Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — And How to Think Deeply Again
Johann Hari
Crown (January 2022)

How to focus on what is most important, not just on what is urgent or easy

In their classic work, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (2001), Thomas Davenport and John Beck explain how and why attention continues to be so important to free enterprise. Since the ancient markets in Egypt, Greece, and Italy (if not earlier), the purpose of marketing has been to create or increase demand for what’s offered, either for sale or trade. Attracting and then retaining attention is essential to that process. Twenty-one years have passed since Davenport and Beck’s book appeared and attention is even more important now than it was then.

What Johann Hari offers in his book, Stolen Focus, is a wider and deeper analysis of the challenges barriers encountered when struggling to attract and retain others’ attention, yes, but also the challenges and distractions we all encounter when struggling to retain focus, whatever the given subject or situation may be. His is a research-driven book, based on revelations in 250 studies that caught his eye and stimulated his mind.

According to Hari, there are at least three major reasons why reading his book should be read. “The first is that a life full of distractions is, at an individual level, diminished…[also] this fracturing of attention isn’t just causing problems for us as individuals — it’s causing crises in our whole society…[and] if we understand what’s happening, we can begin to change it.” As James Baldwin once observed, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (Pages 13-15)

Reading this book will help you to understand and then avoid or overcome whatever prevents others from paying attention to you, AND, to understand and then avoid or eliminate whatever prevents you from focusing on whatever is most important, whatever the source may be.

These are among the other passages that caught my eye, also listed to suggest the scope of Hari’s coverage:

o Stolen focus (3-8, 16-17, 91-92, and 265-267)
o James Williams (13-14)
o Acceleration and complication of life (50-56, 57-60, 61-62, and 268-269)
o Multitasking (37-43)
o Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi (50-56, 57-62, and 268-269)

o Mind wandering (91-104)
o Tristan Harris (108-111, 112-119, 117-119, and 159-164)
o Ethical issues (111-112)
o Google (112-113, 113-119, and 125-126)
o Technology design (105-123, 133-134, 138-140, and 164-!65)

o Surveillance capitalism (127-128, 156-164, and 169-170)
o Anger (131-132, 131-132, and 136-137)
o Aza Raskin (141-142, 156-157, and 160-!61)
o Bad Habits (145-106 and 148-149)
o Nir Eyal (147-148, 151-153, and 162-164)

o Nutrition (196-203)
o Pollution (204-212)
o ADHD symptoms (213-237)
o Free play (238-254)
o Attention Rebellion (264-283)

These are among Johann Hari’s concluding thoughts: “If our attention continues to shatter, the ecosystem won’t wait patiently for us to regain our focus. It will fall and it will burn. At the start of the Second World War, W.H. Auden — when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans –warned: ‘We must love one another or die.’  I believe that now we must focus together — or face the fire alone.”

In response to forces that resulted in what became World War One, William Butler Yeats observed:

“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I fear that we will soon find out…for better or worse.