Stolen Focus
Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
How’s YOUR focus? If you’re like most human beings on the planet these days, my hunch is you feel like you’ve lost your ability to pay attention. This book is a sobering look at what Johann Hari believes to be the twelve causes of our inability to focus and a guide on “How to Think Deeply Again.” I highly recommend it.
Big Ideas
“I found strong evidence that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal feeling on my part, or your part, or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns. I realized, when I learned all this, that there was a hole in all the existing books I had read about how to improve your focus. It was huge. They have, on the whole, neglected to talk about the actual causes of our attention crisis—which lie mainly in these larger forces. Based on what I learned, I have concluded that there are twelve deep forces at work that are damaging our attention. I came to believe we can only solve this problem in the long term if we understand them—and then, together, we stop them from continuing to do this to us.
There are real steps you can take as an isolated individual to reduce this problem for yourself, and throughout this book you’ll learn how to carry them out. I am strongly in favor of you seizing personal responsibility in this way. But I have to be honest with you, in a way I fear previous books on this topic were not. Those changes will only get you so far. They will solve a slice of the problem. They are valuable. I do them myself. But unless you are very lucky, they won’t allow you to escape the attention crisis. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. We have to take individual responsibility for this problem, for sure, but at the same time, together, we have to take collective responsibility for dealing with these deeper factors. There is a real solution—one that will actually make it possible for us to start to heal our attention. It requires us to radically reframe the problem, and then to take action. I believe I have figured out how we might start to do that.”
~ Johann Hari from Stolen Focus
How’s YOUR focus?
If you’re like most human beings on the planet these days, my hunch is you feel like you’ve lost your ability to pay attention. This book is a sobering look at what Johann Hari believes to be the twelve causes of our inability to focus and a guide on “How to Think Deeply Again.”
I highly recommend it. (Get the book here.)
As per his bio in the book, Johann Hari is a British writer who has authored two New York Times bestselling books, which have been translated into thirty-seven languages and praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. He’s written for some of the world’s leading newspapers and he’s appeared on countless shows while his TED Talks have been viewed over 75 million times.
The book is packed with Big Ideas. Let’s take a quick look at some of my favorites!
P.S. We’ve covered a range of other great books on the subject, including: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (check out his Digital Minimalism 101 class as well!), The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Irresistible by Adam Alter, and The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley.
We cannot put off living until we’re ready. ... Life is fired at us point blank.
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