When I was young, there was no internet. If I wanted to watch a movie, I had to go to Blockbuster and rent it. Play it in a VCR. Then return it in a couple of days or else you were charged a late fee.

Now, any movie/video/song is available to you 24/7 at the touch of a button. And a lot of this media is free. Why? Because of the ads. The companies that provide this to you for free are doing it for ad dollars. And how do they get more ad dollars, by keeping you engaged with their content. They are financially motivated to keep you engaged with their services for as long as possible. They want your attention. They want your time. Don’t give it to them. You have better things to do with your life.

The book Stolen Focus walks through how we got to this point. It doesn’t give many stratgies on how to fight back against it though. A couple of pieces of advice:

• Determine the apps that take up the most of your time and delete them
• Keep your phone away from you
• Minimize notifications as much as you can
  • Context switching is a huge mental cost. Every time you are “dinged” your attention is pulled away from what you were doing. The mental cost to switch to the notification and then switch back to what you were originally doing is greater than you realize. Your brain literally has to reconfigure itself, like rearranging the furniture in a room.
• Read using books, magazines, or electronic devices specific to reading (ie. a Kindle)
  • It’s too enticing to want to switch to something else while you read.
• Keep a notepad nearby to jot down ideas you want to explore later
  • When I’m reading something, and it sparks an idea, I’ll write it down instead of researching immediately. If I jump to device, I’ll never come back to that reading with the same mindset. Writing it down also has the added benefit of offloading it out of your brain. While you read, your mind will continually come back to that thought that you don’t want to loose. Writing it down gets it out of your head and lets your mind focus.
• To get to a state of flow you need to:
  • Choose a clearly defined goal
  • Do something that is meaningful to you
  • Do something that is at the edge of your abilities

Below are some passages that really resonated with me. These are the sections/paragraphs that I highlighted in my Kindle:

• Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.” Once he had learned all this, Sune deeply changed his own life. He stopped using all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sundays. He stopped watching TV. He stopped getting his news from social media, and instead took out a newspaper subscription. He read many more books instead. “As you know, everything with self-discipline is not like it’s a thing you fix and then it’s fixed forever,” he said. “I think the first thing you have to realize is it’s an ongoing battle.” But he told me it had helped to trigger a philosophical shift in how he approached life. “In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.” He looked at me and smiled. “I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that’s more difficult.”
• There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.” There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
• The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the “screw-up effect.” When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because—Earl explained—“your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off”—and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. “Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.”
• Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term—which we might call the “creativity drain.” You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? “Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?” Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how “new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting,” Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts.”
• I later learned about a fourth consequence, based on a smaller amount of evidence—which we might call the “diminished memory effect.” A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterward they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.
• I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life—sometimes several times a day—I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz—just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad—like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.
• Mihaly’s studies identified many aspects of flow, but it seemed to me—as I read over them in detail—that if you want to get there, what you need to know boils down to three core components. The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swim. You have to resolve to pursue it, and to set aside your other goals while you do. Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. Mihaly found that distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two or more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.
• Second, you have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. This is part of a basic truth about attention: we evolved to pay attention to things that are meaningful to us. As Roy Baumeister, the leading expert on willpower I quoted in the introduction, put it to me: “A frog will look at a fly it can eat much more than a stone it can’t eat.” To a frog, a fly is meaningful and a stone is not—so it easily pays attention to a fly, and rarely pays attention to a stone. This, he said, “goes back to the design of the brain…. It’s designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.” After all, “the frog who sat around all day looking at stones would have starved.” In any situation, it will be easier to pay attention to things that are meaningful to you, and harder to pay attention to things that seem meaningless. When you are trying to make yourself do something that lacks meaning, your attention will often slip and slide off it.
• Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either. Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she’s not going to get into flow because it’s too easy. If she’s suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won’t get into flow either because she’ll freak out. What she needs is a hill or mountain that is, ideally, slightly higher and harder than the one she did last time.
• This disagreement seemed to me to lay the groundwork for one of the defining conflicts in the world today. We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—the men I saw in Provincetown obsessively posting selfies to Instagram started to look to me like Skinner’s pigeons with a six-pack and a piña colada. In a culture where our focus is stolen by these surface-level stimuli, Mihaly’s deeper insight has been forgotten: that we have within us a force that makes it possible to focus for long stretches and enjoy it, and it will make us happier and healthier, if only we create the right circumstances to let it flow.
• By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come. And so it ran, into the fifth and sixth weeks—and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it. Everything Mihaly had described was there—the loss of ego; the loss of time; the sense that I was growing into something bigger than I had been before. Flow was carrying me through the difficult patches, the frustrations. It had unlocked my focus. I noticed that if I spent a day where I experienced three hours of flow early on, for the rest of the day, I felt relaxed and open and able to engage—to walk along the beach, or start chatting to people, or read a book, without feeling cramped, or irritable, or phone-hungry. It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind—perhaps because I knew I had done my best. I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
• Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right—you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter—in terms of followers and retweets—are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attention-deprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site—but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade.
• What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
• Each of us can only ever experience a small sliver of what it’s like to be a human being alive today, Raymond told me, but as you read fiction, you see inside other people’s experiences. That doesn’t vanish when you put down the novel. When you later meet a person in the real world, you’ll be better able to imagine what it’s like to be them. Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn’t have this empathy-expanding effect. There have now been dozens of other studies replicating the core effect that Raymond discovered. I asked Raymond what would happen if we discovered a drug that boosted empathy as much as reading fiction has been shown to in his work. “If it had no side effects,” he said, “I think that it would be a very popular drug.” The more I talked with him, the more I reflected that empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have—and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy—the realization by at least some white people that other ethnic groups have feelings and abilities and dreams just like them; the realization by some men that the way they have exerted power over women was illegitimate and caused real suffering; the realization by many heterosexuals that gay love is just like straight love. Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.
• And yet, as I dug deeper into the research on mind-wandering, I learned there is an exception to what I just explained—and it’s a big one. In fact, it is one you have probably experienced. In 2010 the Harvard scientists Professor Dan Gilbert and Dr. Matthew Killingsworth developed a web app to study how people feel when they do all sorts of everyday things, from commuting to watching TV to exercising. People would get random prompts from the app that would ask: “What are you doing now?” They would then be asked to rank how they felt. One of the things Dan and Matthew tracked was how often people found themselves mind-wandering—and what they discovered was surprising, given everything I had just learned. In general, when people are mind-wandering in our culture, they rank themselves as less happy than when they are doing almost any other activity. Even housework, for example, is associated with higher levels of happiness. They concluded: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” I thought about this a lot. Given that mind-wandering has been shown to have so many positive effects, why does it so often make us feel bad? There is a reason for this. Mind-wandering can easily descend into rumination. Most of us have had that feeling at some point or another—if you stop focusing and let your mind drift, you become jammed up with stressful thoughts. I thought back to my life at many points before Provincetown. When I was sitting on those trains, clucking in my own mind at the people who could sit staring out of the window while I manically worked and worked and worked, what was my mental state? Often, I saw now, I was loaded with stress and anxiety. Any attempt to relax my thinking would have let those bad feelings flood in. In Provincetown, by contrast, I had no stresses, and I felt safe—so my mind-wandering could float freely and do its positive work. In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.
