A book by Johann Hari

In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari argues that our attention crisis is neither natural nor irreversible—it’s manufactured. He traces how the lightning pace of modern media, constant task-switching, engineered technologies, and societal pressures are consuming our ability to concentrate. Hari warns that losing focus does more than harm productivity: it erodes our sense of self, quenches creativity, and fractures social connection. But the story doesn’t end there—he also explores how reclaiming sustained attention involves reworking not just our personal habits, but the systems around us.

Introduction

It is in the best interest of us all to improve our ability to focus, to pay attention.

On the individual level, a life full of distraction is a diminished one. We need focus and attention to find out who we are and what we want from life. On the collective level, we need focus to have any chance at addressing the mounting socio-environmental problems of today.

Fortunately, the attention crisis is man-made, and can hence also be man-unmade. We should start by recognising what has caused this crisis in the first place.

The increase in speed, switching and filtering

When you fix your gaze at something moving at incredible speed, you feel pensive and amped-up. Conversely, when you stare at something old and permanent, you feel greeted with a slow and welcoming indifference. This is what might makes us feel so at ease in nature.

Collectively, we are focusing for a shorter amount of time on a single topic—our collective attention span has shrunk. The increase in the volume of information creates the sensation of a world that is speeding up.

The more information you pump in, the less time you can focus on any individual piece of it.

If we don’t change course, society will split into an upper class with focus control and a majority easily swayed by distractions and vulnerable to manipulation.

Although we may perform various tasks subconsciously, our conscious attention is limited to one thing at a time. Often, when we think we are multi-tasking, we are merely juggling between tasks. This has four negative effects:

Switch cost: when you switch to something else and back, you have to remember what you were doing before. This takes time and degrades your performance.
Screw-up effect: because you have to remember what you were doing before you switched, you might misremember where you left off. Correcting these errors takes time and effort too.
Creative drain: your brain gets less opportunity to follow associative links down to new places. This prevents you from having original and creative thoughts.
Diminished memory: doing multiple things makes you less likely to remember any of them. The mental penalty you pay for switching tasks cannot be used to memorise experience.

Apart from switching tasks, our brain is overloaded with stimuli. These include noisy, busy cities, bright and colourful ads, open floor-plans, flashy technologies… Our filter gets overloaded and starts to malfunction.

We have fundamental limitations. We can ignore them and pretend we’re capable of everything, or we can acknowledge them and live our lives in a better way.

The crippling of our flow states

If you have grown used to being interrupted, you will start to interrupt yourself.

Your flow state has three requirements: