Stolen Focus

Christmas Eve of 2025, I talked to one of my cousins on the phone. He’s recently gone through some awakenings about vaccines and the negative impact they’ve had on the health of many. He’s also diving into a lot of topics that many people still call conspiracy theories, and finding fascinating information on lots of ideas ranging from the conspiratorial to causation of what appears to be a societal breakdown.

The shortening of our attention spans and manipulation of emotion through social media is one of those topics. Some could call it a conspiracy, others might deem it a very unfortunate side effect of a cool and useful tool. Both can be true.

He spoke highly of a book called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, where the author argues the global attention crisis and inability to focus isn’t a personal failing but a widespread issue cause by twelve key factors.

Most of those factors link back to technology, corporate greed and societal changes. Societal changes that I would also personally argue are by design. Big tech and big corporations want us addicted to their products and services, for their profit at a minimum. For division among citizens at worst.

In the book, Johann had interviewed many people. From one of those interviews, he wrote: James Williams, former Google strategist, once “addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: ‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.” That’s pretty telling (in my opinion)

Their products and services have invaded our lives in every way. Alexa and Siri now listen intently to our daily lives and feed us advertisements based on what we’re already interested in. They travel with us everywhere in pockets and purses, ultimately using our habits and preferences to perfectly curate our feeds in a way that feeds the way we already think. If you ever watched The Social Dilemma, you have an idea that delivering content which reinforces what we believe can drive ideologies which drive division.

Don’t even get me started on AI technologies, as many are beginning to just bypass thinking and focus altogether. They utilize AI to think for them. It’s no wonder we all have difficulty in thinking clearly and remaining focused on any one thing.

Guilty here ~ I haven’t written anything in many months. Whenever I have tried sit to do so, my focus was stolen by some notification on my phone and half an hour later I ended up disgusted with myself for having lost that time to a meaningless scroll. I may experience a few laughs at funny reels, I also find myself falling into a trap of comparison or feeling outrage over the current status of society.

In the book, Johann describes his three-month no tech excursion. He believes he’s removing distractions to temporarily focus on writing. Ultimately, he finds that he relearned the art of thinking and learned an intense amount about himself.

It’s a book well worth reading, I’m only halfway through it and felt the need to share some of the great tidbits I found. It’s full of realizations about himself that I think we could all relate to.

He shares a paragraph about how crude and mean people have become on social media, and that it’s easy to fall victim to that as well. His book challenges me to be more self-aware about the time spent on social media and strive for less of it, as I do find myself on an emotional rollercoaster every time I let too much time slip from my grasp into the wasteland of social media.

Johann writes this: “I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.” 

One of my goals for 2026 is be more like Johann.