The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention – to focus – was cracking and breaking.
The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: “It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.
We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.
Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. “I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You’re not giving yourself more energy – you’re just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you’re doubly exhausted.
It said that we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.
A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine – who I interviewed – observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.
Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.
I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling – the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.
So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it’s like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task – like you are the rock you are climbing.
In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing – we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest – if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward – you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.
What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don’t have time to dream?
He explained that when you’re very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you’re soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalise the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children because they are so amped up themselves.
There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.
After studying all the hidden data – the stuff that Facebook doesn’t release to the public – the company’s scientists reached a definite conclusion. They wrote: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and “if left unchecked,” the site would continue to pump its users with “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.
Silicon Valley sells itself by articulating “a big, lofty goal – connecting everyone in the world, or whatever it is. But when you’re actually doing the day-to-day work, it’s about increasing user numbers.
Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego – it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now. 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.
It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present.
If you want to think about thinking itself, he told me, you should see it as being like a symphony. “You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion – but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.” You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus – but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play.
I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.
After carefully analyzing all the options, Facebook’s scientists concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth. The only way out was for the company to adopt a strategy that was “anti-growth” – deliberately shrink, and choose to be a less wealthy company that wasn’t wrecking the world.
It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. Your distraction is their fuel.