Stolen Focus

I was expecting Stolen Focus to predominantly focus on digital focus, and the negative impacts big tech companies have on our attention. That’s definitely a good portion of this book, which was incredibly insightful, but there are many more concepts tied to focus I had never considered which were equally amazing to learn about.

Diet, environment, social factors, economy, politics, and more. Stolen Focus ties relations between the focus crisis to the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the mental health crisis, and much more. These are all interlinked problems which feed on each other in disastrous ways.

This book is not a “how to reclaim your focus” guide, it’s rather a thorough investigation into how and why focus is so important, and what has happened to it. It gives you the context and understanding required to not just fight back personally, but socially.

Writing-wise, I was thoroughly impressed with the structure of the book. I was consistently captured by the book (ironically) as the author had a great balance of personal anecdotes, storytelling, interviews with dozens of experts, scientific research, and more. I felt the balance of facts, evidence, and story were perfect.

Great read, a must read if we are to reclaim some sanity in this insane world.

Johann Hari skriver ikke så godt som Malcolm Gladwell eller Ronan Farrow, og det kan bli litt mye kronglete formulerte beskrivelser og intellektuell name dropping innimellom (som om ikke jeg nettopp gjorde det samme).Hari kritiseres også for å være unøyaktige med sine kilder, og i 2011 (enda en unøyaktighet) mistet han jobben i The Guardian (enda mer unøyaktighet?) pga. plagialisering.

Diskvalifiserer disse opplysningene det denne boken handler om? Langt i fra! Når det gjelder redelighet, så er 1/4 av boken (unøyaktighetsvarsel) henvisninger til kilder han har brukt i skrivingen av boken, og selv om Morgenbladet og andre klarer å påvise faktuelle feil og forskningsresultater på tynt grunnlag, er det meste som boken bygger på fullt og helt redelig og pålitelig.

Alle disse betenkelighetene tatt i betraktningen, dette er en uhyre viktig bok i den tiden vi lever i. Jeg har selv merket det: Det er ufattelig vanskelig å fokusere og holde oppmerksomheten. Det kom så langt at jeg måtte begynne å legge mobilen i et annet rom, sette av tider til bevisst lesing uforstyrret, timer forsvant til ting jeg ikke ante hva gikk til (joda, jeg vet: Twitter), og generelt følte jeg meg på siden av mitt eget liv i lange perioder av døgnet. Touche, her kommer Johann Hari og beskriver akkurat min opplevelse. Det han også gjør, er å beskrive årsakene til at vi er der vi er, og konsekvensene av det. Blant annet skriver han om hvordan vårt individuelle fokus eller mangel på sådan, tar fra oss evnen til å kollektivt fokusere på de store utfordringene vi lever i nå, og dermed redusere muligheten for å finne en løsning.

Slutten av boken inneholder en konklusjon. Det er fem ting vi må gjøre for å komme oss ut av uføret (eller var det tre?), og jeg er enig i alt sammen. Markedsliberalister vil se blod når de leser rådene, jeg er enig i alt sammen - og det er kanskje derfor jeg liker boken så godt. Birds of a feather osv. Men uansett: Eeeh, nå glemte jeg hva jeg skulle skrive...

Johann Hari has managed to write a book which gives a look into some of the causes for what he quite excellently argues is an attention crisis, and how this attention crisis is affecting us as a species. The book has several interesting, intriguing and at times dystopian analyses but manages to end the book in an ultimately speaking hopeful way.

I highly recommend everyone I know to read this book, as it not only gives insight to why we as a species are becoming worse and worse at focusing, thinking deeply and becoming more mindless than mindful, but it also gives a general insight to what this does with us as a society and who it is that seemingly wants it to go this way.

If you are even just partly interested in the social sciences and psychology behind focus, behind social media, behind the ever increasing speeding up of everything in our society or just about why we find it so hard to be able to just sit on the bus without frantically scrolling on our phones, than this book is a must-read.

It is also worth noting that this is not a traditional self help book, like many might think because of the cover and title. It is more an analysis of what has gone wrong, why, how it can be changed, and why individual efforts aren't enough in this situation; while the book does give insight and tips that fit in the self-help genre (many that I'm using and will use as well), the book itself points more towards 'Society needs to change. Now.' than 'You are lazy and need to change.'

I really enjoyed [b:Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions|34921573|Lost Connections Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions|Johann Hari|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1631416785l/34921573.SX50.jpg|56184854] by Johann Hari even though I had some critiques about the way it made its argument. Overall I agree with his main idea that many of the issues we have in modern life are not the problem of biology or the individual but are a reflection of the structure of our society. What he did for depression in his previous book, he does here in a work looking at our inability to focus. Though "Lost Connection" hit me harder, I think that this is a better written volume. Hari uses his experience living in Provincetown, Massachusetts for three months with no connectivity as a central experience upon which to hang his twelve arguments. Another strength of the book is that, while rooted in science, it doesn't fall into the "Science says X" trap that I felt like "Lost Connections" feel into.

Some of the arguments he makes here feel like common sense while others are surprising. A lot has been written about the role of technology on our ability to pay attention but Hari also looks at nutrition, pollution, and sleep as causes of our lack of focus. The strongest sections detail the importance of mind wandering and the need for children to play. The main thrust that Hari attempts to articulate is that this problem is complex and cannot be attributed to a single cause. In fact, comes from larger structural problems within society that will need equally complex solutions. I do think the book falls short on the solutions part but perhaps this could be attributed to the fact that in order to break these structures, we need to really expand our imagination to think beyond the way our society has operated for so long.

