Stolen Focus
Why You Can’t Pay Attention
Johann Hari
Having read it
★★★★☆
A pretty informative and insightful read about the realities of the world we seem to be building and operating in that actually is a detriment to our attention and ability to successfully and meaningfully relax, learn, adapt and grow.
It was also good to learn that many of the thoughts I’ve held for much of the last decade (or two, which is essentially the length of my career/livelihood) about the ways-of-working in the world are actually a big, contributory factor to the problems society faces (even more so today) and ironically tries to fix with the very things that are assisting the problems in the first place.
As the book infers (and states) our economic system is broken (as well as one of its threads, surveillance capitalism) and would seriously benefit from a complete rethink/change to genuinely present, develop and deliver for people and the planet. Then our attention will massively benefit and consequently many of society’s other issues will lessen and present real opportunities for all to properly progress.
A good passage
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book – and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience – you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past 400 years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in freefall.
A second good passage
[...] Dr Jason Hickel, who is an economic anthropologist at the University of London, is perhaps the leading critic of the concept of economic growth in the world – and he has been explaining for a long time that there is an alternative. When I went to see him, he explained that we need to move beyond the idea of growth to something called a ‘steady-state economy’. We would abandon economic growth as the driving principle of the economy and instead choose a different set of goals. At the moment we think we’re prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged to buy things – most of which don’t even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life – they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals that don’t raid our attention, and don’t raid the planet’s resources.
[...]
I suspect that, in the long run, it will be ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. I can’t tell you I have all the answers to how we do that – but I believe that if an Attention Rebellion begins, we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself.
But we will have to do this in any event – for another reason. The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds – but it is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits. And these two crises, I was coming to believe, are intertwined.
A third good passage
The climate crisis can be solved. We need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and towards powering our societies by clean, green sources of energy. But to do that we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. These solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in algorithm-pumped fury. We can only solve the climate crisis if we solve our attention crisis. As I contemplated this, I began to think again about something that James Williams wrote: ‘I used to think there were no great political struggles left . . . How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is the prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.’