There’s a certain irony to this review of Johann Hari’s 2022 exploration of the attention crisis currently gripping society. I bought the book when it first came out and only recently finished reading it after three abortive attempts. The reason? Other things distracted me. Clearly this issue is affecting me too, so recently I sat down to read what is causing it and what can possibly be done about it.
If you’re anything like me, you have probably had the thought “I just can’t concentrate like I used to” on more than one occasion. Our smartphones, tablets and other devices provide us with endless notifications, text messages and other distractions from a whole host of social media and other apps. You have probably observed people sitting in cafes or even walking down the street staring at the little screen in their hand. In short, you recognise that we have a collective problem.
In Stolen Focus journalist Johann Hari discusses the nature of this problem, and travels the world speaking with numerous experts about what causes the issue and what can possibly be done about it. He interweaves the results of these interviews with his own anecdotal experience of a lengthy, self-enforced “digital detox” in Provincetown at the northern tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and his subsequent return to the “real world”.
Hari identifies twelve possible contributing causes for the attention crisis and spends time discussing each in detail. Some of these will seem glaringly obvious, such as the recent growth in technologies that are designed to be addictive in order to gather data to be sold to advertisers. Likewise, the general increase in the speed of our society and the increasing demands on our attention by the modern workplace, leading to stress, exhaustion and burnout. Others may seem less obvious at first glance, but make sense when you think about them, such as the decline in quality of our diets and the rise in environmental pollution.
A particularly counterintuitive suggestion was that constant stimulation reduces the amount of time that our minds have to wander. You might be inclined to think that mind wandering was the opposite of focus, but research has shown that it provides an essential opportunity to process what has been absorbed, to make sense of it and how it applies to you as an individual.
This ties in well with one cause that particularly caught my attention: the fact that today’s children grow up in a very different way from those in previous generations. In a recent blog post I described a Sunday afternoon from my own childhood a half-century ago, where my friend and I would ride our bicycles to the local shopping precinct and look through the windows of the closed shops. Similarly, I have written about the hours my friends and I spent playing on the site of a disused covered reservoir, inventing games about explorers climbing mountains and discovering lost lands where dinosaurs still roamed.
By comparison, Hari states that by 2003, only 10% of children spent any time outside enjoying this type of free, unsupervised play on a regular basis. One can only imagine that the percentage is lower today. Much of children’s play now is organised and supervised by adults. Children miss out on the experience of figuring out what to play and establishing and enforcing the rules of the game, experiencing the give and take that prepares you for adult life. What is left, according to one of Hari’s interviewees, is the equivalent of highly processed food: much of the value has been lost.
Hari spends some time looking at the rise in the number of ADHD diagnoses, and speaks with medical professionals, including a veterinarian who treats similar conditions in animals, on the history of ADHD and the various treatments available.
Finally, the author turns his attention to what can be done to reclaim our attention and, as the cover promises, think clearly again. This is where the book may disappoint some readers. Hari states that it is not a self-help book offering a simple solution. He discusses his own continuing struggle with attention and outlines some of the strategies with which he has had some success, including going for a daily walk without his phone. Other parts of the solution, he maintains, must be societal. For example, he cites the constant need for economic growth as one of the main drivers of the problem, ever pressuring people to consume more, and to work harder to pay for this increased consumption. As with all of society’s ailments, there is no quick, easy fix.
I must mention here that Johann Hari is something of a controversial figure in the world of journalism, having admitted in 2011 to plagiarism and fabrication, which led to his resignation as a journalist for The Independent. Since that time, he has turned his attention to writing books, and he provides extensive citations in Stolen Focus, along with additional resources, including the audio of his interviews, on the book’s website.
In conclusion, I would recommend Stolen Focus to anyone who has found themselves asking the same question I did: “Why can’t I concentrate like I used to”. The book is a timely and interesting read which, if nothing else, will give you a lot to think about in the area of our collective attention crisis.
Leave a Reply