Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

Certainly made me think - I am persuaded that this is an issue that everyone should be made aware of. I do strongly believe that being more intentional with our time is one of the best ways to actually achieve happiness and any of its proxies - how do you advocate for something you want without knowing how to get there! I feel a good job was made of explaining and including different views, and that makes for an agreeable read. Despite thinking that I was decently caught up on the area, there were plenty of new points and discussions included that are sensible but just not mainstream. My only qualm is that in the introductory sections the writing was maybe a bit over-enthusiastic, but then again if someone feels passionate about something to write a whole ass book about it, maybe that would make sense AHAHAHAH

Loan from library ran out and when I went to renew they no longer offered it!? 

Took me over a year to get past the start of this book, but once I did I really enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook alongside reading it and I was impressed by its range of topics. 'Stolen Focus' tells the story of the author's interest in attention span and focus and his tech-free life for a while. He then goes on to interview many scientists and researchers about various causes for increased attention deficiency in modern society. I particularly enjoyed his sections about sleep and free play for children. I also was surprised to hear about how some people have exaggerated role of genetics regarding ADHD with twin studies.

This book is a Nonfiction deep dive into how our modern life is destroying our attention spans. If you, too, have noticed an uncomfortable downward slide of your attention span, especially after Covid lockdowns, you are not alone. The scary thing is, as Hari posits, is that this downward trend has been ongoing since the late 1800s, around the Industrial Revolution. As our society values economic growth more and more, tech companies will fight to get ever last second of your mind, equaling less sleep and more screentime, and more profit. This book is a wake-up call for every wired person on this planet. No, Hari doesn't offer easy solutions; he wants to start an Attention Rebellion. Let's fight back and do our part.

Originally gave this five stars, but after reading about the controversy behind Hari's earlier work as a journalist (plagiarism among other things) decided to remove the rating altogether. Check out his Wikipedia of you haven't heard of his history! 

Gathers information concerning our society, how it functions, what we value to discuss the impact of technology that is designed to keep us looking at media and make those media providers money while apparently not caring about the impact on users. While this has some tips about how to increase focus or at least take better control of your media, your mileage will vary as this is more a look at societal factors and the related research than a self-help book. Hari's arguments feel more than just hyped up moralizing or a nostalgia for a time gone by.He calls for both personal and societal changes to allow humans to live a life less externally mediated, less algorithmic derived lives and ultimately a higher quality life.

The writing is somewhat eclipsed by the sheer density of citation and attribution, but that's not unexpected from a man recovering from a plagiarism scandal.

Overall touches on several things I agree with. I often think about what I would be like if I hadn't touched a computer lol. Not sure I'll ever get on board with nationalised social media, though. Still a little too pop-sciencey for me, but overall a message I agree with.

I was expecting a remix of the same old tips (using tech to force time off tech/sleeping right/planned sabbaticals) in the hope that they would get through my thick distraction addled skull this time. And you do get that and it's great, worded very kindly and effectively.

What I didn't expect was to also get a manifesto on the need to revolt against a system that is turning us into the worst version of ourselves. Unable to focus, to parse truth from reality, to learn and grow and work together. I'm won over, I want to add to this revolution. It's the most important and difficult revolution that's ever been needed. A revolution to reclaim our very souls from the demon of distraction, so we can even begin to fix the other issues in our lives.

The best argument he has in the book? Imagine Facebook was designed for humans to be their best selves. It used all its engineers to design an app that brought people together, made them healthier and more caring and in touch with each other, what would that look like? It wouldn't even need to be a major change, just the small design changes that would make us all better people. It wouldn't be much, and it would change the world.

It's so true! It's so little and it would make the world a better place! It's completely outrageous it's not that! We've been duped!

The best non fiction book I've ever read. Incredible.

The valuable parts of this book are really valuable and important: why it's worth it to slow down, how our brains are being manipulated by the internet into wasting time online, what we stand to gain by mono tasking. Hari is a smart, interesting writer with a bold claim: can we save the best parts of our lives and ourselves from surveillance capitalism? The rest of the book feels like a distraction (is the cause what we eat, is it pollution, is it ADHD?). Those influences are so broad they deserve discussion on their own, rather than being a chapter in a book that has already decided they're part of the problem. They might be, but his treatment is not nuanced or detailed enough, particularly when he starts talking about weight gain as a metaphor, as well as how diet and attention relate. That said, parts of this are deeply compelling and concerning. I like Hari and I liked this book. 2.5 stars.

