Stolen Focus

Stolen Focus explains why our attention spans have been dwindling for decades, how technology accelerates this worrying trend, and what we can do to reclaim our focus and thus our capacity to live meaningful lives.

Out of personal dissatisfaction with his ability to focus, Danish professor Sune Lehmann conducted a study about attention. He concluded that, even before the internet, the rise and fall of popular books in the last 200 years indicates that trend cycles are getting shorter. The internet compounds this problem. Between 2013 and 2016, the average duration for which topics trend on Twitter reduced by over 30%, from over 17 to just over 11 hours.

The culprit is the increasing rate at which we can spread information. From letters to the radio to telephones and live TV — the internet is just the tip of the iceberg. This “great acceleration,” as Robert Colvile calls it, lies at the heart of the problem. Where we used to consume the equivalent of about 40 newspapers each day in the 80s, it was about 174 newspapers in 2004, and it’s bound to be a lot more now.

The faster we can spread information, the more information we distribute, and the more rains down on every single one of us on any given day. Unlike the latest hot topic on Twitter, this trend isn’t going to go away any time soon, and our brains simply aren’t evolving fast enough to cope with it.

We have a saying in Germany: “The only thing that’s free in life is death — and even for that, you’ll have to pay with your life.” It means that everything comes at a price, even if the price is hidden at first.

Social media is a great example. We don’t pay with cash to use services like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, but in that word, “using,” already lies their true cost: our time and attention. Infinitely scrolling feeds, vain buttons that issue dopamine at a tap via likes, shares, and comments, and algorithms feeding you outrageous stories to keep you “using” — it’s all designed to make you addicted on purpose.

To the giants of Silicon Valley, your time is their money, and they’re doing everything they can to keep you “engaged,” even if it’s to the detriment of your time management, wellbeing, and focus.

In 2020, the Wall Street Journal even broke a story showing Facebook knew full well what it was doing. Quoting an internal presentation, they showed that “[their] algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” Since it’s so profitable, however, they’ve done little to change anything, so it’s up to us to take back what’s ours.