It is in the best interest of us all to improve our ability to focus, to pay attention.
On the individual level, a life full of distraction is a diminished one. We need focus and attention to find out who we are and what we want from life. On the collective level, we need focus to have any chance at addressing the mounting socio-environmental problems of today.
Fortunately, the attention crisis is man-made, and can hence also be man-unmade. We should start by recognising what has caused this crisis in the first place.
1 The increase in speed, switching and filtering
When you fix your gaze at something moving at incredible speed, you feel pensive and amped-up. Conversely, when you stare at something old and permanent, you feel greeted with a slow and welcoming indifference. This is what might makes us feel so at ease in nature.
Collectively, we are focusing for a shorter amount of time on a single topic—our collective attention span has shrunk. The increase in the volume of information creates the sensation of a world that is speeding up.
The more information you pump in, the less time you can focus on any individual piece of it.
If we don’t change course, society will split into an upper class with focus control and a majority easily swayed by distractions and vulnerable to manipulation.
Although we may perform various tasks subconsciously, our conscious attention is limited to one thing at a time. Often, when we think we are multi-tasking, we are merely juggling between tasks. This has four negative effects:
Switch cost: when you switch to something else and back, you have to remember what you were doing before. This takes time and degrades your performance.
Screw-up effect: because you have to remember what you were doing before you switched, you might misremember where you left off. Correcting these errors takes time and effort too.
Creative drain: your brain gets less opportunity to follow associative links down to new places. This prevents you from having original and creative thoughts.
Diminished memory: doing multiple things makes you less likely to remember any of them. The mental penalty you pay for switching tasks cannot be used to memorise experience.
Apart from switching tasks, our brain is overloaded with stimuli. These include noisy, busy cities, bright and colourful ads, open floor-plans, flashy technologies… Our filter gets overloaded and starts to malfunction.
We have fundamental limitations. We can ignore them and pretend we’re capable of everything, or we can acknowledge them and live our lives in a better way.
2 The crippling of our flow states
If you have grown used to being interrupted, you will start to interrupt yourself.
Your flow state has three requirements:
You have a clear goal.
The thing you are doing is meaningful to you.
The thing you are doing is sufficiently challenging.
When you get into flow, you experience a loss of self-consciousness. You feel you are purely present in the moment. The more flow you experience, the better you feel.
3 The rise of physical and mental exhaustion
How you woke up as a child is how it feels to live without mental and physical exhaustion.
Sleep deprivation has many psychological and physiological effects:
Impaired memory: when you go to sleep, your mind transfers things you’ve learned into your long-term memory. When you do not sleep enough, not everything will be transferred.
Your body goes into emergency mode: when you have to little sleep, your body interprets this as that you must be in an emergency. It triggers a series of physiological responses, such as an elevated heart rate, a craving for sugar and fast food, and heightened blood pressure.
Reduced creativity: when given time, your brain will identify connections and patterns from what you have experienced throughout the day. This is one of our key sources of creativity.
Waste removal: during slow-wave (deep) sleep, your cerebrospinal fluid channels open up to remove metabolic waste from your brain. Some scientists suspect this is why people who are underslept are at a greater risk of developing dementia.
Energy source: the prefrontal cortex does not utilise glucose, the brain’s primary source of energy, from minimal sleep deprivation. Without renewing your energy resource, you cannot think clearly.
Dreaming: dreaming might help you emotionally adapt to waking emotional events. When you dream, you can revisit stressful moments without stress hormones flooding your system. Over time, scientists believe this can make it easier to handle stress and make it easier to focus.
Throughout the day, in your brain, a chemical called adenosine is building. This chemical signals you’re sleepy. Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. Drinking coffee does not give you energy; it just blocks the signal of feeling tired.
Chemically-induced sleep is often a lesser kind of sleep. So although it may help you sleep sooner or longer, you do not sleep better.
Biologically, we get a rush of energy when we go from bright to dimmed, or no light. In the past, this was a crucial moment for humans to return to a safe place and set up camp. To sleep well, you need to radically limit your exposure to light before you go to sleep.
In a society based on consumer capitalism, sleep is a big problem. When you are asleep, you are neither producing nor consuming.
Your phone should be in a place where you cannot see or hear it when you recharge overnight.
Your room should be cool so your core cools too, which sends you to sleep.
4 The collapse of sustained reading
The way we navigate through information in one place affects how we navigate through information somewhere else. The habit of scanning and skimming content on social media has become the norm, influencing the way we read books, reports, and other extensive texts.
