Is there no pleasure then in being online?ĭefinitely. You have spoken about how the internet has made reading “manic and extractive”. I want to ask about the pleasure of being online. What the book is doing, then, is to caution you on parts of the western society - like our diet - that have a negative effect on focus.

One of the things that is happening is that your society is becoming much more like the West. Are there cultural factors that would, perhaps, undermine some of the arguments? A lot of the research you cite in this book is incredibly American and European-focussed. But it has been stolen by these big powerful forces. One study found that an office worker can focus on any one task for only three minutes. So, I went on a long journey from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne interviewing over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus, and I learned there is scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or worse, and that many of the factors which can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing. I would blame my will power, but looking at the young people in my life alarmed me, where nothing still or serious could touch them. Things that needed deep forms of focus, like reading a book, were getting harder and harder. I noticed that my own ability to focus got worse. What were the triggers that led to you pursuing a book on this topic? In a Zoom interview, he discusses these solutions and some of the criticism they have received.

His solutions are, thus, systemic and radical - nationalising Facebook like the BBC, creating a paid-subscription model for social media, introducing four-day work weeks, banning surveillance capitalism, and letting children play freely without parental helicoptering. His argument is bleak: that as individuals there is only so much we can do. What are all the things that rob us of our focus? What can we do as individuals? What should we do as a society? Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (Bloomsbury, ₹599), he broadens the question of attention beyond social media. Lost Connections: Uncovering the real causes of depression, 2018). Hari, after the scandals in 2011 involving his plagiarism, took time off and boomeranged back with books tackling charged issues such as drug addiction (Ĭhasing the Scream: The first and last days of the war on drugs, 2015) and depression ( Watch | Author Johann Hari on his new book, ‘Stolen Focus’

Stolen focus hari