大象传媒

To write his latest book, Johann Hari put himself through something most professionals his age would never dare, and something most young people have never lived through 鈥� something they may never even have conceptualized. Hari went offline.

In 2018, he bought a 鈥渄umbphone鈥� that lacked internet access, and found an old laptop that wouldn鈥檛 let him connect to the World Wide Web, check email, or access social media. With a backpack stuffed with paperbacks, he boarded a ferry for Provincetown, Massachusetts, and, with a pang of anxiety, stepped out of the modern world. For the next three months, Hari searched for something he had felt slipping away for many years: his concentration.

鈥淚n my life before I fled to Cape Cod, I lived in a tornado of mental stimulation,鈥� he writes in Stolen Focus: Why You Can鈥檛 Pay Attention鈥攁nd How to Think Deeply Again. 鈥淚 would never go for a walk without listening to a podcast or talking on the phone. I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me.鈥�

鈥淚 was thirty-nine, and I had been working nonstop since I was twenty-one,鈥� he continues. Those years were eventful for Hari. He鈥檚 had a prominent and controversial career, and most recently published two bestsellers: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression鈥攁nd the Unexpected Solutions. But he could no longer ignore what such a prolonged frenetic pace was doing to him.

An interaction with his godson finally prompted Hari to make a change. The pair had traveled together from London to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit the home of their hero, Elvis Presley. And Hari鈥檚 godson couldn鈥檛 get off his phone. 鈥淚 know something鈥檚 wrong,鈥� the 15-year-old boy told Hari. 鈥淏ut I have no idea how to fix it.鈥� Then he returned to his screen. 

Hari and I have been journalists for roughly the same number of years, have both ingested information obsessively that whole time, and, I learned from his book, have both grown increasingly worried that our attention spans are shrinking to resemble a fruit fly鈥檚. As I write this, I can鈥檛 help but glance down at my phone whenever it vibrates with a news alert. I鈥檝e already taken two short breaks to skim through my Twitter interactions, and I鈥檝e alt-tabbed six times to check the prices of a bunch of stocks I don鈥檛 even own.

Hari and I aren鈥檛 alone in this. Hari quotes studies in Stolen Focus that found the average American spends 3 hours, 15 minutes on their phone during the workday, and that we touch our phones 2,617 times per day. From 1978 to 2014, the proportion of Americans who didn鈥檛 read a book in a given year roughly tripled. And from 2013 to 2017, the duration a subject remained in Twitter鈥檚 top-50 trending topics declined from 17.5 hours to 11.9.

This is happening for many reasons. We don鈥檛 sleep as much as we used to. Food dyes have been associated with children鈥檚 hyperactivity and are in seemingly everything we eat that鈥檚 not ripped directly out of the ground. Chemicals in pesticides, plasticizers, flame-retardants, and cosmetics all have potential side effects on our ability to pay attention. (When asked how to avoid common substances that harm our minds, one researcher said, 鈥淭here is no way we can have a normal brain today.鈥�) And many of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet dedicate their entire existence to deploying algorithms that have the explicit goals of getting us to scroll faster, click more often, and tap through one TikTok video after another. Hari writes that a poll he conducted with the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry and YouGov shows that nothing affects our focus worse than stress. And with the middle class shrinking and globalization鈥檚 hypercompetitiveness making jobs ever more demanding, chronic stress is becoming our new baseline.

Stolen Focus has some answers. Eat from the edges of the supermarket (fruit, veggies, fish, meat, and fresh baked goods); take extended breaks from social media to give your brain time to recover from its addictive diet of comments, likes, shares, and hearts; and attempt to understand what we are avoiding when we immerse ourselves in the relentless cascade of words, images, and videos.

Hari warns that simply deleting your Facebook account won鈥檛 get you reading Russian literature again. It wasn鈥檛 with the invention of television or the internet that we began to lose our focus, although those technologies certainly hastened the trend. There is evidence that our attention spans have been shrinking gradually since at least the 1880s. The reason for that is the very basis of the modern world: capitalism and economic growth.

鈥淕rowth can happen in one of two ways,鈥� a social anthropologist explained to Hari. 鈥淭he first is that a corporation can find new markets鈥攂y inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn鈥檛 have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more.鈥� In order for the basic structure of our society to remain in place, we need to take in more and more information, which means that we have to pay attention to each piece of information for a shorter amount of time.

鈥淚n the long run, it will ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year,鈥� Hari writes. 鈥淭he growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds.鈥�

Hari calls the break required from this perpetual acceleration the 鈥淎ttention Rebellion.鈥� It will feel like an insurmountable challenge, he concedes. But the consequences of not beginning this societal shift are equally difficult to imagine.

In Montreal, Hari interviewed a professor of psychiatry specializing in sleep who told him that while we don鈥檛 know for sure, dreams might help us adapt emotionally and better respond to events that occur throughout the day. But dreams often happen during rapid eye movement sleep, and REM sleep mostly occurs toward the end of a seven- to eight-hour sleep cycle. As humans pack each 24-hour period with more obligations and activities and leave less time for sleep, those valuable REM dreams are vanishing into the ether.

鈥淎s he said this,鈥� Hari writes, 鈥淚 wondered: What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don鈥檛 have time to dream?鈥� 

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Travis Lupick is a journalist and the author of, most recently, 鈥淟ight Up the Night: America鈥檚 Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival.鈥�

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