Johann Hari: Reclaiming our capacities for deep thinking and intimate engagement (ep354)
“There’s a lot of evidence that the world, and our experience of life, has massively sped up... We’re all speed-reading life now, and we’re living at a pace that makes deep thought impossible.”
In this episode, we welcome Johann Hari, a writer and journalist who has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and other newspapers. His TED talks and NowThis viral video have been viewed almost 100 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people.
Johann is the author of Stolen Focus, which was published in January of this year.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Johann Hari: With each year that passed, things that required deep focus, that are really deep to my sense of self, like reading a book, having long conversations, were getting more and more like running up a downward escalator. I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. It seemed to be happening to everyone around me, particularly the young people in my life whom I really love, who seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat—where nothing still or serious could touch them.
I decided to use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to really dig deep into this. And even some of the early evidence on this was quite a shock. For every child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven, there are now 100 children who are identified with those problems today. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes.
I wanted to figure out what's happening to us, so I ended up going on this big journey all over the world, from Moscow to Montreal to Miami to Melbourne… I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about attention and focus. I learned that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or worse.
Loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely supercharged in recent years. If you're struggling to focus and pay attention, you're not imagining it. It's not a flaw in you. This is a big structural problem that is happening, and that requires systemic solutions alongside individual solutions.
The most important thing to understand is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you.
Kamea Chayne: I found your book and everything that you share really relatable, because I used to be able to read books pretty easily from front to back. But I haven't been able to do that. I am curious to learn about why, and how I might be able to reclaim this.
From your work, it feels like the loss of capacity for attention really starts a vicious cycle that ends up negatively affecting our overall well-being. How exactly might this play out for a person whose attention is being compromised by the environments that we exist in, largely to no fault of our own, leading to impacts that then show up in our personal lives and on our well-being?
Johann Hari: Think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of. Whether it's learning to play the guitar, being a good parent or writing a screenplay, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of focus and attention, sustained deep focus.
But when attention and focus break down, your ability to solve problems and achieve goals breaks down. It’s happening not just to individuals, but also to society, as anyone who's seen the news in the last decade can see.
[Someone who] really helped me to think about this is Dr. James Williams, who had been at the heart of Google, part of the machinery that is degrading our attention. He was so uncomfortable with what he was doing. One day he spoke at a tech conference to the people who were designing the apps that many of the people listening were obsessed with, and he said to them: if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, put up your hand now.
Nobody put up their hand.
James quit, and he became, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world, and he argued that actually there are three kinds of attention.
The first type of attention is what we call your spotlight. When most of us think about attention problems, this is the attention problem we think about. Spotlight is your ability to narrow your focus down on an immediate task. I want to go to the fridge and get a Diet Coke. I want to read the chapter of this book. I want to finish listening to this podcast. That's the spotlight focus: your ability to do an immediate short term task. We can all feel that that's being disrupted and interrupted.
The next level of focus is what Dr. Williams calls your starlight, which is more medium to long term goals. It's not “I want to read a chapter of this book,” but “I want to write a book” or “I want to set up a business” or “I want to be a good parent.” These are more medium-term and longer-term goals that are being hugely interrupted as well. (He calls that your starlight, because when you're lost in the desert, you have to look to the stars to figure out what direction you're traveling in. )
The third level is what he calls your daylight. Your daylight is how you even know what your goals are in the first place. How do you know what it means to be a good parent? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know you want to lead this campaign group? It's called daylight because you can only really see a room most clearly when it is flooded with daylight.
I would argue there's a fourth layer of attention. (When I put this to him, Dr. Williams agreed.) It’s what I would call our stadium lights, which is our ability to see each other.
When attention breaks down, we also find it increasingly difficult to see and understand each other, to just be present with other people in a society.
We can see that's clearly being disrupted as well.
I really like this metaphor of attention as a light. Because when your attention breaks down, it feels like you're stumbling in the dark. You're in this fragmented environment you can't really get to grips with. Losing those four forms of light leads to a profoundly diminished life.
Kamea Chayne: I really resonate with what you name stadium light, because in addition to losing our capacities to be present with each other and be sensitive to the needs of one another, this also applies, especially when we're talking about our ecological crises, our lack of abilities to tune in with our bio-regional landscapes to understand their needs and what they need, for our collective healing. There's that layer to it as well, beyond the human community.
