Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

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...

Gathers information concerning our society, how it functions, what we value to discuss the impact of technology that is designed to keep us looking at media and make those media providers money while apparently not caring about the impact on users. While this has some tips about how to increase focus or at least take better control of your media, your mileage will vary as this is more a look at societal factors and the related research than a self-help book. Hari's arguments feel more than just hyped up moralizing or a nostalgia for a time gone by.He calls for both personal and societal changes to allow humans to live a life less externally mediated, less algorithmic derived lives and ultimately a higher quality life.

Johann Johann Johann. Where was our focus when you wrote this book? For a start, don't bother reading this book if you want to understand how to improve your focus. Most of it is devoted to social system scale factors that the author thinks impede on focus. But he increasingly veers off course eventually ending up at the whole economy. His editor should be fired because s/he was AWOL on this book. His hypothesis is that focus is mostly something that happens to you. Guess what, you're a victim. F-off. His only “Self-help” approach to improving focus is to deny yourself of technology. He hasn't heard of self discipline or the idea that it's something that can be built. That's the only fundamental solution to focus and he doesn't even mention it once. What an idiot, what a poor victim. Yes, the system scale factors can make focus more difficult, & in conjunction with how “Big tech” (eg. Facebook) manipulates not only the capture of our attention but more sinisterly, what it is pointed towards, is something that needs more social attention.

4.5 stars. Very little of this information was new to me, although I was surprised at how much material he covered. This is not just about tech companies developing addictive software, although he certainly explains that well. He also talks about pollution, the educational system... 12 chapters, 12 reasons for our lack of focus, so it's more of a whole life approach.

If you're interested in the broader reasons for why attention has become such a problem, this is an excellent place to start. You can then dive more into the specific area you find most relevant.

This book is a Nonfiction deep dive into how our modern life is destroying our attention spans. If you, too, have noticed an uncomfortable downward slide of your attention span, especially after Covid lockdowns, you are not alone. The scary thing is, as Hari posits, is that this downward trend has been ongoing since the late 1800s, around the Industrial Revolution. As our society values economic growth more and more, tech companies will fight to get ever last second of your mind, equaling less sleep and more screentime, and more profit. This book is a wake-up call for every wired person on this planet. No, Hari doesn't offer easy solutions; he wants to start an Attention Rebellion. Let's fight back and do our part.

Rating: 3.5 stars

I loved Johann Hari's execution of the book and admire how he managed to live off the grid in the United States for three months. Depending on the level of privilege that someone has, they can try it as an experiment. I don't think that I would last more than two weeks without Internet so kudos to him. However, I wish that Hari would dispel the misinformation on ADHD instead of spreading it and go more extensively on the role of childhood trauma and lack of attention span. Also, ADHD is more than just hyperactivity; I wish there was more information about ADHD in terms of executive functioning, emotional regulation, and attention span.

I was expecting a remix of the same old tips (using tech to force time off tech/sleeping right/planned sabbaticals) in the hope that they would get through my thick distraction addled skull this time. And you do get that and it's great, worded very kindly and effectively.

What I didn't expect was to also get a manifesto on the need to revolt against a system that is turning us into the worst version of ourselves. Unable to focus, to parse truth from reality, to learn and grow and work together. I'm won over, I want to add to this revolution. It's the most important and difficult revolution that's ever been needed. A revolution to reclaim our very souls from the demon of distraction, so we can even begin to fix the other issues in our lives.

The best argument he has in the book? Imagine Facebook was designed for humans to be their best selves. It used all its engineers to design an app that brought people together, made them healthier and more caring and in touch with each other, what would that look like? It wouldn't even need to be a major change, just the small design changes that would make us all better people. It wouldn't be much, and it would change the world.

It's so true! It's so little and it would make the world a better place! It's completely outrageous it's not that! We've been duped!

Fascinating - lots of food for thought. I didn't necessarily agree with all his conclusions and the second half wasn't as interesting to me as the first but all in all, an excellent round-up of the current research into attention, focus, from both a psychological and an environmental standpoint with a mix of what we can do individually and what we need to do collectively as a society to address our growing inability to concentrate.

This book is really great except for a couple of big points. It talks about how our ability to focus is less a personal failing (ie “I'm not disciplined enough to focus”) and more of a systemic problem. The author talks about a basic problem that leads to difficulty focusing, such as looking at your phone too much, and then talks about there are hundreds or thousands of people working against you, trying to make you fail. Are you poorly disciplined for looking at your phone too much, or does it totally make sense that you do when apps are engineered from top to bottom to be distracting and addicting? Do those people have a vested interest in telling you it's your fault and not to look elsewhere? Absolutely.

I think one of my favorite things about it is how he talks about the basic mantras most self-help and health books do - you need to eat healthy, sleep the right amount, and exercise regularly - and then talks about how this is incredibly difficult and the system is stacked against us. It's hard to eat healthy when as a child, you've been conditioned to eat foods that are terrible for you, and as an adult, you may not have the time to eat well. It's hard to get the right amount of sleep when our work obligations are high and cause stress, which keeps you awake. It's hard to get the right amount of exercise when the world around us has been made into the space for cars and there isn't a natural reason we would walk. This is such a vastly fresh take because I've never read a book where these things are offered as solutions and then the author admits they're really hard, and often a point of privilege to meet properly.

This book explains why it's hard to focus and it's true goal is to convince you that we need societal changes to fix them. We need the government to get involved and ban food additives in the US that are banned in other countries. We need infrastructure changes so walking is safe again and pollution is cut down. We need to push for a four day work week. These need to become big issues.

There's a couple of things that bother me though. The ADHD section is by far the worst of the book. It feels like he let his bias get the hold of him here and he feels bitter that he very well could have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child and put on medication for it. He only talks about ADHD as a thing that makes it hard to focus for kids in schools - nevermind that a really common aspect of it is that you can hyper focus, which is to focus intensely on something you enjoy. Hyper focus can lead to not paying enough attention to the things you need to do, but it's still a form of focus that's completely ignored by this book on focus. It's really frustrating that he talks about this whole privileged private school where kids structure their lesson plans themselves and concludes that ADHD is basically not real because it doesn't show up in kids when they have the freedom to make their own choices. The school sounds great, don't get me wrong, but they literally are all focusing on things they enjoy. No one would have the chance to be diagnosed in the first place because you're just hiding the symptoms. (TW: He also brings up a case where a kid was misdiagnosed with ADHD when the problem was that he was sexually abused, which is gross negligence to add to this discussion.)
He ignores that adults can be diagnosed with ADHD late in life, and the fact that they can throws a lot of what his assumptions are out the window. He wants to assume ADHD is a symptom that's almost always misdiagnosed, and that's simply not true. And while he doesn't directly say that, that is exactly what he's implying.

In the final chapter, he admits that this isn't a self help book and that he hasn't entirely solved the issue. Which... Look at your subtitle? It's different from a lot of self help books (ie: better) in that it's more of a journalistic research of the subject, but he gives a lot of general information on how we can get back to focusing. Turn off notifications on your phone, do the eat/sleep/exercise thing, spend less time on screens in general, etc. It just struck me as really disingenuous to say “this isn't a self help book” at the very end when it's absolutely set up to look like one. Maybe he said it in the introduction also and I've just forgotten.

Overall the book is really great. The ADHD parts made me pause and question if I should really buy into what he'd said before that section, which I was more ready to accept what he'd said. But I feel the rest of the book was better researched and backed up with things I knew from outside the book, whereas the ADHD section is contradicted for the same reasons.