Ben David Trigg

I’ve just finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. I may be on a bit of a kick about focus, flow and generally how we think, at the moment – up next in my book pile are Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.

It is going to be difficult for me to summarise the salient points in this book without becoming heated or digressing into extensive hypothesising about the direction of society, the roots of the problems or the extent of the possible solutions. But I’ll do my best:

1. There are several factors at play that are all harming our attention. This is a modern problem; the symptoms and causes can be traced by and large to their roots within the last 50 years, some just within the last 10 or 20.
2. Among these (and I think, chief of the culprits) are the rise of social media and invasive technology or ‘surveillance capitalism’, which are actively harnessing your attention for monetary gain. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s literally about you becoming addicted to using Facebook or Instagram; this was well documented in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
3. Among these also are the change in Western diet, the rise of drugs in everyday use (including caffeine), the depreciation of sleep, increased pollution, and the restrictions on children not allowing them the free play they need for their bodies, imagination and learning.
4. This collective degradation of our focus is seriously harming our society at large, our democracies, and our ability to band together to solve the big crises of our day, such as climate change.
5. One major driving force behind the accelerating proliferation of these issues is the general economic concept of ‘continual growth’ peculiar to capitalist societies; alternative economic models e.g. ‘steady-state economy’ or ‘donut economies’ might offer real solutions not only to the climate crisis but also our attention crisis – we might all just become less stressed if we’re not on a continual (and ultimately pointless) treadmill to acquire more.

It might seem like a cute academic itch to scratch, that some of us feel like our attention has been a bit corroded, since we’re all a bit more stressed, and have forgotten what it felt like to be free, though we’re sure at one time a couple of decades ago, we were. But I’m convinced the problem is larger even than that, and more pervasive than we might realise, and more threatening to our species. And one final salient point from the book. We can’t solve some of these crises by merely ‘pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps’; we have to be able to organise and band together to – for example – ban surveillance capitalism, meaning Facebook can’t abuse our attention any more by the way they design their app, but instead offer something genuinely useful to our social well-being (meaning we’d spend less time on Facebook – but you’d have to read the book to find out how that could possibly work).