Johann Hari: I talk and think a lot about the climate crisis in the book, and I think you're absolutely right. It's a unique disaster that we are losing our most important human faculty, our attention, at the moment of the greatest challenge in the history of our species. The attention crisis and the climate crisis are profoundly interconnected in all sorts of ways.
The forces that are destroying the ecosystem—unrestrained capitalism—are also playing a huge role in the destruction of our attention.
That's obviously a huge thing. But even more than that, to use another analogy from Dr. Williams, he said, “Imagine you're driving somewhere, and someone throws a huge bucket of mud over your windshield. It doesn't matter what you're going to do whenever you get to your destination, the first thing you've got to do is clean your windshield. Otherwise, you don't go anywhere.”
I think [that is] a really good metaphor for the attention crisis. We've got to urgently solve the climate crisis. We know what the solutions are. We've got to urgently get to them. But if we can't pay attention to anything, if our attention is being diverted into forms of madness.
Think about Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, who's currently accelerating the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which will have incalculable and horrific consequences for everyone and all humans who come after us... When Jair Bolsonaro won the election, that night, his supporters at his election rally chanted Facebook. Facebook. Facebook, because they knew that Facebook's algorithms have profoundly promoted Jair Bolsonaro and other far-right leaders. Facebook's own leaked internal research revealed that as well. I'm sure we can go more into why that's happening, that Bolsonaro was a product of a deliberate and systematic destruction of our collective attention.
There's another way in which I think the attention crisis and the climate crisis are interconnected, and it might be the one that most worries me.
We know that as the ecosystem begins to unravel and the planet heats, we can pass tipping points beyond which are impossible to go back. An example would be that we've caused so much heating that there are now heatwaves in Siberia every year. (The phrase “Siberian heat wave” is not what I ever thought I'd hear.) There's a huge amount of methane stored in the Arctic tundra in Siberia, and that methane is now being released. Methane is one of the most potent gases for causing accelerating global warming.
That's a tipping point where if we don't deal with that, we can get runaway global warming. My worry when I'm pessimistic—and I'm ultimately not pessimistic about attention or indeed the climate—is that...
We could pass a tipping point with attention. Because getting our attention back requires a certain amount of attention.
We have to be able to focus enough to understand the problem and band together to take on the forces that are so degrading our focus and attention, but sometimes I think, “what if we got to the point where we're so degraded that we can't do that?” Then we're in trouble. (I don't think we’ve crossed that point yet, and we should certainly not assume we have, because there's a chance we can fight and win it.)
Does that ring true to you, Kamea?
Kamea Chayne: I share similar concerns. Our past guest, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, names this crisis in form, and invites us to really slow down in the face of urgency so that the solutions we come up with don't end up replicating the problems in form.
I do worry that our collective consciousness has altered to an extent that our collective capacities to deal with complex and large-scale crises have been compromised. [Maybe] even at our best attempts to address the problems, we are limited by our declining capacities for attention and abilities to tune in deeply.
Johann Hari: That makes me think of another parallel between the climate crisis and the attention crisis, which is about a refusal to understand natural limits.
[Let’s think about sleep.] Sleep is absolutely essential, for all sorts of reasons. One reason is that when you don't sleep, you can't pay attention. I interviewed some of the leading experts on sleep in the world. We sleep 20 percent less than we did a century ago. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did a century ago.
Sleep is an obvious human limitation. We can’t deny one of our most fundamental needs. If you stay awake for 19 hours, your attention deteriorates as much as if you were legally drunk. Something really interesting Professor Roxanne Prashad at the University of Minneapolis explained to me is that we think of sleep as a passive process, but sleep is a deeply active process. When you're sleeping, your brain is healing itself: it is repairing.
Throughout the day when you're awake, something called metabolic waste builds up in your brain. Professor Prashad calls it brain-cell poop. When you sleep, a watery fluid rinses through your brain, your cerebrospinal fluid channels open up and it takes that metabolic waste out of your brain down into your liver and then out of your body.
If you don't sleep, your brain doesn't get to do that. If you don't sleep properly, your brain literally gets clogged up. This is why people who don't sleep properly are more likely to get dementia, because they're more likely to develop plaques and tangles in their brain.
