Why You Can't Pay Attention

You've felt it. That mental itch...to pick up the smart phone, check the news feed, check your social media performance, check something. Sometimes you think you should be able to resist it, but...nah, I want to look. I can quit any time I want! You know though, that you don't have nearly as much control as you’d like. It's not just you, it's everybody. The book “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari is about that and why it's so hard to escape.

The author spends some time talking about attempts to block it all out by going cold turkey for several months by moving to Cape Cod for a summer to see what would happen. He found that without ceaseless distraction, his focus _did_ return but he knows that this experiment is nothing more than a temporary reprieve; we all have to live in the modern world and few of us have the privilege of going on a permanent retreat.

Over the course of the rest of the book he builds the case that our screen addiction is hardly a matter of self-discipline, we're victims of a carefully engineered ecosystem of electronic media that directly converts our attention into profit for others. He likens it to the American food industry: to live in the U.S. means being surrounded with products so ultra processed that it's barely recognizable as food. If you have extra pounds you don't want, it often has less to do with your willpower, and more to do with your economic access to real food. If your goal is to eat healthfully, the environment we live in makes it almost impossible to be successful. And so it is with screen time.

He digs into some other factors like environmental pollution, genetics, and questionable educational strategies that diminish our ability to focus, but the biggie is the deliberate efforts of software engineers to hack the human mind, target its known weak points, and exploit them to keep us looking, tapping, and scrolling.

What to do? Well, the effects of screen addiction are so serious, the impacts to young brains so worrisome, and the business practices so unethical that actions at the societal level are needed. Individual goal setting to reduce screen time isn't going to cut it. We need to control these technologies in the way that we banded together to bring political pressure to ban ozone-destroying CFCs and pollutants that created acid rain in the 1980s. Nothing less will do. He admits that you may feel hopeless that this can happen but reminds you that many such efforts to thwart global corporations seemed equally hopeless...until they weren't. That outcome starts with a few people who believe they can make a big difference.