Having trouble staying focused? Me, too!
Are you having a problem staying focused? Reading through a long article? Finishing a project? Me, too. These days I find myself more easily distracted, vanishing down the rabbit holes of an interesting headline or video. It seems harder and harder to stay focused. While there is a lot of concern about the use of cell phones among youth, it seems us older folks are more challenged these days too. Which is why, when I saw the title of Johan Hari’s latest book, Stolen Focus I knew I had to read it (ironically requiring a long stretch of focused attention!)
This well-researched and thoughtful exploration of the shortening of our collective attention span is well worth reading. Without the ability to think deeply about the issues we face today, we are less likely to make well-considered decisions. Hari lists twelve causes for our fractured attention and some suggestions to address the issue. As a systemic thinker, some additional factors occurred to me that shape our ability to focus. I’ll pick out some of the causes that struck me as both important and entangled in the larger social structures we humans have created.
The first cause Hari discusses is the amount of information we face everyday. The invention of the printing press and the ability to store and disperse information has evolved into a dense fire-hose of information that penetrates every aspect of our existence. Emails follow us home from work. Texts arrive in the early morning (sometimes spam!) Urgently worded headlines blare at us. Not only are we connected to a broader swath of human experience, our techno-economic systems are designed to grab your eyeballs and tear you away from whatever it was you sat down with your phone or lap top to do!
While Hari explores this problem from a number of angles, one factor that bears examining is the increasing urbanization of our lives. More of us live in cities than at any time in human history. The denser our cities, the more life speeds up. Geoffrey West explains the basis for this in his Ted Talk on Scale. Density increases both our opportunities for connection and interaction, and subsequently, the speed of our lives. Urbanization is the irresistible force butting up against the immovable limits of our environment. If you live in a big city, you are not moving at body speed, you are moving at the speed dictated by the human built world, including frustrating and stressful things like traffic and traffic lights, apartments and rent, and beneficial things like hospitals and schools. And, yes, you (and me) are tired. With all this input, and tasks, and urgency, we’re sleeping fewer hours and less well.
On top of that we’re also not eating as well. The modern industrial diet is organized around efficiency and economy in producing food, not necessarily nutrition. We are far from the whole food diet that would provide optimal nutrition, after all, who has the time to grow food, process it well, store it, and cook it? (Well, a few of us small farmers are trying to get that to you via farmer’s markets and CSA (community supported agriculture), but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the onslaught of sugary, mass produced foods. (For more on this, check out forks over knives website.)
Urbanization, increased speed, a flood of information much of which we can do little about, and increasing distance from the natural world and the natural rhythms our bodies evolved to synch with are not making us either healthier or happier. And, we SIT a lot more. And more! (Read the book.) What a mess! What drives this beast?
Well, the simple answer is the “economy”. Our capitalist system of exchange has greatly facilitated our ability to exchange goods and services, and it contains a hidden gotcha. It is a “success to the successful” or positive feedback loop that concentrates wealth in increasingly fewer hands while also encouraging innovation and invention. The gotcha is “interest.” For every 10 dollars I loan you, you agree to pay me back 11. That extra dollar has to come from someplace. For a quick explanation of how this works, go here. Infinite speed and infinite growth are not possible for finite beings on a finite planet. On top of this, the five large tech companies that are driving much of the domination of our lives by electronic gadgets (Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet (google)) are busy designing more ways to entrap your eyeballs and brain through what Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. AI only supercharges this commercialization of our lived experiences.
What can we do? Well, in the face of thousands of software engineers on the other side of the screen and big data, you’re outnumbered. Just turning off your phone is challenging for most of us. We are told we need to have more will power and just turn off. This is what Hari identifies as “cruel optimism” which blames the individual for systemic forces. These are problems with the systems we’ve built for exchange and development.
For the short term question of what you can do to restore your frazzled focus and attention span, Hari lists a few things. First is doing activities that bring you into a state of flow. This is the experience of being so engrossed in an activity you enjoy that is just at the edge of your comfort and competence and yet within your ability to master that time just seems to disappear. That can be playing music, making art, reading a good novel, playing with your child, etc. This state of flow seems to recharge our attention span. So does taking a walk and allowing your mind to wander, in other words day dreaming.
It turns out that day dreaming allows our minds time to process all that information flooding into our bodies and brains and to sort out and make sense of this in terms of our own lives. Of course, managing the amount of time we spend with our attention directed by others (i.e., in the grip of electronic media) also makes more space for those other activities.
What about collective action to take back our attention and direction of our own minds? Hari proposed an “attention rebellion”, collective action to insist on changes to the way technology is presented and legislation to level the playing field between us and the companies that want to use our attention for their ends. And, get ready, the attention-grabbing elves have already launched the holiday blitz!! FOMO is in full swing.
Treat yourself to Hari’s thoughtful and well researched book. This is essential for these times that we take back our ability to think for ourselves.
