Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

“As a species, we are facing a slew of unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors—like the climate crisis—and, unlike previous generations, we are mostly not rising to solve our biggest challenges. Why? Part of the reason, I think, is that when attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down. Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years.”

Hari broadens the scope of his analysis from the individual to society as a whole. He argues that waning attention harms people on an individual level, and also threatens societal progress, since solving “big problems” requires continued attention. Hari encapsulates the consequences of inattention for society at large, making his work a sociological analysis as well as a self-help book.

“People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up […] For the average American, it’s three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every 24 hours.”

Some people reacted to Hari’s “digital detox” with envy, and admitted that they often felt distracted by their phone and wished they used it less. These statistics reveal how much time Americans spend on their phones and challenge readers to consider how they might otherwise use that time.

“Would I never get to my phone? I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.”

Hari felt distressed and was missing his phone by the third week of his digital detox—a feeling that confirmed to him that he had developed an unhealthy dependence on the device, which he recognized as an addiction. This quotation builds the theme of The Addictive Nature of Technology, exploring how limited the effects of individual choices are in mitigating this problem.

“Mihaly was struck by one thing above all else—for the artist, when they were in the process of creation, time seemed to fall away. They almost appeared to be in a hypnotic trance. It was a deep form of attention you rarely see elsewhere.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on “flow states” shows how deeply people can concentrate when they are undistracted and focused on something creative and purposeful. This quotation contrasts the satisfying and productive “flow state” with Hari’s splintered attention.

“So, to find flow, you need to choose a single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it is a distinctive mental state. You feel purely present in the moment.”

Summarizing Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow, Hari highlights the feeling of being in the moment that people experience in a flow state. This focused mindset is very different from a state of fragmented distraction. This passage also positions Hari’s book as a useful resource with applicable advice, rather than simply an exploration of the current research on concentration.

“I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.”

Hari contrasts the “fragmented” attention that people experience when they are distracted by their surroundings or devices, and the “flow state” they enjoy during an interesting challenge. Hari’s description of distracted thinking encourages readers to consider how their lifestyle and cognition are affecting their personality and values, and challenges them to embrace flow whenever possible.

“As people stayed awake, it seemed their ability to focus fell off a cliff. In fact, if you stay awake for nineteen hours straight, you become as cognitively impaired—as unable to focus or think clearly—as if you had gotten drunk.”

Hari explores the connection between a lack of sleep and inattention: Sleep deprivation has significant consequences for people’s focus and learning, slowing cognition and increasing distractibility.

“A brain that hasn’t gone through this necessary cleaning process becomes more clogged and less able to concentrate. Some scientists suspect that this is why people who are under-slept are at greater risk, in the long term, of developing dementia.”

Research has shown that spinal fluid rinses the brain of toxins as people sleep. Without this essential process, which never occurs during waking hours, people’s thinking is much less focused.

“For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience—you dedicate many hours of your life, cooly, 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 four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall.”

Hari credits reading with building people’s capacity for sustained attention. He considers it a valuable and accessible form of flow, which benefits the individual and society. By pointing out the worrisome fact that reading for pleasure is decreasing, Hari raises the alarm about what the consequences of this trend could be.

“Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. First, life is complex, and if you want to understand it you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page.”

Hari posits that novels prompt people to consider the world as a complex and nuanced place that requires careful thought to understand. They are also valuable as they reward the reader for their sustained attention, helping to build their focus.

“One of his studies showed that children are more empathetic if they read story books or watch movies, but not if they watch shorter shows. This appeared to fit, it seemed to me, with what I saw on social media—if you see the world through fragments, your empathy doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.”

Books are not the only medium that increases empathy; films can also have a similar effect. However, these benefits are lost in shorter TV shows, prompting Hari to conclude that continued attention on a longer story is essential to developing this form of social intelligence. This quotation highlights the link between paying attention and building important social awareness.

“He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organized personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions.”

Jonathan Smallwood, a psychologist at Oxford University, has demonstrated a positive correlation with mind wandering and many positive traits. This finding adds nuance to Hari’s arguments about focus, which is not only about “spotlight” attention and productivity, but also about being able to think freely without interruptions in daily life.

“When I got back, people had started replying to my emails and texts, and despite myself, I felt a little rush of affirmation. In the next few weeks, I started to post on social media—and I felt myself become cruder and meaner than I had been in the summer. I made snarky comments. The complexity and compassion I had felt in Provincetown was, I felt, being replaced by something thinner.”

This passage helps Hari demonstrate the addictive nature of social media, which he gave more and more of his attention to in the months after his digital detox. Not only was social media distracting, but Hari also felt incentivized to be “cruder and meaner” in his posts than he normally would be because outrageous online behavior drives engagement, approval, and popularity.

“Think, the class wondered out loud, about how you could target people if you knew this much about them. Think about how you could change them. When a politician or a company wants to persuade you, they could pay a social media company to perfectly target their message just for you.”

Tristan Harris points out that his predictions about the dangers of data gathering and targeted ads have come true. Hari points out that these targeted messages are not limited to shopping; Donald Trump’s campaign used them in the 2016 election, showing the serious societal implications of this kind of advertising.