• Tristan realized he was bumping up against a core contradiction. The more people stared at their phones, the more money these companies made. Period. The people in Silicon Valley did not want to design gadgets and websites that would dissolve people’s attention spans. They’re not the Joker, trying to sow chaos and make us dumb. They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. It’s not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But it’s an inescapable effect of their current business model.
• When I pieced together what I’d learned, I could see that—when I broke it down—the people I interviewed had presented evidence for six distinct ways in which this machinery, as it currently operates, is harming our attention. (I will come to the scientists who dispute these arguments in chapter eight; as you read this, remember that some of it is controversial.) First, these sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hunger for hearts and likes. When I was deprived of them in Provincetown, I felt bereft, and had to go through a painful withdrawal. Once you have been conditioned to need these reinforcements, Tristan told one interviewer, “it’s very hard to be with reality, the physical world, the built world—because it doesn’t offer as frequent and as immediate rewards as this thing does.” This craving will drive you to pick up your phone more than you would if you had never been plugged into this system. You’ll break away from your work and your relationships to seek a sweet, sweet hit of retweets. Second, these sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you normally would—to pick up your phone, or click over to Facebook on your laptop. When you do this, all the costs to your attention caused by switching—as I discussed in chapter one—kick in. The evidence there shows this is as bad for the quality of your thinking as getting drunk or stoned. Third, these sites learn—as Tristan put it—how to “frack” you. These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways—they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers—what, specifically, will distract you. This means that they can drill into your attention. Whenever you are tempted to put your phone down, the site keeps drip-feeding you the kind of material that it has learned, from your past behavior, keeps you scrolling. Older technologies—like the printed page, or the television—can’t target you in this way. Social media knows exactly where to drill. It learns your most distractible spots and targets them. Fourth, because of the way the algorithms work, these sites make you angry a lot of the time. Scientists have been proving in experiments for years that anger itself screws with your ability to pay attention. They have discovered that if I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of arguments around you, and you will show “decreased depth of processing”—that is, you will think in a shallower, less attentive way. We’ve all had that feeling—you start prickling with rage, and your ability to properly listen goes out the window. The business models of these sites are jacking up our anger every day. Remember the words their algorithms promote—attack, bad, blame. Fifth, in addition to making you angry, these sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger. This can trigger a different psychological response in you. As Dr. Nadine Harris, the surgeon general of California, who you’ll meet later in this book, explained to me: Imagine that one day you are attacked by a bear.  You will stop paying attention to your normal concerns-what you’re going to eat tonight, or how you will pay the rent.  You become vigilant.  Your attention flips to scanning for unexpected dangers all around you. For days and weeks afterward, you will find it harder to focus on more everyday concerns.  This isn’t limited to bears.  These sites make you feel that you are in an environment full of anger and hostility, so you become more vigilant-a situation where more of your attention shifts to searching for dangers, and less is available for slower forms of focus like reading a book or playing with your kids. Sixth, these sites set society on fire.  This is the most complex form of harm to our attention, with several stages, and I think probably the most harmful.  Let’s go through it slowly.
• “An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state,” he told me. “It’s all about avoidance. It’s all about—how do I get out of this uncomfortable state?” He believes we all need to explore our triggers nonjudgmentally, think about them, and find ways to disrupt them. So whenever he felt that prickling feeling or boredom or stress come to him, he identified what was happening, and picked up a pack of Post-it notes, and he wrote on it what he wanted to know. Later, when he had finished a good stretch of writing, he would let himself google it—but only then.
• Nadine knew that decades before, scientists had discovered something significant. When human beings are in a terrifying environment—like a war zone—we often flip into a different state. She gave me an example, one I briefly referred to a little earlier. Imagine that you are walking in the woods and you are confronted by a grizzly bear that looks like it’s angry and about to attack you. In that moment, your brain stops worrying about what you’re going to eat that night, or how you’re going to pay the rent. It becomes narrowly and entirely focused on one thing: danger. You track every movement of the bear, and your mind starts scanning for ways to get away from it. You become highly vigilant. Now imagine that these bear attacks happen a lot. Imagine if three times a week, an angry bear suddenly appeared on your street and swiped one of your neighbors. If this happened, you would likely develop a state known as “hypervigilance.” You would start to look out for danger all the time—whether there’s a bear right in front of you or not. Nadine explained to me: “Hypervigilance is essentially when you’re looking out for the bear around every corner. Your attention is focused on cues for potential danger, as opposed to being focused on being present with what’s going on, or the lesson you’re supposed to be learning, or doing the work you were supposed to be doing. It’s not that [people in this state are] not paying attention. It’s that they’re paying attention to any cues or signs of threat or danger in their environment. That is where their focus is.”
• With a few honorable exceptions like Andrew, the owners of corporations will not voluntarily take less of your time, any more than Facebook will. They have to be compelled to do it. The introduction of the weekend was the biggest challenge to the speeding-up of society that has ever happened. Only a comparable fight will deliver a four-day week.
• Two: I have changed the way I respond to my own sense of distraction. I used to reproach myself, and say: You’re lazy. You’re not good enough. What’s wrong with you? I tried to shame myself into focusing harder. Now, based on what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi taught me, instead I have a very different conversation with myself. I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.
• With this image in mind, I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper.
• I kept puzzling away at this question. Why? Why has this been happening so long? This trend far precedes Facebook, or most of the factors I have written about here. What’s the underlying cause stretching back to the 1880s? I discussed it with many people, and the most persuasive answer came from the Norwegian scientist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who is a professor of social anthropology. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea—economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy—and each individual company in it—should get bigger and bigger. That’s how we now define success. If a country’s economy grows, its politicians are likely to be reelected. If a company grows, its CEOs are likely garlanded. If a country’s economy or a company’s share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organizing principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world. Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets—by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn’t have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth. Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more and more in the same amount of time. As I read Thomas’s work more deeply, I realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going—and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. In fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about—our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.
• As Jason and I talked, in a public park in London in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, I looked around us, where people were sitting in the middle of a workday under the trees, enjoying nature. This was, I realized, the only time in my life the world had truly slowed down. A terrible tragedy had forced us to do it—but there was also, for many of us, a hint of relief. It was the first time in centuries that the world chose, together, to stop racing, and pause. We decided as a society to value something other than speed and growth. We literally looked up and saw the trees.