Stolen Focus  
Jonah Harri   

Summary

How social media is ruining our attention, what are the potential consequences and how can we fix this problem.

Rating: 4/5

Notes

There is no escape from our phones and this problem is everywhere

You are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day and then you are toll to blame yourself and change your habits while the world’s attention burns

When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down

Twitter makes you feel like the world is obsessed with you and your little ego

It is faster to reach peak popularity and faster to fall again - we spend far less time on issues than we did a decade ago

This happens because of the flood of information. The more infnormation you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it

A scientist fears a world where an upper class of people are aware of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits and the rest of society will have fewer resources to resist manipulation and theyre going to live in their computers being manipulated more and more (Zuck’s metaverse)

‘We want to take the easy way out but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult’

Your brain can only produce 1 or 2 thoughts, not 5-10 (can’t multitask)

Multitasking causes you to be slower, make more errors and be less creative

‘We have a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of distraction’

For artists and creatives, the process is more important than the outcome

To find flow, focus on a single goal, make sure it’s meaningful to you and push yourself to the edge of your abilities

‘To have a good life, it’s not enough to remove what’s wrong with it but we also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going’

People with the quickest reaction times are ones sleeping the most

Chemically induced sleep is not the same as normal sleep

Our economic system is dependent on sleep deprived people consuming

Avoid artificial light at least an hour before sleep

The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is the lowest level ever recorded

The message from instagram is how you look from the outside

Life is complex and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside time to think deeply about it - you need to slow down

The more novels you read, the better you are at reading people’s emotions

Mind wandering lets you make new connections between things

We aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus but also minnd understanding which are both degrading the quality of our thinking

It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design of these big tech companies to keep you coming back for engagement (how success is measured)

The more people stare at their phones, the more money these companies make

Facebook and Google aren’t listening to you but their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic 

To understand the system, here’s a quote from Aza, the person who invented infinite scrolling ‘imagine if I could predict all your actions in chess before you made them. It would be easy for me to destroy you. That’s what’s happening on a human scale right now’

Their business model (big tech) is screen time not life time

A study by MIT found that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth

We are seeing the collective degrading of humans and collective upgrading of machines. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent and less focused

Big tech can no longer deny the crisis so they are subtly manipulating us that it’s an individual problem that has to be solved with greater restraint from the individual, not them

Cruel optimization: when you take a big problem like obesity and blame it on the individual rather than the systemic problem

A few changes could make tomorrow are batch notifications and ending infinite scrolling

You have to change the business model and incentives if you want to change the way social media works

This can only change with regulation done by governments

The facebook leak showed the company’s algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness and would pump its users with more divisive content to increase time on the platform. The solution is Facebook would have to abandon its business model and stop growing

Research suggests when we work less, our focus significantly improves

A lot of ADHD is a reaction to a stressful environment growing up

‘Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone’ - Noele Donald Walsh

Need to let kids be on their own, try things, fail and develop the confidence to be resilient

We don’t let kids play freely, we imprison them in their homes with screens and our school system largely bores them - no wonder they can’t pay attention

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