3.5 stars.

Es uno de esos libros que te hace ver las cosas de una forma nueva.
Fue muy informativo.
Creo que el autor hace demasiado enfasis en algunos aspectos de la solucion. Creo que deberia haberlo dejado quiza para otro libro o para un capitulo especifico. Tambien me parecia que en algun momento ya no tenia mas contenido y estaba metiendo cualquier otro tema relacionado. Es comprensible pero creo que un libro mas corto y al grano hubiera sido mejor.

I didn't realize how broken my attention was until it was pointed out, and I was terrified of it, because I miss the person I was before I had a supercomputer within grasp that can supercharged me with infotainment anytime I want, one that I seemingly get anxious if I didn't have it on me, a stupid phone that can act as a massive black hole of attention.

I used to post a lot of short thoughts on Facebook, sometimes funny observations, sometimes insights into how things work or the people I met. They're not particularly Nobel-worthy but they were written by someone who was engaged with life. I looked back at them and wondered how I was able to be so calm and... alive. Now I can only find those moments when my internet connection was taken away from me - on road trip, on a plane ride. And I realize I was able to do it because I let my mind wander and present in the “now” and “here”, not someone's thoughts for 15 seconds, and another one's and another one's and so on and so for hours on TikTok or Instagram or whatever online vices you can name.

I'm in my mid twenties now and for the next 10 years, I'll be as free as I can be, with my body still cooperating and unmoored with any familial or serious responsibilities. I don't want those years to whiz by and wondering what I have been doing all those times. So here's to change, for a better life of mine.

One thing to note, Hari did mention that this is not an individual responsibility alone. We now have tech companies with billions in assets funding people whose main job is getting us addicted to their platform. More users, more attention, more ad revenue, more money. More and more and it's a wonder how my brain can scrape by each day with so much more's. I don't have the means to affect change on the legal level but I can give you my recommendation for this book. Maybe if enough people are aware, things are easier to change.

As an aside, I understand the hype around hiking now. It used to be unbearably boring for me, but I guess that's the point, to take some time off consuming things and think things through, to evaluate the current course of my life or contemplate on the events and people of my life, to have all that and see nature in all its glory. Here's to paying attention to where I want it to be again.

4.5 stars. Very little of this information was new to me, although I was surprised at how much material he covered. This is not just about tech companies developing addictive software, although he certainly explains that well. He also talks about pollution, the educational system... 12 chapters, 12 reasons for our lack of focus, so it's more of a whole life approach.

If you're interested in the broader reasons for why attention has become such a problem, this is an excellent place to start. You can then dive more into the specific area you find most relevant.

Johann Hari skriver ikke så godt som Malcolm Gladwell eller Ronan Farrow, og det kan bli litt mye kronglete formulerte beskrivelser og intellektuell name dropping innimellom (som om ikke jeg nettopp gjorde det samme).Hari kritiseres også for å være unøyaktige med sine kilder, og i 2011 (enda en unøyaktighet) mistet han jobben i The Guardian (enda mer unøyaktighet?) pga. plagialisering.

Diskvalifiserer disse opplysningene det denne boken handler om? Langt i fra! Når det gjelder redelighet, så er 1/4 av boken (unøyaktighetsvarsel) henvisninger til kilder han har brukt i skrivingen av boken, og selv om Morgenbladet og andre klarer å påvise faktuelle feil og forskningsresultater på tynt grunnlag, er det meste som boken bygger på fullt og helt redelig og pålitelig.

Alle disse betenkelighetene tatt i betraktningen, dette er en uhyre viktig bok i den tiden vi lever i. Jeg har selv merket det: Det er ufattelig vanskelig å fokusere og holde oppmerksomheten. Det kom så langt at jeg måtte begynne å legge mobilen i et annet rom, sette av tider til bevisst lesing uforstyrret, timer forsvant til ting jeg ikke ante hva gikk til (joda, jeg vet: Twitter), og generelt følte jeg meg på siden av mitt eget liv i lange perioder av døgnet. Touche, her kommer Johann Hari og beskriver akkurat min opplevelse. Det han også gjør, er å beskrive årsakene til at vi er der vi er, og konsekvensene av det. Blant annet skriver han om hvordan vårt individuelle fokus eller mangel på sådan, tar fra oss evnen til å kollektivt fokusere på de store utfordringene vi lever i nå, og dermed redusere muligheten for å finne en løsning.