“We know that interruptions cause a deterioration in people’s ability to focus and think clearly—so why are we ramping up the interruptions? [...] All humans have natural vulnerabilities, and instead of exploiting those vulnerabilities—like a malign magician—Google should be respecting them.”

In a message to his colleagues at Google, Tristan Harris observed that Google’s business model and its constant attempts to engage users were at odds with people’s best interests, but his concerns largely fell on deaf ears. Big Tech often intentionally exploits its users’ vulnerabilities to increase profit, a dynamic with obvious ethical problems.

“If people used Facebook to just quickly get on, so they could find the amazing thing to do with their friends that night, and get off, how would that [affect] Facebook’s stock price? [...] Facebook’s share price would collapse; it would be, for them, a catastrophe. This is why these sites are designed to be maximally distracting. They need to distract us to make more money.”

Tristan Harris argues that social media’s business model is inherently opposed to users preserving their time and attention—sites have been designed to lure users away from real-life activities and into long periods of online engagement.

“A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than real news, and during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, flat-out falsehoods on Facebook outperformed all the top stories at nineteen mainstream news sites put together. As a result, we are being pushed all the time to pay attention to nonsense—things that just aren’t so.”

Not only is social media adept at distracting users, but its content is often not true. He hopes to convince readers that social media’s algorithms promote harmful content more than fact-checked, legitimate news—something he wants to spark the kind of indignation that will lead to collective action.

“He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named ‘cruel optimism.’ It’s when you take something with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.”

Hari feels that too much emphasis is placed on individual responsibility to resist the addictive nature of certain sites. He considers Nir Eyal’s strategies a form of “cruel optimism,” since they seem simple but are unlikely to work in the long-term. Instead, Hari believes that Big Tech should accept more responsibility for people’s engagement with the sites and services it creates.

“Let’s imagine each of us had to pay fifty cents or a dollar every month to use Facebook. Suddenly, Facebook would no longer be working for advertisers and offering up your secret wishes and preferences as their real product. No. It would be working for you.”

A subscription model is one possible solution to reducing the addictiveness of social media. If users paid to access these services, then sites would no longer be incentivized to sell data to advertisers or coax users to spend more time online. By imagining a world in which social media sites “would be working for you,” Hari prompts readers to wonder how they could promote such a change to take place.

“She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic.”

Nadine Burke Harris has found a strong correlation between childhood trauma and attention disorders. Hari cites this evidence to support his argument that stress is a part of what is fueling society’s crisis of inattention.

“Toyota cut two hours off the workweek, and it turned out their mechanics produced 114 percent of what they had before, and profits went up by 25 percent. All this suggests that when people work less, their focus significantly improves.”

Numerous trials by companies around the world have demonstrated that people who work fewer hours are more productive during their shifts, and their companies benefit from compressing their schedules. Hari argues that stress and long work hours have a negative effect on people’s focus—the common belief that more work results in more productivity is false.

“For almost all of our history, human beings ate, roughly, like my grandparents—they consumed fresh food that they knew the origin of […] In the mid-twentieth century there was a rapid move from fresh food towards precooked, processed food that was sold in supermarkets and created in order to be reheated.”

Changes in Western diet—going from whole foods with minimal processing to factory-produced, denatured products that have almost nothing to do with their origins—have affected people’s ability to pay attention. Moreover, studies have revealed that dyes, preservatives, and other additives in these new foods affect the human brain.

“In many ways, the story of resistance to lead poisoning is a model for us to follow now […] things only changed when there was a dedicated democratic movement of ordinary citizens taking on the forces that stole their focus. The IQ of the average preschooler is estimated by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have risen by five points as a result of the ban.”

Household and airborne lead pollution have disastrous effects of on brain development, but readers should be encouraged by the fact that grassroots organizing helped to ban it. Hari reminds readers about the necessity of tackling systemic causes of inattention through activism and the real results that this kind of movement can achieve.

“All you are saying, when a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, is that a child is struggling to focus. It doesn’t tell you anything about the ‘why’ question.”

Hari quotes an ADHD expert who questions treating ADHD with stimulants such as Ritalin. Some researchers believe that while ADHD diagnoses acknowledge a problem, they often fail to identify its causes, which could range from stress, to nutrition, to pollution, or other factors. Although Hari purports to describe the lack of consensus about this issue even-handedly, it is clear that he very sympathetic to scientists who stress the environmental rather than the biological roots of the disorder—a position that is in line with the rest of his book’s argument about lost focus.

“There is scientific evidence that there are several risks with giving these drugs to kids. The first risk associated with these drugs is physical—there is evidence that taking stimulants stunts a child’s growth […] Several scientists have also warned that stimulants increase the risk of a child having heart problems and dying as a result.”

Hari argues against prescribing drugs for ADHD without first considering the possible underlying causes of the condition—a theme throughout the book. Because he is interested in systemic issues affecting the population-wide attention, solving individual attention deficits with medication goes against his desire for the citizenry to rise up against Big Tech and other focus-stealing structures.