We are experiencing a crisis of attention and we need to find the focus again, says writer

The typical American worker focuses on a particular task for just three minutes. Each day, we touch or check our cell phones more than 2,000 times, and we spend more than three hours looking at them on average.

That’s what Johann Hari, a writer who has talked about depression and addiction in previous works, says in his new book, “Stolen Focus”. The work is an investigation into why we have let ourselves be carried away into this state of distraction – which Hari describes as “a crisis of attention”.

Some factors that Hari identifies seem pretty clear, like the current business model of big tech companies, which make money in direct proportion to the attention people give them.

Other factors he identifies are often less discussed, and range from what we eat (industrialized foods packed with refined carbohydrates) to the way we sleep (by some accounts, for much less time than we used to), to the nature of childhood United States, with its widespread loss of autonomy.

Hari calls for an “attention rebellion”, a drastic collective action aimed at bringing about drastic change, which would include reducing the working week to four days and allowing children to play freely, unsupervised, for much longer.

Below, condensed and edited for clarity, is a recent conversation with Hari about what it will take to regain control of our minds.

Do you see a connection between the topics of your three books – depression, addictions and attention? There is always a mystery in my head that I genuinely want to investigate. With this book, I felt my attention was getting worse.

Things that required deep focus, and that had always been central to my self, like reading books and having deep conversations, were becoming more and more like trying to climb an escalator that descends. I was still able to do them, but the difficulty was increasing. And I noticed the same thing happening to most people I know.

I also believe there is a deeper connection. In the case of each of these phenomena – depression, addictions and our crisis of attention – we see them primarily as individual problems, individual failures. But in fact it is about phenomena that are happening within a certain environment.

As Joel Nigg, a professor of psychiatry who is a leading expert on children’s attention problems, told me, we need to question and we are facing what he defines as “a pathogenic attentional culture,” a culture that is undermining everyone’s ability to us to stay focused.

And what about the pandemic? How have the events of the past two years contributed to our fractured sense of focus? The pandemic has made us more stressed, and we know that stress triggers a state known as vigilance — and vigilance is when you find it harder to concentrate because your mind is constantly scanning the horizon for danger.

The other thing is that the pandemic is giving us a dystopian vision of the future. As Naomi Klein argues, we suddenly found ourselves thrust to a point where we wouldn’t have reached it for 15 years, technology-wise.

The situation showed us a vision of the future that many of us hated. In the last two years, I haven’t heard anyone say “yes, another Zoom conversation”. That is, the situation has given us a vision of the future we are heading towards, and we can now consciously choose to abandon it and move towards a better future.

In this regard, there are people, like writer and tech expert Nir Eyal, who say we need to be individually accountable for our lack of discipline in screen time, rather than blaming technology for our propensity to be distracted. . You define this as “cruel optimism”, and explain that definition as “a solution that looks good but won’t work”. At the beginning of the research for the book, I essentially had two stories about what happened, in my case. I kept musing that “one, you have no willpower, and two, someone invented the smartphone”.

I decided to exert my willpower and function without a smartphone for three months. I spent three months in Provincetown, Massachusetts, completely offline, in a radical exercise of will. There were many ups and downs, but I was amazed at how much attention I regained. I was able to read books for eight hours a day again.

At the end of my stay there, I thought that “I will never go back to living the way I lived before”. The pleasures of staying focused are far greater than the rewards of “likes” and tweets.

But then I went back to using my cell phone, and within a few months I was 80% back to where I started the exercise. And I only really understood why when I interviewed James Williams, who in my opinion is the most important philosopher who studies the issue of attention, today on the planet, and he told me that “it was as if you had imagined that the solution to the pollution of the air on the planet was for you to wear a gas mask”.

I have no objections to gas masks. Gas masks are great. But they are not the solution to the problem of air pollution.

If putting technology aside for an extended period of time isn’t the answer, what were some of the techniques that you found effective on an individual level? I’m sleeping more, for at least eight hours. I have a box with a clock-operated lock, and I keep my cell phone in it for four hours a day while I write. And I don’t sit down to watch a movie with my boyfriend unless we both lock our phones.

There are people who argue that worrying about the influence of big tech companies on our attention is just the latest moral panic, something akin to the outrage with which the invention of printing presses was received. What is your response to this argument? I used to agree that this was the case. But now I think the evidence is really overwhelming — and I think most people can see that fact.

And the question is also urgent because many of the factors that are invading our attention are about to undergo immense acceleration. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is than Facebook.

There needs to be a movement from the opposite side, involving all the people who say, “No, we won’t let you do this to us. We want a life in which we can read books. We want to have a life in which our children are able to talk.”

In this regard, the number of diagnoses for attention deficiency has skyrocketed since the beginning of the century. There are approximately six million children in the United States who have received diagnoses of attention deficit disorder today. But you point to some ambiguities on the subject – there is no agreement among researchers that attention deficit is a “biological disease”. Of all the topics in the book, it was on this one that the scientists I interviewed most disagreed. There is pretty clear evidence that there are people whose genes make an attention deficit more likely.

But the proportion of people whose attention problems are caused by biology has been somewhat overestimated. This is the first society in human history that tried to get children to sit still for eight hours a day. Nobody has done it until now because it’s an absolutely stupid thing to do.

So I believe the attention deficit diagnosis can have a bright side, because it tells children that “this is not your fault.” But I think it’s harmful to give them an exclusively biological story, saying “that’s just a problem in your mind.”

His solution to all of this is to create an “attention rebellion.” How would it work? The first step is awareness. It’s for everyone to come together and say that “you think you’re failing because of lack of focus, but in fact the same thing is happening to all of us, and for great structural reasons”.

_{Translation by Paulo Migliacci}