While researching his new book on attention, author Johann Hari met with one of the world’s leading experts who has studied willpower for 35 years. When professor Roy Baumeister at the University of Queensland learned about the author’s concern with degrading societal attention, he responded, “It’s interesting you say that because I find my attention just isn’t very good anymore. I just play video games on my phone a lot.”
Hari recalls feeling stunned as he sat opposite this renowned scholar. “I’m like, wait, aren’t you the leading expert in the world on willpower?” But when he learned that even he was saying he couldn’t stop playing Candy Crush, it reminded the author of the moment in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” where the people “realize everyone’s been body-snatched.”
Many different influences
“What I realized is our attention is being degraded by a whole series of things that are happening in the environment,” Hari told Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast in 2022.
Another expert on children’s attention problems, professor of psychiatry Joel Nigg, told Hari that we’re now living in what he calls an “attentional pathogenic environment” — an environment in which we are “all going to struggle to pay attention, for a big and broad range of reasons.”
This is more than just being “subjected to tech that is designed to invade our attention,” Hari underscored. Inadequate sleep, unhealthy diets, food dyes, air pollution, lack of physical activity, other health conditions, overwork, excessive stress, early trauma, relationship strains — each of these has been identified in medical research as correlated with attention struggles.
In short, the modern context we are living in is “militating against the possibility of forming deep focus,” Hari summarized. “You can still do it, but it’s getting harder and harder.”
But, is this really a crisis?
Hari, who authored the book, “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again,” tells Klein, “there’s this growing and strong evidence that we are in a serious crisis of attention.” This “affects the daily lived texture of your life in the short-term, the medium-term, the long-term, and it affects our whole society.”
“Attention is, in total, the depth of thought and consideration a society can bring to bear on itself, its problems, its opportunities” Klein himself later summarized. So much “depends on our capacity to pay attention, on the quality of the attention we pay and on the condition we’re in when we pay attention,” he added.
“But like any collective resource, attention, it can be polluted, it can be exhausted. And I think to a large extent, it has been.”
The problem of “flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions,” concurred D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt in a New York Times op-ed from 2023 — pointing to sharp decreases in capacities for “sustained, or deep attention,” especially among young people. People are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task, they point out. This makes art, reading, deep discussion and any number of crucial forms of liberal arts learning difficult.
“Our attention is born free, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains,” they continued. “Can our systems of liberal education rise to this challenge?”
“Your ability to pay attention is absolutely foundational to the texture of your life,” Hari said. “What is your life like if (it’s) dissolved into a hailstorm of three-minute fragments?”
If that becomes your daily reality, he suggests, it “profoundly degrades the texture of your life.” After all, most anything we achieve that we’re proud of — setting up a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar — almost always requires “a huge amount of sustained focus and attention.”
The attention capturing industry
Yet “increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours,” Burnett, Loh and Schmidt argued. “We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives,” they say, describing “extractive profit models” that they suggest “amount to the systematic fracking of human beings” thanks to repeated attempts at ”pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces.”
“Every time you open any social media app, the longer you scroll, the more money they make,” explained Tim Hwang, director of Harvard M.I.T. Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative on Klein’s podcast in 2023. “So all of that engineering power, all of their algorithmic genius is geared towards one thing: thinking, how do we get Ezra to pick up his phone as often as possible and scroll as long as possible?”
Hari likewise cites Sean Parker, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, who said that since the beginning “they had designed Facebook to ask, how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
To confuse matters further, this same “infinitely scrolling buffet of choice,” the op-ed authors argued, “masquerades as freedom of attention.” After all, compulsive viewers still tell themselves, “How neat, I get to watch anything I want!”
Buying and selling attention
In this way, an “amorphous, shapeless concept of attention has been transformed into discrete comparable pieces that can be captured, priced and sold,” wrote Hwang in his book, ”Subprime Attention Crisis” — further explaining on the podcast:
“What happens is that there’s a signal that basically is put out to a marketplace saying, hey, we’ve got Tim — male, 25 to 35 — on the East Coast who’s looking at this website. Who wants to advertise to him?”
Hwang, who has worked as a global public policy lead for artificial intelligence at Google, continued his explanation. “And essentially, there’s a number of algorithms that operate on behalf of advertisers that compete to basically bid to deliver the ad to me. And depending on which bidder wins, they upload that to my website and into my eyeballs. And this happens billions and billions of times every single day.”
Klein responded, “I mean, that’s truly amazing. Put aside however you might feel about advertising. That this is happening — here’s an auction for your attention, which serves you up something in a personalized way in the time it takes you to load a website on a broadband connection — is nuts.”
The exhaustion of attention
“If you think of attention as a collective good, a public good,” Klein reflected, it’s this relentlessness of advertisement, among other things, that is “degrading the collective quality of the attention.”
The problem furthermore, he said, is “every individual player has an individual incentive to grab more and more attention. It’s highly competitive. They’re all competing with each other for our attention.”
“And so you get this tragedy of the commons dynamic, where everybody is basically exhausting our attention, making us irritable and angry at each other and unable to focus. And it’s not really in anybody’s interest to figure out how to collectively manage the attentional commons better.”
“The incentives of this market are essentially driving disattention,” Hwang concurred — pointing to clickthrough rates of 44% for banner ads in 1994, compared with more like 0.1% today. “The core underlying asset, which is attention, has become so degraded with time that this channel is becoming useless.”
Then, he concluded: “Basically, your content feeds, your information feeds are just filling with so much garbage that even the good stuff can’t get through. And the end effect is that people just pay attention less, or they pay attention in a much more shallow way than they used to.”
“Basically, your content feeds are just filling with so much garbage that even the good stuff can’t get through.”
— — Tim Hwang, 2023
A revolution to recapture our attention?
Attention isn’t just being bought and sold, it is being used and changed, Klein elaborated further. “From the smallest aspect of the web to the biggest economics of the web, it’s all shaped by this core ecosystem.”
The consequences are as personal as they come. When you become consumed in distraction, Hari said, “you can’t even figure out who you are, what you want to do, where you want to go. It’s like you become lost in your own life.”
This helps explain why Burnett, Loh and Schmidt compared the need for pushing back against corporate intrusion to earlier exploitation during the 19th century Industrial Revolution — proposing that “the moment has come for a new and parallel revolution.”
As all these experts seem to agree, that revolution starts in our own lives and homes, moment by moment. So much else depends on deepening our capacity for attention — relationships, spirituality, learning, productivity, maybe even peace and happiness.
So, are you ready to join the revolution to reclaim and deepen your own attention?