Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

“I came to believe that we have profoundly misunderstood what is actually happening to our attention. For years, whenever I couldn’t focus, I would angrily blame myself. I would say: You’re lazy, you’re undisciplined, you need to pull yourself together. Or I would blame my phone and rage against it…But I learned that in fact something much deeper than personal failure, or a single new invention, is happening here.”

Johann Hari hints that there are both personal and systemic causes behind the rise in attention issues, intriguing readers to discover the broader, more systemic issues that are detrimental to people’s attention, aside from more obvious causes such as poor discipline or easy access to phones.

“As a species, we are facing a slew of unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors—like the climate crisis—and, unlike previous generations, we are mostly not rising to solve our biggest challenges. Why? Part of the reason, I think, is that when attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down. Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years.”

Hari broadens the scope of his analysis from the individual to society as a whole. He argues that waning attention harms people on an individual level, and also threatens societal progress, since solving “big problems” requires continued attention. Hari encapsulates the consequences of inattention for society at large, making his work a sociological analysis as well as a self-help book.

“People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up […] For the average American, it’s three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every 24 hours.”

Some people reacted to Hari’s “digital detox” with envy, and admitted that they often felt distracted by their phone and wished they used it less. These statistics reveal how much time Americans spend on their phones and challenge readers to consider how they might otherwise use that time.