It’s incredible that we created a society that would deny such a basic, natural human need that all humans know about. There's a real link with the climate crisis, because there are limits to what we can do to the planet and the climate, before it goes to shit, just how like we can't enlarge our body's natural limits.
We don’t acknowledge the Earth's natural limits—we’ve created a culture where even the idea of limits seems like an affront to us.
It's almost magical thinking. This is partly a product of unrestrained capitalism. Dr. Charles Eisler, who's probably the leading sleep expert in the world, at Harvard Medical School, where I interviewed him, said to me: “You know, we need to sleep 8 hours a night. But actually, 40 percent of Americans are chronically sleep deprived. Only 15 percent of us wake up feeling refreshed.”
He said to me, if we started to get the amount of sleep we need, that would cause a huge economic crisis, because there would be an hour or two hours a day less when people were not buying shit or not consuming products. I thought, “Wow, what a crazy way of thinking.” He's right, but what a crazy indictment of our economic system.
If we lived within our natural physical limits, it would cause an economic crisis.
That's also true of the climate crisis right now. Transitioning would cause an economic crisis, but we have to make that transition. Remaining within the logic of the existing system leads to catastrophe. We have to break with the logic of the existing system. That's true for our attention, and that's true for the climate.
Kamea Chayne: Also, just that we are part of the Earth, so our well-being is a part of the planet's well-being, so we all need to rest more and sleep more, so we produce and consume less. The same things are true for the Earth as well. We have to extract less and produce less of the stuff that we don't need and consume less and use less energy. It's definitely intricately linked and does highlight the incompatibility of the current economy, which is predicated on endless economic growth. What we might better understand as the more holistic measurements of our collective well-being and sleep, of course, definitely highlights the systemic angle, given that people are increasingly forced to work more for less pay as our economic disparities continue to widen.
It was really resonant for me when you talked about how REM sleep, which is dreaming in the most intense stage, tends to happen in the seventh or eighth hour of sleep, when you asked, "What does it mean when we've become a society where we literally don't give ourselves enough time to dream?" I would love if you could elaborate on the role of dreaming, and what you think this has done to our abilities to be imaginative in the ways that perhaps we address these larger-than-life challenges that we're facing individually and collectively.
Johann Hari: I went to interview Professor Tauren Nielsen, who runs the Dream Lab at the University of Montreal—which I always thought was a weirdly poetic name for a scientific lab—and I found that there's a lot of evidence that dreams play a really important function in the psychology of human beings. There was one small study that found that middle-aged women who'd gone through a divorce who dreamed about their divorce were more likely to psychologically recover from the divorce than those who didn't dream about the divorce.
Dreaming is a time when we process stressful things without being flooded with stress hormones. All sorts of things happen in dreams. As you say, REM sleep, which is where most dreaming happens, tends to occur quite late in the sleep cycle, and a lot of us don't get to that late stage.
[So back to attention and economic growth,] which not many people want to talk about, and it's one of the points in the book I've got the most pushback on… There's a lot of evidence the world has massively sped up, right? Our experience of life has hugely sped up, and we talk faster than people did in the past. We walk faster than we did in the past. The experience of life is going much, much faster, and there's loads of evidence that when things speed up, your attention gets worse.
You can train anyone to speed read. A literate person can be trained to speed read or certainly to read much faster than they currently do. But what they find is, that even with professional speed readers, it always comes at a cost. And the cost is you remember less. You are drawn to much more shallow and simplistic messages, and you just absorb less of what you do read. That's just a speed beyond which we cannot go if we want to engage properly with things that are happening. I would argue we're basically all speed reading life now, right? We're living at a pace that makes deep thought impossible.
There's interesting research by Professor Sooner Layman at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, where I interviewed him, that our collective attention span has been shrinking significantly as far back as the 1880s. Every decade since the 1880s, our collective attention span has gotten worse. We think about just the internet or whatever, and of course, there are key aspects of how the internet works that are designed to invade and hack our attention, which we can fix them, but the internet didn't exist in the 1880s. It didn't exist when I was 18, nor did ordinary people use it.
