Attention! Attention!

Hi friends.

When I was a kid, my aunt gave me a birthday card that had Miss Piggy on the front, waving her purple gloved arms (hooves?) in the air while her long blond hair swung up around her head. It said, “ATTENTION! ATTENTION!” Inside, it said, “I just wanted your attention, that’s all.” Or something like that. It was both a birthday wish (somehow) and an indictment of Miss Piggy’s and my desire for attention. It seems natural to be hungry for attention in a huge family that was constantly battling for one another’s attention, but I guess I was too obvious about my neediness. That’s between me and my therapist.

I digress.

We now live in a world where so many different things demand our attention that it feels impossible to give our attention even to the things we wish to focus on. Before you finished reading that sentence, I suspect your mind wandered to the issues demanding your attention beyond my words - work, kids, a health issue, Facebook, effing Donald Trump, whatever else. So many things we want to give attention to feel beyond our grasp because of all the things that demand our attention, like evil Miss Piggys, flailing around, screaming in our faces.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari is the rare (supposed) self-help book that lives up to its title. Hari discusses his struggles with being too online and distracted and laments his nephew’s childhood, lost to Snapchat. Hari even went so far as to move to a disconnected beach cabin without internet or cell phone to reset his focus, poisoned as it had been by social media and FOMO (fear of missing out). Hari explores more than a dozen different reasons why we have difficulty focusing and offers some antidotes to temper our worst impulses to distraction.

But this isn’t a typical self-help book. While he notes there are simple things you can do to reduce dependence on your personal electronic devices (turn off your Notifications NOW), Hari focuses on the systemic issues that are driving our lack of focus, including the design decisions made by tech companies to keep us hooked; the psychological reasons outrage draws us in longer and faster than community and kindness; the round-the-clock expectations of the workplace; other factors that cause us stress that are beyond our control (e.g. the healthcare system); chemistry and epigenetics; and so much more.

I know it sounds like he is just blaming everything in the world on external factors but that’s not the case. Hari nails the problem of balancing individual responsibility for our actions while also acknowledging that it benefits other actors (namely tech companies but not exclusively) to have us believe it’s our fault. In the same way that we’ve been misled to believe that obesity is a moral failing rather than the outcome of a food supply that is largely processed and artificial, we’ve been misled to believe that our phone addiction is a moral failing as opposed to the engineered outcome of tech company choices. For example, the guy who invented the “endless scroll” that loads new content into your social media feed admits that it is intended to prevent the viewer from ever reaching a point where they must choose whether to stop or proceed.

In other words, you can stop beating yourself up about your phone addiction and make mindful steps away from it while also raising awareness of the need to regulate technology and limit surveillance capitalism. His book veers away from both personal blame and despair about the system issues by describing possibilities of change on both levels. Hari is very forthright about the areas where the science is unsettled, such as around the causes and treatment of ADHD, but he explores different ideas that help attention problems feel less intractable. By beginning to understand, we can work toward a different way of engaging with the world around us.

Normally I have a hard time finishing self-help-style nonfiction books. Inevitably my mind wanders and I skip to the chapters that are prescriptive before deciding to find a magazine article about the same topic. I don’t blame my attention issues for this; I blame tedious writing and the demands of publishers that books be longer than magazine articles. Stolen Focus, though, kept me engaged enough that I read it one day (Saturday, the same day I figured out how to use a snow blower) because each chapter was a combination of thoughtful suggestions and reasonable ideas that identified the culpable source of our distraction. Anyway, go read it, and don’t freak out that it’s too long. There are nearly 200 pages of notes and references supporting the science he writes about.

Now here’s me with a snow blower.