Stolen Focus

November 8, 2021
Journalist Hari (Lost Connections) explores a growing “crisis”—people’s inability to focus their attention for extended periods—in this provocative study. He presents data that suggests students switch tasks once every 65 seconds, while adults in offices tend to remain focused on one thing for just three minutes. There are costs to this decrease in attention span, he suggests, from both an intellectual and a productivity perspective, as studies have shown that workers’ IQ dropped by an average of 10 points when they faced frequent “technological distraction” in the form of emails and phone calls. Hari lays out a wide array of environmental factors at play in this decline: technology companies promote innovations to keep people glued to their screens; there’s a large-scale sleep deprivation issue (40% of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived); and overall stress levels have increased—meanwhile, “deteriorating diets and rising pollution” do little to help. Although Hari addresses some actions that readers can take (such as locking phones up in a safe and taking six months off social media), he concludes that the issue is beyond individuals and is a regulatory problem—but his call that people need to band together to build “a movement to reclaim our attention” feels somewhat nebulous. Still, it’s a comprehensive and chilling lay of the land.

A deep dive into one of today's most pertinent psychological problems. As Hari demonstrates, the fractured state of your attention span has more insidious causes and more drastic outcomes than you ever imagined. Tormented by his own inability to focus, the author traveled the world to speak to researchers and also abandoned his phone and computer to spend three months screen-free in Provincetown. The latter was liberating, enabling him to once again read books, have creative thoughts, and sleep well. Unfortunately, these effects didn't last long once he reconnected. As he learned from expert interviews, the causes of our attention issues are so vast that telling someone they can improve their plight by making personal adjustments is known as cruel optimism, "when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture--like obesity, or depres-sion, or addiction--and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution." The trouble is not just in our devices, but in our air, food, workplaces, the way we raise children, the surveillance of our lives by corporations, and more. Social media is especially dastardly, and Hari offers numerous appalling examples: Because feeling angry is more likely to keep your attention than any other emotion, YouTube has recommended videos by belligerent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, such as the one claiming Sandy Hook was faked, 15bil-liontimes. In Brazil, Facebook was used to swing an election in a way that sounds eerily familiar: filling people's heads "full of grotesque falsehoods, to the point where they can't distinguish real threats to their existence (an authoritarian leader pledging to shoot them) from nonexistent threats (their children being made gay by penises painted on baby bottles)." Systemic change is the key to any possible solution, but some of Hari's suggestions sound like more cruel optimism. Still, the author brings to light many important issues. Bristling with facts and ideas expressed in a high-energy, cliffhanger style.

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