So what's going on here? There are many factors. Professor Thomas Helland Ericsson, who's in Norway—arguably Norway's leading social scientist—said to me that one of the factors here is economic growth, a system built around economic growth. And a system built around economic growth can deliver growth in one of two ways. It can discover a genuinely new market, and obviously that happens sometimes. You can invent something that didn't exist before and it's a new market.
Or—and this is much more common—you can get people in an existing market to consume more and more. Think about something as simple as if I can get you to watch TV and at the same time, tweet about what you're watching. I have doubled the amount of advertising you're exposed to and therefore doubled the revenue stream in terms of economic growth. So, getting the world to speed up means we consume more, which is good for growth, but bad for your attention, and catastrophic for the ecosystem.
I argue in the book that we desperately need a movement to take on the underlying causes of the climate crisis. We need an attention movement. I slightly jokingly in the book [say it] should be called an attention rebellion to deal with the causes, the deep, systemic structural factors that are undermining our ability to focus and pay attention. This requires a shift in consciousness.
There are things we can do as isolated individuals, and I'm passionately in favor of them.
But I want to be honest with people that [the things we do as isolated individuals] will only get you so far.
Professor John Nick, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world, said to me that we need to ask if we're now living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment—an environment that is systematically undermining the ability of almost everyone to pay attention.
If that's the case—and I believe the evidence is strong that that is the case—just tweaking our individual behavior will help. It's good. I'm strongly in favor of it, but it's not going to solve the problem. To solve the problem, we have to take on the forces that are doing this to us, and that requires a big shift in psychology.
We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, at least in theory, and we own our own minds, and we can take them back if we want to. But we have to understand these factors. They've done this to us and we have to collectively take them on.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of the internet, of course, someone who you've been connected with for a while is Tristan Harris, the former Google engineer who appeared in the documentary The Social Dilemma. He essentially has been sitting with a difficult question of the ethics of creating large-scale surveillance technologies that are, as he said, destroying our common silence and ability to think. From his insider experience and reflections, he also shared that he believes what we're seeing is the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines. So overall, we're essentially becoming less rational, less intelligent, and less focused.
This all really sparked me to think about how we tend to individualize the question of ethics and let off the hook these larger-than-life forces in our society that are shaping us at such massive scales that we might not even recognize because we're so immersed within it, that we may fail to see ourselves as products of that system. I'm curious about how your views on the ethics of technology have evolved or changed as you've gone deeper into this work, and how you might push back against this binary of pro-tech and anti-tech.
Johann Hari: The greatest sickness about American culture is that we individualize everything.
Every problem that comes along in American culture, we just think, well, this is a problem for you.
So there are things individuals can do. [Individual action] can get you 10, 15, 20 percent of the way and it is worth doing. But the other 80 percent is all the systemic stuff.
[Back to Tristan.] He worked at Google, and he was initially assigned to the Gmail team. When they were developing Gmail, they were particularly trying to figure out how to get people to use Gmail more often, how to pick up their phones more frequently. One day Tristan was in the Google Plex, and one of his colleagues had an idea. His colleague said, “Oh, I've thought of something. Why don't we make it so that every time someone receives an email, their phone vibrates a little bit,” and he said that's a good idea, let's do it. A week later, Tristan was walking around San Francisco, and he just hears these vibrations everywhere, like a dystopian birdsong. He thought shit, we did that. That's us. Then he realized that was happening all over the world.
In fact, a little while later, he calculated that had led to 10 billion interruptions to people's days every day. We know that being interrupted profoundly damages attention. If you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted, according to Professor Michael Posner. But in most of his research, most of us never get 23 minutes now, so we're constantly being degraded. So Tristan quit. He was horrified by what they were doing. He tried to change inside the machinery. But he discovered they were not interested in changing.
You've gone to the heart of the ethical dilemma, which is that what we've done is create a system in which…
The current business model of social media has created a system whereby the only way people in that machinery can succeed is by developing more effective ways of undermining people's ability to focus and pay attention.
They make more money the more they do that, and they lose money when they don't do it. So, all this machinery is designed to do that, but that's its purpose. All the structure and machinery of these companies care about is how often you pick up your phone, how long you scroll through our apps.
Tristan could, at an individual level, persuade people that this was really harmful. And you could persuade them individually to leave the company and cease to be part of this immoral system, which is certainly worth doing. But the primary way we have to exert moral force is by changing the system itself, by getting rid of those incentives.
