It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be. For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.
There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too. One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes? Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself. Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing. Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years. Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.
The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal. If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end.
Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about. This book takes it to the extreme. When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone). Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.