Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again

One of the benefits of learning software development early is that I got a chance to learn how to pay attention.  Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, argues that our ability to pay attention has been stolen from us as a society by forces of technology and media companies’ incentives that lead us away from focus.  To understand how I got to this book, I need to acknowledge Jonathan Haidt’s reference in The Anxious Generation and my recognition of Hari’s name from Chasing the Scream.  It pulled the book to near the top of the stack as I wondered what Hari would have to say on the issue of attention.

Partial Immunity

Before I dive into Hari’s narrative, it’s worth explaining that my life is – and has been – largely immune to the pressures that both Haidt and Hari share.  It makes me no less aware of the problem, but it does change it from a largely personal problem to one of those I love.  Hari himself credits his realization through his godson, Adam, and his desire to see Graceland being stolen from him.

Even today, I spend a generous amount of time in flow.  (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman.)  It can be its own addiction, as I ask my family to give me space for focus – but those boundaries are carefully negotiated and renegotiated.  (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries.)  So, I start with having periods of focus that are autotelic (self-rewarding).  Because I’m so aware, and my periods of flow are already protected, I didn’t have to start from a deficit.

Second, I pay little attention to either the mainstream news media or social media.  Part of that is disposition.  Part of that is a conscious decision to see what bubbles up to be the most important.  Chuck Underwood, who wrote America’s Generations, is focused on the news (or at least he was when we spoke).  I’ve never really been that way.  When I started researching what made people effective and how to handle the barrage of information we are subjected to, I realized that turning down the noise from the outside world was necessary.  (See The Information Diet, The Age of Overwhelm, and The Organized Mind for more.)

In my conversation with Underwood, I recognized that I was much more concerned with fundamental truths than social fads.  Much of what pulls people into the swirling pool of commentary (by professionals and professed experts) is distant and dull for me – and has been for a very long time.

Disconnected in Provincetown

Hari’s experience started with his own form of digital detoxification in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  He arrived without internet access and a “dumb phone,” capable of making calls but not connecting to the internet.  He describes his withdrawal symptoms as he gradually unwound the rules that had governed his life.  Instead of being distracted by the latest like, he’d listen to the lapping of ocean waves.

He’d disconnect from reality in a way that most of us couldn’t.  Not because we can’t survive without a connection to the internet –but because we can’t afford to leave behind our day-to-day for a month let alone the three that Hari took.  He admits that his grandmother (who raised him) and his father couldn’t possibly do what he was doing.  Their lives simply wouldn’t allow it – and to suggest it would be disrespectful.

Still, this detox was the first step to understanding what had been lost in the shuffle.  It was a way to hear the inner voices that called to social media for a sense of instant gratification from the new follower, share, or like.  It was a way to avoid the water that we’re all swimming in every day.  It teams with distractions and currents trying to pull us towards others’ aims.

The Need for Speed

For over a century, we can track the increased pace of life.  In my talks, I trace it back further.  I attach it to the way that we receive, generate, and share information.  If we look at content creation, we see the ever-increasing pace of our ability to create, copy, and distribute information.

If that weren’t enough, we expect that information isn’t just available but that’s available now – and that even pushed to us immediately (or nearly immediately).

Whether it’s mass media or personalized, individualized messages delivered to us, we live in a world that both generates more information and delivers it faster.

Moving beyond the technologies that enable our increased expectations, we can see that trends and fads move with ever-increasing speed.  Topics simply come and go at a pace unimaginable to our grandparents.  The problem is that this pace of change creates downstream effects that we didn’t anticipate.

We’ve seen the rise of misinformation and the difficulty in quelling it.  There are still people who believe the MMR vaccine causes autism – a lot of people.  The Data Detective reports that less than 50% of people believe that it doesn’t cause autism.  This is despite the retraction of the original article and that Andrew Wakefield (the lead author of the study that purported to show the link) has had his medical license revoked.  (See also Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.)  We know that people can – and often do – “flood the zone with shit,” because it works as a strategy.  (See After the Ball for more strategies that can be used for good or evil.)

Secondarily, the onslaught of information has made it impossible to focus on any of it and to consider it deeply.  There are better techniques for managing your time that can help, but they’re like trying to put out a house fire with a dixie cup.  There are strategies for consuming faster – like speed reading – but they come at the cost of comprehension and understanding.  Your eyes can scan the lines of text faster – but your brain can’t consider what you’re reading any faster than it already is.  (Which is still about 3-4x the speed of the spoken word.)

We’re already shrinking the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth, and we’re at the limits of how we can shrink it.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow and Sources of Power for more.)  We can, with time, develop more complex schemata (models) that allow us to more efficiently process the incoming information – but it’s context-sensitive and very time consuming.  (See Efficiency in Learning and Learning in Adulthood.)

Fragmentation and Flow

Today, multitasking is all the rage.  The ability to do multiple things at one time is seen as an essential skill for the high potential employee.  The problem is that it’s fiction.  Humans can’t multitask.  Humans can task switch quickly, but each switch takes time and increases the probability of mistakes.

As mentioned above, I still am granted large periods of flow in my world, and it’s the opposite of the fragmentation that most people experience either because they’re trying to multitask or because they’re getting interrupted.  We’ve known for decades that recovering from an interruption when you’re in flow takes ~20 minutes to recover.  If you don’t believe me, check out Peopleware – which was originally published in 1987.  It discusses the problem of recovering from an interruption to flow.