Locating the moral failing in the individual, who is being hacked and invaded, rather than in the system that is hacking and invading them, seems to me madness.
Of course, that's how they want us to think about it. That's why they give you a screentime option. They want you to feel like shit when you see that you spent six hours on the phone that day. But then you blame yourself. You don't blame Facebook. You don't blame TikTok. You don't blame Google. You blame yourself. They want to transfer so much of our society’s—Noam Chomsky obviously writes brilliantly about this—anger downwards.
People are angry at the homeless, not at tax-dodging billionaires. Even though the homeless have done nothing to you and the five heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune owned more than the bottom 100 million Americans and their heirs. But we're constantly encouraged to transfer our anger downwards on every issue and tension that's happening. We're encouraged to blame ourselves, criticize ourselves, “Oh, what's wrong?” and get into a masochistic self-recrimination.
It's a real victory of neoliberalism. When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher said, “There's no such thing as society. There are only individuals in our families.” That has seeped so deep into the bones of the culture. As you know, 60 percent of Americans going into the pandemic had less than $500 in savings, through no fault of their own. That money was transferred to the rich.
Here's a real no shit Sherlock insight for everyone. Being financially insecure makes you much more likely to become depressed and anxious. There was a collapse of the middle class. A huge increase in wealth to the rich, a huge increase in economic insecurity for the poor. That made loads of people depressed. What do we do as a society? We told people it was just your brain malfunctioning. There's something wrong with you. You can see how we're constantly doing that. This is one of the biggest problems in how the culture functions.
Kamea Chayne: And I never want to oversimplify things, but what I can see is that we can certainly co-create the world as individuals, but the systems are also constantly shaping us and our capacities to do various things and even reshaping our desires and understandings of how we want to fill the voids and yearnings that we have, which then shape the world.
So, in a past interview, you raised this question of how we've created a culture where people even want to be in places like the Metaverse—which for people who aren't aware, is the virtual reality that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is attempting to create. The question I have is—and there's not going to be an easy answer—if our collective consciousness has been altered to an extent where we've lost touch with what we need to feed our very human yearnings and desires and we're starting to feed these voids with misguided things, what do we do when we've been conditioned to value certain things that actually are not aligned with what is good for our well-being and that is life-enriching and life-enhancing so that even if we had a perfectly functioning and healthy democracy free of corporate interests and corrupt politics, we might still enthusiastically vote our ways and co-create a reality that is self-destructive? What comes up for you here?
Johann Hari: The thing I think of first, and I apologize in advance that I'm a man mansplaining this to you, is how the tightest and best analogies are from the feminist movement. I think about my grandmothers, and how they were the age I am now in 1963.
One of them was a working-class woman living in what we call a housing project here in Scotland. The other was a Swiss peasant woman living in a wooden hut on the side of a mountain. When they were the age I am now, neither of them was allowed to have bank accounts in their names because they were married women. It was legal for their husbands to rape them as it was legal everywhere in the world for men to rape their wives. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. They both left school when they were 13, even though their brothers got to go into school longer because no one gave a shit about girls knowing anything.
My grandmothers’ lives were profoundly disfigured by sexism and misogyny. But my grandmothers had a pre-feminist consciousness. They hated what had been done to them. They thought it was unfair, but they also thought, “Well, this is just the way the world is.” They had no politicized consciousness about it. They never felt like this. They lamented it the way you might lament being washed away by a hurricane. They just saw it as a force of nature, a terrible, lamentable force of nature that disfigured their lives.
There were some women in that generation, but many more women in the generation after them who said, “No, this isn't just some innate truth about human existence. This is the product of a whole series of forces of power that we can challenge. It doesn't have to be this way,” right?
The first stage of that was consciousness-raising: just saying it doesn't have to be this way.
That this isn't a fault in you. Of course, many women internalize those power structures. But the first thing is we need our consciousness-raising, and that's what I'm trying to do with Stolen Focus—is to say to people, stop blaming yourself. It's not your fault. This is a systemic and structural problem.
Secondly, it doesn't have to be this way. There are these practical steps you can take. In France in 2018, they were having a huge crisis of what they called “le burnout”. The French government, under pressure from labor unions, set up a government inquiry to figure out why. They discovered one of the key factors was that 35 percent of French workers felt they could never unplug, could never stop checking their phone or email because their boss could message them at any time of the day or night. If they didn't answer, they'd be in trouble.
