Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.
In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there – while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.28.
I’ve pursued happiness for myself my whole life, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t feel any closer to it – because where does it end? The bar just keeps getting moved.
Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.
The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated – because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.
You don’t get what you don’t fight for.
In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions – and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can’t get a handle on any of them.
She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.
The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.
The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are “multitasking” – which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.
The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.
If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.
There’s a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.
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.
Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention.
We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.
At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden – when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans – warned: “We must love one another, or die.
In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.