available around the clock, sending messages and clicking further, watching something you haven't yet seen, is naive. The more you try to avoid boredom, the more bored you become. Routine is like that too...Busying oneself becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of allowing that same restlessness to lead you somewhere further.”

“Shutting out the world is not about turning your back on your surroundings, but rather the opposite: it is seeing the world a bit more clearly, staying a course and trying to love your life. Silence in itself is rich. It is exclusive and luxurious. A key to unlock new ways of thinking. I don’t regard it as a renunciation or something spiritual, but rather as a practical resource for living a richer life.”

“The call to stillness comes quietly. The modern world does not.”

“You can’t escape - with your body - problems that exist in your mind and soul.”

“How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as they answer the dings and rings of technology in their pockets?”

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

“The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable."

"Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet.

It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It's a method for making the tough tradeoffs between lots of good things and a few really great things.

It's about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life."

“No source of power, no set of ideas, is so large it can't be challenged. Facebook would love us to believe that their power is impregnable and there's no point fighting for change because that never works. But these companies are as fragile as every other powerful force that was torn down in the end."

“Whose side am I not hearing? Is there more to it than this? Are these studies reputable? Are these interview subjects representative of what many others in the field think? Did Hari quote these people accurately?”

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

#1: "How valuable do you believe your attention to be? Is it something that you're willing to give up, freely and easily, to anyone who wants it? Or do you value it enough to be extremely selective about where you direct it?"

#2: "How many times a day do you reach for your phone? Have you ever kept track of this? And when you do find yourself reaching for your phone, what are you normally feeling in that moment? Boredom? Anxiety? Stress? Curiosity?"

#3: "When's the last time you entered a flow state? Do you remember what you were doing and what led up to it? Was it a pleasurable enough experience that you want to repeat it?"

#4: "Are you an opponent of surveillance capitalism, or do you feel as though it's the responsibility of individuals to control their own social media use and the amount of information they hand over to these tech companies?"

#5: "What kind of changes are you going to make to your life after reading this breakdown? Are the changes likely to be confined to your own actions? Or do you feel responsible for helping others reclaim their attention too?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”