12 Reasons You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again

These 12 forces are pouring acid on your attention span and stealing your life away right from under you (but you can take your life back)

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If you think that you’re gradually losing your ability to focus on anything for a prolonged period of time…you’re probably right.

It’s happening to damn near everyone today, and there are causes.

In the incredibly well-researched book, Stolen Focus, Johann Hari investigates 12 distinct causes of our dwindling attention spans - several of them systematic causes - and offers a degree of hope, even though none of us are able to win the battle for our attention alone.

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire book is that your increasing inability to focus is not completely your fault, and believing that it is a personal failing of yours is simply unhelpful in the very worst way.

The fact is that you and I are living within a society that is systematically siphoning off your attention, and as valuable as self-discipline is, it's not going to be enough to solve what Hari calls "the attention crisis."

And it really is a crisis.

I mean, you've got the average American worker being distracted roughly once every three minutes, and even the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day. A day!

The average American in 2017 spent just 17 minutes a day reading, compared to 5.4 hours on their phone. And I'm sure that not many of them were reading books on their phone, either!

The reality is that today, around one in five car accidents is due to a distracted driver, and untold millions of people struggle every day with the simple act of putting down their phones.

But it's not their fault, says Hari, because every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.

What kind of personal will or self-discipline can stand alone against that?  

So, it's obvious that our ability to pay attention is collapsing, but Johann Hari was determined to find out why this is happening.

In the process of attempting to reclaim his own mind and his own ability to focus, he ended up interviewing a multitude of experts - computer scientists, social scientists, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, technologists, etc. - and the result is this impeccably researched and insightful book.  

Hari doesn't tell us that the solution to our problems is just to go off the grid, move to the woods, and live freely ever after. The solution is going to come from systematic and society-wide changes, along with individual efforts to reclaim our attention.

But it starts with realizing that we have a problem. There's this big beautiful world out there, encouraging us to build the lives we were meant to live, but many people are too busy scrolling to hear the call.

They - and maybe you, too - have to realize that social media is not free. It costs your attention - a piece of your life - and these costs matter. Our lives matter. Our real ones, not the simulacrum of life that exists on screens.

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Alright, so, after giving you some context, here are the 12 causes that Johann Hari identifies in the book that are pouring acid on our attention spans and depriving us of the opportunity to live our real lives:

Cause #1 - The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering:

Information is being fired at us faster and faster, and as the volume of that information increases, it becomes more and more difficult to filter it effectively. We don't know what to pay attention to, so we try to pay attention to everything, and we're quickly overwhelmed.

Worse, we think we can "multitask," which is essentially a lie because trying to do that comes with "switching costs." We're not really doing two things at once, but switching back and forth between them, and every time we do that, we dilute our attention.

Cause #2 - The Crippling of Our Flow States:

A flow state is what we experience when we're completely immersed in a pleasurable and/or sufficiently challenging activity - when our attention is totally consumed by the task at hand, and we feel "weightless," as though the work is being done of itself. It's effortless.

Flow states arrive when we're doing one single thing at a time - something that's both meaningful to us and right at the edge of our current abilities, not too hard and not too easy.

When we keep getting distracted, however, we preempt the necessary conditions for flow, and we lose the ability to perform deep, meaningful work.

Cause #3 - The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion:

Several of these causes feed into each other, and perhaps nowhere is this more self-evident than in the case of our physical and mental health.

The constantly-expanding workweek and the proliferation of demands on our attention and focus are directly contributing to overwhelm, and this, combined with our unhealthy diets and increased stress - not to mention the pollution hanging over our heads - all takes a toll on us.

Cause #4 - The Collapse of Sustained Reading:

In 2017, the average American spent just 17 minutes a day reading, while spending a troubling 5.4 hours on their phones.

Many of us are reading less than we used to, and less often purely for pleasure, and this works to undermine our ability to pay attention as well. Reading trains our attention, and when we spend hours with a great book, we're also learning how to focus on one thing for extended periods of time.

In contrast, social media trains us to be superficial in our reading habits, and to flit back and forth between insubstantial and inconsequential material until we've done it so often and for so long that we don't know how to read anything longer than a status update anymore.

Cause #5 - The Disruption of Mind-Wandering:

Far from being a sign of laziness or lack of discipline, mind-wandering is essential to creativity, and for allowing us the space with which to make sense of our own lives.

However, when we reflexively fill every spare moment with stimuli - constantly distracting ourselves from the possibility of ever spending one, unstimulated moment alone with ourselves - these crucial periods of free thinking start to disappear.

Cause #6 - The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You:

Also referred to as "surveillance capitalism," Hari found that the modern social media landscape is intentionally and specifically designed to pull you away from your own life.

These social media companies make money every time they show you an advertisement, and to be able to show you more advertising, they need to keep you on the apps for longer. They lose money whenever you put your phone down.

You may have exceptional self-control, but is it really strong enough to withstand the greatest psychological manipulators and tech engineers in the entire world? The tech companies are betting that it isn't, and the massive ad revenues these companies pull in are evidence that they're right.  

Cause #7 - The Rise of Cruel Optimism:

I had never heard of this term before reading Stolen Focus, but now, I can't unsee it. I discuss this idea further here, but cruel optimism is basically when you take a really big problem, one with various, deeper causes in our culture, and then you offer people simplistic, individual solutions that barely make a difference in addressing the real problem.