It’s like you thought the solution to air pollution was for you personally to wear a gas mask.
-- James Williams
The typical American worker focuses on a given task for just three minutes. Each day, we touch or check our phones more than 2,000 times, and spend more than three hours staring at them, on average. So says Johann Hari, an author who has previously written about depression and addiction, in his new book “Stolen Focus.” It is an investigation into how we got ourselves into this distracted state — what Mr. Hari describes as an “attention crisis.”
Some factors that Mr. Hari identifies seem straightforward, like the current business model of Big Tech, which makes money in direct proportion to the attention people give it. Other factors he unearths are less commonly discussed, from what we eat (highly processed food, filled with refined carbohydrates) and how we sleep (by some accounts, less than we used to) to the nature of American childhood, with its widespread loss of autonomy. Mr. Hari calls for an “attention rebellion,” a drastic collective action to force major changes, such as instituting a four-day workweek and letting children have much more unsupervised free play.
Here, condensed and edited for clarity, is a recent conversation with Mr. Hari about what it will take to reclaim our minds. Continue here....
-- Casey Schwartz