Fragmentation and flow are opposites.  Flow is focus.  Fragmentation is anti-focus.

Economic Growth Fueled on Sleep

Economists have long expected that our economic output will increase.  Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century explains that, for most of our time on the planet, our output increased by a paltry one-tenth percent per year.  Since the industrial revolution, the rate has increased substantially.  The estimated compounded per capita growth in output was 1.6% per year.  The problem, according to Hari and his sources, is that this system ran out of gas, so we started feeding it sleep.  We get less sleep, and we’ve become more sleep-deprived.  To correct this issue would cause the assumptions of the economic growth engine to unravel with untold consequences on our societies across the planet.

The failures of attention, which are the subject of Stolen Focus, are just roadkill on the road to continued progress.

Life in 280 Character Chunks

It started with the short message service (SMS).  It was a side effect of the telecommunications industry reaching level 7 of the signaling protocols.  It created space for small amounts of bandwidth for short messages.  It defined the limit as 160 characters.  This was never intended to be a primary communication channel.  When Twitter (now X) launched with 140-character message limits, it felt similar to the short messages that teens had “hacked” to provide longer messages by using a dizzying array of acronyms.  It was the human equivalent of the compression tools that had been in use on computers for decades.  Just like those compression tools needing to be present on both ends, the receiver of your message needed to decode the acronyms.  Many older adults failed.

Twitter ultimately doubled the size of the message to 280 characters, and now we expect that we can express our lives in 280-character chunks.  You can’t get deep in 280 characters – or even sets of 280 characters.  The medium limits what can be done – and it doesn’t allow for depth.

Instagram and TikTok moved us to images and movies; though they consume substantially more data transmission resources, they are snippets of lives that still can’t convey depth.  In fact, the evidence points to the idea that we’ve made people shallower.  We’ve become obsessed with our appearance.  Six pack abs and bikini lines refocus us on the surface and the temporary.  We know everyone (who doesn’t die) will age and their body shape will change.  Images are richer than 280 characters – but only in surface dimensions.

Attention Economy

While many still report that we live in an information economy, the truth is more sinister.  We don’t live in an information economy.  We live in an attention economy where the most valuable commodity is the attention that people can demand of us.  Sure, we need the information to pull the attention, but the game isn’t the information itself.

It’s like magic.  No, really.  It’s like a magic trick.  The goal is to control the attention so the audience doesn’t realize what is really going on.  Controlling the attention is what can get the audience to react with a wow – or advertisers to write big checks.

Controlling attention is a series of distractions to draw you in the direction that they want you to go.  Distractions are how they pull you to the things that they want from you.  Who are “they”?  It’s the social media companies – and anyone hoping to sell you a product or service.

Another unwanted side effect of the distractions – beyond the loss of focus – is the sense of mania it creates.  There’s always another thing to check or alert to respond to.  Click by click and tap by tap, we’re drawn into the web of mania so that we don’t even realize that we’re there.  We believe that each notification is an indication that we’re recognized, special, and important.  Having the notifications makes us feel important.

It’s Not Your Fault, but It Is Your Responsibility

It’s a bait and switch maneuver.  When the problem becomes undeniable, you don’t accept responsibility for it, you transfer the responsibility to the consumer.  Smoking isn’t about addictive chemicals, it’s about your lack of self-control.  The obesity epidemic isn’t about portion sizes and calorie counts.  It’s about your inability to control your desires – at least, that’s what they want you to believe.  The truth is that the forces are aligned to make it hard for you to succeed.  Some can do it – but only through unrealistic forces of willpower and determination.

While it’s not fair for someone to have to fight these forces, it is what is required.  Just like an injury that isn’t your fault – like a broken bone – you must heal yourself.  Who or what caused the problem doesn’t matter after it happens.  It only matters when we want to help others not experience the same injury.  That’s why even if the world is structured in ways that make it hard to focus, we must fight back for our individual lives – and band together to change the forces that make it hard for all of us to focus.

Play in Genes

There’s a fair amount of work that’s been done to try to determine what percentage of our traits and behaviors are genetically driven.  This research is almost exclusively done with twin studies, a strategy that has limitations.  In Judith Rich Harris’ works about how children turn out differently, No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption, she shares that the findings are tentative – and that the drivers are somewhere in the 40-50% range.  Hari and his sources suggest that the results may be lower when additional factors are taken into account.  SNP (Single Nucleotide polymorphism) heritability studies are finding that some of what we assumed were genetic traits are likely attributable to the increase in similarity in the way that identical siblings are treated rather than their genetic factors.

Genes, it turns out, may be less impactful than providing the right environment for growth to children when they need it.  We know that there are regions of the brain that need stimulation at specific periods of time, and, if deprived of this input, they won’t develop correctly.  We also know that animals play.  They learn by the low-risk situations created by play.  (See Play and also The Anxious Generation.)  Despite both general and specific information about our needs as humans to learn through play, we’ve all but deprived our children of play via recess at school and free play.

We’ve become more fearful and protective of our children – even if the statistics show that we’re safer now than at almost any time since the 1950s.  Both children and adults are safer since the violent crime peak in the early 1990s – but we don’t behave that way.  (See The Anxious Generation for more on safety vs. perception.)

We’re being overprotective, but we don’t want to find our loved ones suffering – including from Stolen Focus.