Reading trains us to read in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period of time. Reading from screens trains us to manically jump from one high-intensity piece of information to the next.
The way information gets to you is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast, superficial, and that everything is happening all at once.
When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. If you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page.
Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, be shaped like them.
5 The disruption of mind-wandering
Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book. But this isn’t just true for reading; it is true for life. Some mind-wandering is essential for things to make sense. Three reasons:
The more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organised personal goals. You’ll be more creative and make patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life.
When your mind wanders, it starts to make new connections between things. Creativity is the new association between two things that are already there.
During mind-wandering, the mind engages in ‘mental time travel,’ roaming through the past and attempting to predict the future. Liberated from focusing on the immediate, the mind begins to contemplate potential future events and prepare for them. 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.
6 The rise of technology that can track and manipulate you
Through ‘surveillance capitalism,’ social media platforms are earning revenue by:
Showing advertisements
Selling a very detailed profile of you to others. These can be advertisers, but also political parties (Cambridge Analytica).
There are six ways in which our technology, as it currently works, is harming our ability to pay attention:
Websites and applications are engineered to condition our minds to desire frequent rewards such as hearts and likes. Losing these can lead to withdrawal symptoms, compelling a desire to return. As the real world does not provide such instant gratification, this often drives a continuous urge to revert to our screens.
These sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you would naturally.
They learn about your personal triggers—what it is exactly that will distract you.
The algorithm optimises engagement, including the promotion of content that can provoke anger. Anger can disrupt your ability to concentrate, leading to more superficial and less attentive thinking.
These sites also create a perception of being surrounded by hostility and rage. This heightened state of alertness shifts your focus towards identifying potential threats.
These websites set society on fire. By disseminating sensationalism and misinformation, they compel us to focus on trivialities. This, coupled with the polarising bias-spirals and anger-fuelling content, tears us apart. Over time, subjecting any civilisation to this constant pressure will lead it to a state of fury and detachment from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding its issues and devising solutions. We are reverse-engineering ourselves; identifying the levers that manipulate us, and exploiting them for profit. In doing so, we dismantle our ability to make sense of the world at a time when we need it most.
7 The rise of cruel optimism
Cruel optimism is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture and you offer people a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.
Cruel optimism presumes that we can’t change the attention-wrecking systems, so we have to focus on changing ourselves.
We are told that it is our responsibility to do away with these attention-deteriorating technologies rather than addressing the problems driving you to use them in the first place.
While we can take all kinds of individual measures, we should solve the issue at its root and ban surveillance capitalism. Subscriptions, rather than advertisements, would offer a useful alternative.
8 The surge in stress and how it is triggering vigilance
The primary factors often cited for the decline in attention are stress and significant life changes. This is followed by disrupted sleep, and only then do smartphones come into play. Therefore, being in a stress-free environment is crucial for maintaining focus.
First and foremost, this includes being in an environment where you feel safe. If you are in a dangerous environment, focusing on just one thing is a terrible idea. Instead, you should be hyper-vigilant about your surroundings, looking for cues for danger. This holds for financial safety as well.
The internet became widespread in the late 1990s. It emerged into a society with a declining middle class and increasing financial insecurity. People were getting an hour less sleep than they did in 1945. Additionally, we work more hours in less stable, often part-time, positions. Being exhausted by the end of the day is the new norm.
When people work less, their ability to focus improves. The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable—until it changes. Take for example the rise in popularity of the 4-day work-week in the UK.
9 Our deteriorating diets
Beyond impacting our hearts and weight, the swift shift to modern diets adversely affects our attention span. The food we consume is often poor fuel for our bodily functions.
There are three ways in which it is killing our focus:
Our diet causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes, both amplified by caffeine.
Our diets are often deficient in the essential nutrients required for brain development and function. Instead, our food is laden with stabilisers and preservatives for supermarket viability. It is packed with trans fats and sugars that cater to our basic cravings for pleasure. We moved from whole foods to refined carbohydrates, processed food, and junk oils. Each of which is directly related to attention and memory sickness.
The problems related to nutrition too, are largely structural and systematic in origin.
10 Rising pollution
If you live in a major city today, every day you are breathing a mixture of many different contaminants.
Your brain did not evolve to absorb these chemicals and it doesn’t know how to handle them. Just by living in a polluted city you are experiencing a repeated chronic insult to your brain. Over the long term it will damage the nerve cells, explaining the direct correlation with air pollution and increased susceptibility of dementia.
