Stolen Focus

"Narcissism is the corruption of attention; It's when your attention becomes turned in on yourself and your own ego”

Stolen Focus

Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and how to Think Deeply Again¶

The book 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.

Our attention span has been degrading, we cannot simply blame it on our phones, but we can surely stress upon the fact that our phones have been a major contributing factor to it.

One of the major reasons we get sucked into these distractions from time and time again, be it the newspapers to radios to phones and now the smart phones, is our lack of discipline! But that’s not all, these devices are designed to keep us engaged, even though it comes at the cost of humanity’s attention span.

We humans are curious creatures, and the unethical use of this curiosity is what has lead us to the Attention Epidemic.

Attention Epidemic¶

On the loss of attention span and our stolen focus, the author states:

“This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns."
It’s like, you are trying to have self control on your own self, and to make better habits and there is a whole workforce of engineers on the other side of screen, working against you.
There is only a finite amount of attention that every single individual has, and there are a ton of companies fighting their heads off for getting this attention
In this race to getting user’s attention, the companies get deeper and deeper into the user’s psychology. Trying to use the human weaknesses of curiosity, insecurities, and what not just to get more attention from the user!
Examples of this can be:
1. The pull down to refresh - which acts like a slot machine where you get random feed reward every time you pull
2. The infinity scroll - However much you scroll these days you will reach no end of content, thus no indicator of stopping for you!
3. Instead of getting your attention, it was much easier and cheaper for companies to get you addicted to getting attention from other users.
4. This in turn aroused the culture of ‘social validation’ amongst teens and self doubt, self hate!

The attention epidemic is caused by one thing i.e. the rise in Technology! But,

How does Technology Manipulate us?¶

To explain this I have to go into the social media sites we all know of, be it facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter, etc. All these sites have the infinite scroll system at one place or another.
Now these platforms run algorithms to decide what to show the user’s next, it can show anything from happy and pleasant content, to content that makes us outraged or sad.
The algorithm is neutral to what it wants to show, it is the engineers who program these algorithms to show the specific kind of content we see, and there is only one logic behind what we see, it is ‘The more time the user looks, the more money the platform earns!’
- To achieve this the platforms generally shows what we are more likely to watch more, and that is the negative/outrageous facts.
- The human mind is more likely to stare at negative events like car events than positive events, that is the general tendency. That is the reason why when you turn on any news channel, there is always some news about accidents, thefts or some other negative stuff.
- This has been known about in psychology for years and is based on a broad body of evidence. It's called 'negativity bias.'
"If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. It 'turns hate into a habit.' ”
If you ever used Youtube you’d know, the recommendation system after every video suggests you something else, and the suggestions are often more shocking, more extreme, more engaging than the video you just watched
These suggestions mainly consist of extremism, outrage exploits, insecurities, conspiracies, confirmation bias and sexuality. All the topics aimed at keeping the brain hooked into watching more!
The best line of defense is exposure; people need to realize they're being manipulated.

You might ask, Okay, we are getting manipulated a bit, but how does this affect our attention though?

The Effect on our attention¶

The information load has been increasing since the early 19th Century,
As the authors in the book Make Time have said

“Even if you were to consume the social media feed and news 24 hours a day, you would still not be able to catch up to it!”
We are stuck in a loophole with more information than we can comprehend. There is more information bombarded at us than what we can practically consume and use. And all this is being done under the one prominent lie of multitasking
The concept of multitasking has convinced us that we can live life fast forward
Professor Miller, a world renowned neuroscientist at MIT, told the author bluntly than ‘human brain is capable of only producing 1-2 thoughts at once in the conscious mind’. We are very single minded, we have a limited cognitive capacity
rather than accepting it, we invented a myth, myth being we can think about multiple things at once, we took the term of multitasking from the computers who could actually multitask to ourselves, who cannot do so very well.
this multitasking in humans leads to what we call Attention residue (from DEEP WORK), which states that ‘

“Every time you switch from one task to another, a residue of your attention is left behind and remains stuck thinking about the previous task.’”
When people refer to multitasking, they aren't concentrating on two tasks simultaneously but rather switching between them.
The distraction all around us isn't just annoying, it's deadly: around one in five car accidents is now due to a distracted driver."

So, to summarise what I have said till now,

We are in an attention epidemic
Technology around us is existing with the sole focus of manipulating us
All this is causing a degrading effect on our attention

What needs to Change then?¶

We are very unlikely to see any drastic changes in the world around us
1. Because the world is hooked to the technology
2. The big tech giants have their business models revolving around our attention

What we can do on personal level is more important:

Use Pre-commitment to stop switching between tasks
- Decide a time and task which you will be performing without any distractions, toss your non required devices aside
Change the way you respond to getting distracted
- Cut off the self doubt/hate and accept that you are getting distracted, and just try to last a few minutes more before viewing that message/notification
Go off social media as much as possible
Let your mind wander
- Give some free time to your mind to just wander around, away from devices, just your mind and the imagination
- It is when you let your mind drift away from your immediate surroundings that it starts to think over the past, and starts to game out the future, and makes connections between different things you have learned.
Get Good Sleep
Spend time with real people, away from the devices

Also more importantly! DISABLE THE NOTIFICATIONS, they tend to play with your attention lot more than you can even think of!