Slutten av boken inneholder en konklusjon. Det er fem ting vi må gjøre for å komme oss ut av uføret (eller var det tre?), og jeg er enig i alt sammen. Markedsliberalister vil se blod når de leser rådene, jeg er enig i alt sammen - og det er kanskje derfor jeg liker boken så godt. Birds of a feather osv. Men uansett: Eeeh, nå glemte jeg hva jeg skulle skrive...

Rating: 3.5 stars

I loved Johann Hari's execution of the book and admire how he managed to live off the grid in the United States for three months. Depending on the level of privilege that someone has, they can try it as an experiment. I don't think that I would last more than two weeks without Internet so kudos to him. However, I wish that Hari would dispel the misinformation on ADHD instead of spreading it and go more extensively on the role of childhood trauma and lack of attention span. Also, ADHD is more than just hyperactivity; I wish there was more information about ADHD in terms of executive functioning, emotional regulation, and attention span.

Fascinating - lots of food for thought. I didn't necessarily agree with all his conclusions and the second half wasn't as interesting to me as the first but all in all, an excellent round-up of the current research into attention, focus, from both a psychological and an environmental standpoint with a mix of what we can do individually and what we need to do collectively as a society to address our growing inability to concentrate.

Johann Johann Johann. Where was our focus when you wrote this book? For a start, don't bother reading this book if you want to understand how to improve your focus. Most of it is devoted to social system scale factors that the author thinks impede on focus. But he increasingly veers off course eventually ending up at the whole economy. His editor should be fired because s/he was AWOL on this book. His hypothesis is that focus is mostly something that happens to you. Guess what, you're a victim. F-off. His only “Self-help” approach to improving focus is to deny yourself of technology. He hasn't heard of self discipline or the idea that it's something that can be built. That's the only fundamental solution to focus and he doesn't even mention it once. What an idiot, what a poor victim. Yes, the system scale factors can make focus more difficult, & in conjunction with how “Big tech” (eg. Facebook) manipulates not only the capture of our attention but more sinisterly, what it is pointed towards, is something that needs more social attention.

Overall I really liked it. I enjoyed the focus on systemic issues and how it's missing the point if you're berating yourself as though it's a personal failure.

That being said, the author definitely comes across as insufferable and holier-than-thou in the early chapters. That perception fades pretty quickly into the book, but starting off with a smug anecdote about being on your phone slightly less than, and yelling at, other people isn't exactly charming.

Again, overall very good and gave me lots to think about!

This book is really great except for a couple of big points. It talks about how our ability to focus is less a personal failing (ie “I'm not disciplined enough to focus”) and more of a systemic problem. The author talks about a basic problem that leads to difficulty focusing, such as looking at your phone too much, and then talks about there are hundreds or thousands of people working against you, trying to make you fail. Are you poorly disciplined for looking at your phone too much, or does it totally make sense that you do when apps are engineered from top to bottom to be distracting and addicting? Do those people have a vested interest in telling you it's your fault and not to look elsewhere? Absolutely.

I think one of my favorite things about it is how he talks about the basic mantras most self-help and health books do - you need to eat healthy, sleep the right amount, and exercise regularly - and then talks about how this is incredibly difficult and the system is stacked against us. It's hard to eat healthy when as a child, you've been conditioned to eat foods that are terrible for you, and as an adult, you may not have the time to eat well. It's hard to get the right amount of sleep when our work obligations are high and cause stress, which keeps you awake. It's hard to get the right amount of exercise when the world around us has been made into the space for cars and there isn't a natural reason we would walk. This is such a vastly fresh take because I've never read a book where these things are offered as solutions and then the author admits they're really hard, and often a point of privilege to meet properly.

This book explains why it's hard to focus and it's true goal is to convince you that we need societal changes to fix them. We need the government to get involved and ban food additives in the US that are banned in other countries. We need infrastructure changes so walking is safe again and pollution is cut down. We need to push for a four day work week. These need to become big issues.