Our society often promotes individualism, suggesting that we view our challenges as personal shortcomings and seek solutions on our own. History, however, shows us that real change in addressing systemic issues comes when people, informed by scientific facts, unite to insist that their governments enact legal reforms.
11 The rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it
Over the past decades, children are increasingly diagnosed with ADHD.
On one hand, some argue that ADHD is a disorder rooted in genetics and brain function, advocating for the use of stimulants as treatment. On the other hand, there are voices that challenge this view, claiming that attention issues are not biologically based and that medication is not the answer.
The first argument may seem convenient, as it shifts responsibility to an uncontrollable factor. However, the risks of prescribing stimulants when alternatives exist are significant. For instance, stimulants can elevate the risk of heart problems, and long-term effects on the brain are not well-researched. Additionally, stimulants may adversely affect children’s growth. While they can enhance focus and attention in children, they do not necessarily enhance learning.
12 The confinement of children; physically and psychologically
There is evidence that the environment can have a significant effect on a child’s ability to pay attention. For example, stopping kids from acting on their natural desire to run around damages the overall health of their brains. Free play has turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it is drained of most of its value.
A lack of play has a major effect on creativity and imagination, social bonding, and aliveness—experiencing joy and pleasure.
There are three main areas where play has a major impact. One is creativity and imagination—how you learn to think about problems and solve them. The second is social bonds—how you learn to interact with other people and socialise. And the third is aliveness—how you learn to experience joy and pleasure. You learn to learn in play, which in a world where information is constantly changing is more important than learning information.
Failing to learn how to handle the unexpected through play can lead to panic and an inability to cope with unforeseen events later in life, potentially resulting in severe anxiety issues.
It is easier to focus on something if your motives are intrinsic. Kids in the ‘modern childhood’ environment are being deprived of the chance to develop intrinsic motives. If you are a kid today, you live your life according to what adults tell you to do.
we all need a sense of mastery—that we are good at something. It’s a basic human psychological need. When you feel you are good at something, you will find it much easier to focus on it. Yet, our school system is so limited that many students, particularly boys, end up feeling as if they excel at nothing.
In today’s society, we often fail to meet the essential needs of children. Their freedom to play is restricted; they are confined to their homes with screens as their primary companions; and the educational system tends to stifle their enthusiasm for learning. The food we provide causes energy dips and contains additives that lead to hyperactivity, lacking the necessary nutrients they require. Moreover, they are subjected to harmful chemicals in the environment. The difficulty children face in learning to focus is not a shortcoming on their part, but rather a reflection of the flawed environment we have created for them.
Conclusion: attention rebellion
Our (stolen) focus takes four different forms:
Spotlight: involves narrowing down your focus on immediate actions. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions.
Starlight: the focus you can apply to your longer-term goals or projects over time. If you become distracted from your starlight, you start to forget where you are headed.
Daylight: makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, in many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, or where you want to go. losing your daylight is ‘the deepest form of distraction, and you may even begin ‘decohering’. This is when you stop making sense to yourself, because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals, or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world like retweets. You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering and deep thought.
Stage light: our ability to see each other, to hear each other, and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.
We were slowly transitioning to a world where all our interactions were filtered through platforms and screens, and the Covid pandemic accelerated this process dramatically. Suddenly, we were thrust into a future we realised we hated; it was detrimental to our well-being, and we found ourselves yearning for real human connection.
The pandemic didn’t create new factors that ruined our attention, it merely supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years.
The lockdown experience, with its endless Zoom calls and Facebook scrolling, was a double-edged sword. It was dreadful, yet it offered a clear glimpse into a potential future: one dominated by screens, escalating stress, the dwindling middle class, increasing insecurity for the working class, and ever-more intrusive technology.
Do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it, collectively.
Economic growth: the elephant in the room
On a deeper level, the attention trend (starting in the 1880’s) revolves around the radical idea of economic growth. It is the central organising principle of our society and at the heart of how we see the world.
Growth can happen in one of two ways: by creating new markets, or by persuading existing consumers to consume more. Today, we achieve growth primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time.
In a world obsessed with constant growth and acceleration, reclaiming our attention and focus seems like an insurmountable challenge. The pervasive belief that we must perpetually speed up and expand every year makes it increasingly difficult to slow down and concentrate.
To solve climate change we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. These solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in algorithm-pumped fury. We can only solve the climate crisis if we solve our attention crisis.