I’ve come to writing this review late, so this likely won’t be as thorough as I would have liked. This is an important book and one of my favorite reads so far this year—it couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s almost the end of the term and unsurprisingly, I’m struggling to properly sit down and focus to finish a term paper and thesis draft. What I appreciate most about Stolen Focus is that Hari leads you through several different ‘causes’ behind the current attention crisis. He does give a few chapters to smartphones and social media, but he is quite adamant that these are far from the only things, and he denies that this crisis can be solved simply by using our phones less.

The book’s structure makes it fairly easy to get into. Hari begins each chapter with a brief anecdote from his personal life, then he extracts an important question or theme from this. From there, he takes the reader to the experts—various professors, academics, researchers that he has consulted with—and distills their research into palatable language. All of this makes for a very compelling read. When I started reading, I found it hard to put down; I probably would have finished it much faster, but I found myself increasingly distracted (heh) by current events. Time is strange; it seemed to go by so slowly when I was reading it, and yet, now that I’ve finished, it’s speeding up again (and I’m even closer to my deadlines).

Reading about Hari’s detoxing experiment in Provincetown, Massachusetts was fascinating and even nostalgic; it’s a reminder of an era gone by—before we were hooked up to the internet constantly. Right now, we are experiencing perhaps the first major ‘social media’ war; I know several people who’ve been following updates on the war in Ukraine nearly 24/7, like a drip feed. Can anyone convincingly argue that this is better for our mental health than getting a daily newspaper just once in the morning? We’re so inundated with information that our minds have to constantly filter between bits and pieces, switching tasks, and be on high alert. No wonder sleep, relaxation, productivity, etc. will suffer. Hari presents his arguments in such a way that one can’t help but think, ‘Well of course we’re fucked, given all these conditions.’

I was previously familiar with some of the things he mentions, like the Center for Humane Technology, and I saw the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’. The latter focuses on Big Tech in particular, but this book of course goes beyond that. I have also heard about the default mode and task positive networks (in an ADHD context, curiously). Nevertheless, I found a lot of new information in Hari’s book. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow was very interesting, and it got me to think about my own actions in a different way. Although I initially felt that I was less addicted to social media than Hari (at least at the outset), this book has spelled out that no one is really immune to the effects of the attention crisis. For example, this is a very relatable feeling:

‘The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it.’

I also started reflecting on the few earlier memories I have of childhood. As an adult, I was always quick to dismiss myself as ‘just not a creative person’, but as a child I used to love writing, drawing, making videos, etc. My mind saw unlimited potential and had infinite energy for all of these efforts. Somehow, between then and now, I can see why Hari would say my attention has not only been diminished, but stolen.

Hari offers insights and advice to help combat the attention crisis, but he emphasizes that he is still struggling himself to repair his attention (and this is what separates this book from the self-help genre—the author acknowledges his own shortcomings) and that this must be a collectivized effort against the forces that are stealing our attention. We need to unionize and demand our attention, essentially. I’m all for it—though I am perhaps a lot less optimistic than Hari that this will actually pan out. In that regard, I’m glad that this book has been making lists and headlines, because it’s an important one; I hope it is sufficient in getting the movement started.

People are quick to dismiss the criticisms of technology and the symptoms of our attention crisis—‘even Socrates was against writing, all generations have the same resistance to technological improvements’. Yes, Socrates was against writing, but was he wrong? How many of us modern day city dwellers can recite a few verses of poetry, or recollect important facts without having to resort to Google? Or remember a good friend’s phone number? (Today, I’m only able to remember my immediate family’s phone numbers, which were all memorized in childhood, and which have not changed overmuch.) Writing has undoubtedly been a helpful tool to humanity, but it was the first step in compartmentalizing our memories and learning to an external medium. The role of the internet and social media and smartphones is to externalize not only memories of epic poems but nearly our entire brain. Hari offers an effective and convincing counterpoint to the ‘cruel optimists’ camp of this debate, figures like Nir Eyal and much of Silicon Valley.

‘In a culture built on ever-increasing speed, slowing down is hard, and most of us will feel guilty about doing it.’

While I greatly enjoyed this book, the last few chapters on the ‘rise of ADHD’ turned to slightly controversial territory. I don’t doubt that kids have a lot of external factors contributing to their attention problems, and I can sympathize with the hyper-pathology of children; but Hari veers a dangerous line between attributing some causes of some children diagnosed with ADHD and attributing these same causes towards ADHD in general. Environmental and dietary factors are important, but ADHD is also a very real condition reflected in neurological factors. I also found some of Hari’s conclusions drawn from some studies to be overly simplistic and perhaps too convenient for his argument; scientific studies are hardly ever that certain, and I can appreciate that he is writing to a different audience. But his presentation of some claims does not make that distinction clear.

Hari does offer a few advice and tips, all of which I need to make better use of, particularly pre-committment. Somehow while I was reading the book, I actually did decently well and leaving my phone well alone; somehow, afterwards, with the increasing escalation of global chaos, my phone hours went up again (to my great shame). Now they’re going back down, but still not as much as I would like. (And evidently I’m spending time writing Goodreads reviews when I should really be working on my term paper.) So pre-commitment would be a good step, along with trying to get back into a better sleep schedule. I also need to incorporate more exercise and ‘mind-wandering’ walks and meditation. This review is just going to be my own accountability in terms of adapting some of these changes. Future me: I don’t want to let you down.

‘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.”’

P.S. There is an audiobook version but I definitely recommend reading and not listening to this book if you can.