Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—And How To Think Deeply Again
It’s not just you: people worldwide are reporting increased difficulty paying attention to deep ideas and ordinary tasks. Though it’s impossible to precisely quantify, copious circumstantial evidence reports that populations don’t stick with ideas as long as we once did, and while customers are buying more books than ever, they’re finishing far, far fewer. How did this happen to so many people simultaneously? Just as important, how can we reverse it?
Anglo-Swiss journalist Johann Hari mixes autobiography with investigative reportage to uncover answers to these questions. He noticed his beloved nephew, once an energetic child, had become entranced by his handheld technology, spending literally hours without looking up from his phone. But sure as every doctor is a patient, Hari realized he could see, in his nephew, his own sins; his own life was increasingly circumscribed by his phone.
Like many critics, Hari assumed our handheld technology caused the problem. After all, we started staring at phones, and experienced shortened attention spans, right? Not so, he quickly discovers. First, though the data isn’t ironclad, there’s reason to believe human attention spans have been getting shorter since the Victorian age, and the reasons are reasonably comparable to what’s happening around us today.
Not that mobile technology, and the companies that make it, are innocent. Using insider testimony and industry documents, he provides persuasive evidence that Silicon Valley cultivates a business model based on keeping users hooked. They know their devices produce cocaine-like dopamine jolts, and they know some modest tweaks could fix that without hurting their balance sheets. But nobody can afford to be the first to make the responsible choice.
So smartphone makers and social media enterprises are disincentivized to act responsibly. That’s hardly a shocker, though Hari feigns astonishment. Hari also finds several less obvious contributors to modern users’ abbreviated attention spans. Heightened levels of economic stress trigger a human tendency to look for threats, like paleolithic hunters on the bushveldt. Lousy processed food leaves our brains undernourished, and environmental pollutants disrupt the functions of our endocrine system.
Taken together, Hari finds a socioeconomic structure that wasn’t necessarily designed to disrupt human attention spans, but definitely has that effect. What’s more, the wealthy and well-connected already know these effects exist. To the extent that they’re able, the people who profit from this disruptive economy, don’t participate in it. The rich eat organic unprocessed foods, send their kids to Waldorf schools, and frequently don’t use the technologies they manufacture.
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| Johann Hari |
Healthy mental states aren’t difficult to define. Robust psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated what well-rounded brains do. From children running and playing, to adults achieving what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “flow state,” we have extensive science showing what healthy minds do, and how such health contributes to creativity, emotional balance, and social well-being. We know what’s gone wrong, Hari writes, and we know what “right” looks like.
Hari occasionally sweeps into breathless narration where he claims to have personally discovered something really well-known. For instance, he claims he uncovered evidence that Facebook and Google make most of their money, not providing services to ordinary end-users, but by packaging end-user data for resale to advertisers. That’s not exactly a closely held secret. His wide-eyed narrative in these moments, sadly, makes him appear less than wholly serious.
Which is a shame. Though most of what Hari discovers isn’t original to his investigative research, he does make a meaningful contribution by organizing it into a unified story. I like the structure of abuse and dependency Hari has uncovered, and wish he would’ve resisted the temptation to make himself the center of the story. Because ultimately, what he finds here isn’t about him, it’s about us.
Throughout the story, Hari hints at something he spells out explicitly in the conclusion. Despite the individualistic Western myth, this widespread attention failure isn’t an individual problem; it was created systemically, and can only be fixed systemically. Hari outlines several steps individual readers can implement to regain some of their attention span, some of which I’ve already implemented. But ultimately, like racism or homophobia, this collective problem requires collective solutions.
I’m not blind to the irony that you’re reading this review online. Without social media, I never would’ve discovered this book. But Hari doesn’t advocate tossing the baby with the bathwater; networked mobile technology serves an important social role. The goal, rather, is to master our technologies, instead of letting them master us. We can achieve that goal, working together. Hari provides the first organized tools to do so.
Also by Johann Hari:
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
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