Book Review: Stolen Focus

Sitting down to a book that promises to explore the global decline of attention spans, it’s hard to ignore the niggling dread that you’re about to read a 300-page version of “don’t have a smartphone”. The introduction to Stolen Focus explains author Johann Hari’s impetus for writing the book, and at first it seems that unfortunately, this may be exactly what is about to happen.

Hari details a trip to Graceland with his teenage godson Adam, a formerly Elvis-obsessed child who now struggles to hold a coherent conversation without being drawn into Snapchat or Youtube. The author announces one condition for the holiday: it would be his treat, as long as Adam stays off his phone. 

Of course, Adam immediately breaks this promise, Hari pleads with other Graceland visitors to get off the virtual tour and experience the place with their own eyes, and the reader is left wondering if someone obnoxious enough to walk up to a stranger on holiday and say, “But sir, there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do - it’s called turning your head,” is much fun at parties. Thankfully, Stolen Focus proves to be a far more nuanced discussion than its opening chapter suggests. 

Hari studies what he proposes are the 12 key causes of our decline in focus, including the capitalist structure of social media, a stifling approach to education, the increase in productivity in the workplace, as well as biological factors such as diet and pollution. He cites extensive research suggesting our collective ability to pay attention, to spend our time in fulfilling ways and to give global issues the depth of focus they deserve, is rapidly declining. The average office worker, he tells us, only stays on one task for three minutes, and we touch our phones a horrifying 2,617 times every 24 hours.

Hari builds a convincing case: the odds are against us. Almost every digital platform we now rely on is deliberately engineered to steal our attention for as many hours of the day as possible. There is no incentive for this to change. Even the invention of the infinite scroll is now professed very publicly by its creator, Aza Raskin, to be a terrible mistake. Hari speaks to former Silicon Valley developers (some of whom also made an appearance in 2020’s The Social Dilemma) who have seen the inner workings of the machine, and now advocate for change and regulation in their industry.

Before potential readers are concerned that the only logical solution to any of this is to throw your iPhone into a volcano and somehow find a way to pay the rent without participating in capitalism, Hari is mercifully realistic about the role of individual responsibility. One of the book’s most interesting sections is where the solutions put forward by author and tech designer Nir Eyal are deconstructed. While Eyal points out that devices and platforms literally hand us the tools to disable them (“Turn off the fucking Facebook notifications every five minutes!”) Hari runs a reality check on the systemic barriers stopping this from being a plausible solution to the entire problem.

Although it’s an unnerving read, the book narrowly avoids defeatism. Tangible case studies are used to demonstrate that some change is possible, on an individual and community level: a school with a unique approach to play and imagination, a workplace that adopted a four-day work week, and the author’s own three-month hiatus from the internet. Stolen Focus may be a helpful resource for creatives, students, office workers, or anyone feeling their time is being progressively snatched away.

Stolen Focus - Why You Can’t Pay Attention is available to purchase from Bloomsbury now.