Framing our collective attention crisis
Fragmentation vs. flow, absurdity vs. meaning
A couple of months ago, my friend Andy sent me a feature in the New York Times Magazine by Willy Staley: What Was Twitter, Anyway?. I’m a longtime Twitter user, mostly as a passive consumer who rarely tweets, and unfortunately since Elon Musk took over the platform last year, I’ve been spending more time on it than ever. This is true despite Musk laying off so many employees the product barely works, doing away with coherent content moderation, and limiting the amount of tweets we can see. I like Willy Staley and I generally like consuming media about media, so I took the plunge. Afterwards, I texted Andy that the way Twitter is described as a “vibes-detection machine” felt spot on and followed up with this:
“I have an honest question for you
What are you going to replace Twitter with
Or what are you replacing with it already
The time goes somewhere”
He didn’t take long to respond, hitting me with:
“God I don’t know I feel myself more distracted than ever honestly”
I felt the same, and clearly we both wanted to understand why, because a few weeks later he texted me that he was listening to a book on audio about the “attention crisis” and I immediately added it to my reading list. It’s called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and it’s written by Johann Hari. He’s a journalist who traveled all over the world to interview experts across a variety of fields on the systemic issues driving a collective increase in our inability to focus. Some familiar culprits arise as Hari takes us along for the ride—big tech, capitalism, and junk food to name a few—but what I found particularly interesting is his overall framing of the problem.
Early on in the book, Hari details his own forced tech detox to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod, where he spends three months pretty much entirely without Internet or phone access. It goes about as you’d expect—irritation at first, bliss eventually, and a slide back into all his worst tendencies once he’s back on the grid. What he suggests—both implicitly and explicitly—is that even with the privilege, money, and time to just zoom away from normal responsibilities for a while, distraction from all the demands on our attention isn’t an affliction that can be cured on an individual level. Sure, there are best practices one can integrate into day-to-day life—don’t use your phone for a couple hours before bed, turn off all your notifications, install programs that force you to focus on one thing on your laptop, etc.—but these will only get you so far. The modern global economy has advanced to a point in which it’s at best a steep uphill battle to carve out enough space to sink into flow (sustained focus) for any stretch of time. At worst, it’s a situation in which most of us are too far gone, our attention ripped into fragments by an ever-rising number of tasks, reminders, updates, and so on. As Hari writes:
“Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be…atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or…able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?”
Now, not everything in Stolen Focus resonates with me. There’s a long stretch of the book that explores the way a generation of Silicon Valley companies have designed their products with the express purpose of monopolizing our attention, and for my tastes it slides a bit too easily into common narratives about evil corporations selling your data. To be fair, I’ve worked at Meta for six years, so I’m biased, but this isn’t about drinking Kool-Aid—I just…I get it, already. The business models of the most successful Internet companies depend on people spending more time using their services. This dynamic has been true for generations, across many forms of media that pre-date the Internet. Advertising makes money.
Back to what I do find interesting though—the framing that Hari deploys against very big, very complex, collectively unhealthy structures that feel impossible to unwind. He doesn’t seem resigned at all to the point of view that we just have to make the best of the way things are. In a consumer technology context, this means finding ways to limit our doom-scrolling isn’t enough—we need to address the root problem and think about ways to flip the incentive structures that drive businesses to design sophisticated, attention-sucking products in the first place. In a work context, it means genuinely exploring what it looks like to move to a 4-day work week at a societal level. In a nutrition context, it means re-examining our food systems and how we might slowly pull out of diets that send us on an endless loop of highs and crashes.
I may roll my eyes a bit at the proselytization of anti-big tech movements, but I respect the scope of what Hari believes is necessary, even without clear answers. And as someone who isn’t even a parent, it hits me hard to read about how a decline in unstructured playtime and more homework for kids is zapping their ability to focus. There’s a lot in the book I can’t fully do justice to here, but I guess this is a longwinded way to say that its central question is a very worthy one to ask: how do we get our attention back so we can apply it to the things that matter most?
I’ll tell you one thing: the debut of Threads, Meta’s “Twitter, but it works!” app isn’t going to help me answer this question. I’ve come to understand that on balance, I feel closer to my worst when I’m scrolling through boundless content because it feeds my anxiety that nothing is ever enough. On the flip, I feel closer to my best when I’m writing, when I’m hiking, when I’m engaged fully in a conversation with someone I care about—because as opposed to chasing pleasure, I’m present for it.
In a recent essay about rethinking “weekend plans” on
, the writer raises the notion of falling into pleasant engagement with even “mundane” tasks like getting your keys copied, picking up a pair of glasses—any errand, really. She explains:“I’d guess that many of you reading share my errand-romanticism, but fall out of it just as easily as I do. We’ve been trained so well by tech and advertising to think faster is better, and provided with so many tools to accommodate that value system, that resisting convenience takes constant re-commitment. But I find that the more I practice making real, genuine plans out of errands, thereby embracing their slowness, the less I dread them, and the less I dread making weekend plans.”
Constant re-commitment. I like that. It sounds a lot like a mindfulness technique—that to be present for each moment means to break the spell of being lost in thought over, and over, and over again. Perhaps it’s a good concept for cracking the attention crisis on both an individual and collective level, too. If we all force ourselves to commit to the things we both enjoy and know are healthy for us—repeatedly—we can indirectly push the convenient, unhealthy distractions into the background. If you don’t want to think about a whale, you can shout “DON’T THINK ABOUT A WHALE!” to yourself, or you can focus specifically on other things you find interesting. Which one is more likely to lead to the desired result?
Okay, that’s an imperfect metaphor. But you get my point. The problem is all in the framing, and maybe the solution is too.
Thanks for another great post, Victor (Is “post” the right word for Substack? It seems too small.) You won’t be surprised that this is a topic I care and think about.
What guides me, and gives me hope, is that “what you practice you become.” Whatever we do repeatedly we naturally get better at. Unfortunately, for individuals and for society, we mostly practice things that drive fragmentation and dissatisfaction. But we do have a choice, at least as individuals. The question is: What do we want to become? And then go practice that.
In my humble view you nailed it when you talked about three things: First, “constant re-commitment.” And yes, it is a mindfulness practice (I prefer the word practice over technique), but of course we will never really “break the spell” of unhealthy distractions in the background. That’s just the way our minds work. Random and discursive thoughts will fire all day long, just like our hearts beat and our lungs breathe on their own. The best we can do is to not believe them all and not attach to them.
Second, find out what brings you alive and go do it. For you that’s writing, hiking and enjoying people.
Third, pay attention to the “in-between” moments. Life is in the everyday mundane things as much as that’s hard to appreciate. We just don’t think that that could be it. We think it has to be somewhere and something else. The hard part for all of us -- present company included -- is practicing that.