There's a couple of things that bother me though. The ADHD section is by far the worst of the book. It feels like he let his bias get the hold of him here and he feels bitter that he very well could have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child and put on medication for it. He only talks about ADHD as a thing that makes it hard to focus for kids in schools - nevermind that a really common aspect of it is that you can hyper focus, which is to focus intensely on something you enjoy. Hyper focus can lead to not paying enough attention to the things you need to do, but it's still a form of focus that's completely ignored by this book on focus. It's really frustrating that he talks about this whole privileged private school where kids structure their lesson plans themselves and concludes that ADHD is basically not real because it doesn't show up in kids when they have the freedom to make their own choices. The school sounds great, don't get me wrong, but they literally are all focusing on things they enjoy. No one would have the chance to be diagnosed in the first place because you're just hiding the symptoms. (TW: He also brings up a case where a kid was misdiagnosed with ADHD when the problem was that he was sexually abused, which is gross negligence to add to this discussion.)
He ignores that adults can be diagnosed with ADHD late in life, and the fact that they can throws a lot of what his assumptions are out the window. He wants to assume ADHD is a symptom that's almost always misdiagnosed, and that's simply not true. And while he doesn't directly say that, that is exactly what he's implying.

In the final chapter, he admits that this isn't a self help book and that he hasn't entirely solved the issue. Which... Look at your subtitle? It's different from a lot of self help books (ie: better) in that it's more of a journalistic research of the subject, but he gives a lot of general information on how we can get back to focusing. Turn off notifications on your phone, do the eat/sleep/exercise thing, spend less time on screens in general, etc. It just struck me as really disingenuous to say “this isn't a self help book” at the very end when it's absolutely set up to look like one. Maybe he said it in the introduction also and I've just forgotten.

Overall the book is really great. The ADHD parts made me pause and question if I should really buy into what he'd said before that section, which I was more ready to accept what he'd said. But I feel the rest of the book was better researched and backed up with things I knew from outside the book, whereas the ADHD section is contradicted for the same reasons.

I think this is one of the most important books I read this year. It starts by explaining what is wrong with our ability to focus and what we could do about it but goes on to explain that finding the solution in ourselves is a challenging task and probably a losing battle for most. It turns into a manifesto that claims that we could spend our life fixing the problem in ourselves but we have to realize that the problem, the root problem, is elsewhere.

The author takes us through a series of reasons that explain the loss of our ability to pay attention. All of this is backed by scientific studies and in cases where the interpretation is subjective, the author makes it a point to clarify that. In this manner, the author takes us through ranging from our loss of flow states due to distractions, the constant FOMO due to social media, and overwhelming information being bombarded on all our senses, to our diets, pollution, our attitude towards empowering children, and the expectation of our society to find individual and heroic solutions. It is safe to say that I have not seen this elaborate coverage on the topic of attention anywhere else.

It is an important book to read and I strongly recommend this as one of the most pressing books of this time.

Everyone should read this book. It presents eye-opening insights about human brain, our ability to focus and how the business models based on engagement and everlasting growth are harming us, our societies and the whole planet.

If you've ever doomscrolled social media in bed, suffered from low productivity due to procrastination, had inability to focus on work or studying, or simply felt tired without obvious reason, you might want to stop to think and change your habits. This book gives some answers what might be the problem and what solutions worked for the author.

There are many books on this topic, but this one is probably the most comprehensive at citing or sourcing material from many other long-time sources, like Tristan Harris, Cal Newport, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

This book was good in that it motivated me to take another long, hard look at how I interact with the Internet. Like the author, I've found my ability to focus for long periods of time has gotten worse and that anytime I'm not doing something, I instinctively reach for my phone. Stolen Focus puts a huge spotlight on that and has some good suggestions for ways to try to regain some of that attention.

Stolen Focus also dedicates quite a few pages to talking about the systemic problems with trying to maintain our ability to think deeply, engage with nature, and slow down in an environment where so many big forces are working against us. Tech companies are incentivized to do one thing—build a profile on you so they can show you things that will keep you engaged with their content as much as possible so they can then try to convince you to buy from their advertisers. The resources they command to constantly improve their ability to do just that are daunting.

Hari proposes some potential solutions to this problem—many of them along the lines of heavy regulation or state takeover of social media platforms. I see where he's coming from but none of his solutioning was very compelling to me. It was either too heavy-handed or too implausible given the reality on the ground, as it were.

I had other minor issues with the book, but on the whole, I enjoyed the it and it's made me much more mindful around my phone use and my screen time stats seem to, for the time being, reflect that as well.