I could give those people all the lovely self-help lectures in the world about “you might want to sleep more, you want to switch tasks less.” That's not a kind liberation to them. That's a taunt. That would be like going up to a homeless person and saying, “Hey, buddy, you know what would make you feel much better, if you went into that lovely restaurant there and had a nice steak? Have you considered that?” It's not a liberating piece of advice.
So, the French government and again, I stress they would never have done this if it weren't for organized labor, introduced a very simple legal reform. It's called the right to disconnect, and it has two components. The first part says every worker has a right to have their work hours legally defined in their contract. The second part says every worker has a legal right to not have to check their phone or answer the email or be contacted by their employer once those work hours are finished, unless they're being paid overtime.
So I went to Paris, obviously before COVID, to talk to people about this. Just before I was there, a pest control company was fined 70,000 euros for trying to get one of their workers to answer his email an hour after he left work.
You can see how that's a collective change that we can all fight for, that frees people up to make these individual changes that can restore their attention. So, there's a dense interconnection between these two forms of protection, the individual and the collective. I almost don't even like framing it that way, this binary…
The collective stuff is only done if enough of us fight for it, but we're in this culture that teaches us an incredible political passivity.
You know that famous line by Maya Angelou: “We are the people we've been waiting for.”
We've got to be the people we're waiting for, the movement. There’s a temptation to go, “Well, I'll do these little individual tweaks and we'll wait for some political messiah to come along and rescue us from the bigger forces.” No, that will only happen if we have a movement.
It's crucial for people to understand at the moment, we're in a race. On the one hand, you've got all these forces that are profoundly damaging our focus and attention, and they go way beyond tech. And they are only going to become more invasive if we don't act. On the other side of this race, there's going to be a movement of all of us saying, “No, no, you don't get to do this to us. No, we don't tolerate this. We want a life where we can think deeply. We choose that life. We don't choose this life of constant speed, stress and anxiety. No, we won't accept it. You don't get to do this to us. You don't get to do this to our children.”
If we have a movement doing that, I'm absolutely confident we can take on these forces. Human beings have taken on bigger forces than that.
I'm gay. There were two thousand years of burning, arresting, and physically destroying gay people. In the space of a few generations, we've gone from that to having gay marriage. Think about my grandmother's lives. Something people say to me is “Oh these are such big forces, we'll never be able to take them on.”
I tell them about my grandmothers in 1963—and I don't from minute one want to underestimate how much further we have to go in terms of achieving liberation for women—but I think about my niece, Erin, who's 17. I mentioned that my grandmother loved to paint and draw and they told her to shut up and get into the kitchen. My niece loves to paint and draw and when we discovered that we started looking up schools. Even the most crazy Republican wouldn't suggest that my niece’s life should be sent back to what my grandmothers’ lives were, that she shouldn't be allowed to vote, that she shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account, that it should be legal for a man to rape her. No one says that.
That change happened because lots of women and some sympathetic men banded together and said, “We're not taking this anymore.” Men controlled every company, every country, every police force, every institution of power in the world and they had, ever since those institutions were created, with the exception of a few hereditary queens.
We can take this on. We can win this fight. But if we don't win, the forces destroying our attention will win by default.
Kamea Chayne: There are certainly a lot of historic people's movements that we can learn from in terms of what it means to take collective action.
The last thing on technology I want to mention, because you named this so explicitly, which is something I've been thinking about. I don't know who else I'll get to talk about this with. You brought up examples of Twitter and Instagram and how you're thinking about the medium as the message and what it means to master the game by playing by their rules.
I'd be curious to hear you expand on this further, as in what messages and values might people implicitly be buying into just by choosing to communicate using these mediums, that I believe at least have been set up to incentivize a culture of superficiality and reactivity?
Johann Hari: I took three months totally off the internet when I was working on the book. I was amazed by how much my attention came back.
I thought a lot during that time about that famous thing that Marshall McLuhan said about how the medium is the message. When a new technology comes along, and he was talking about television, we think of it as like a pipe: information goes in at one end and gets into our head at the other…
But actually, it's more like putting on a new set of goggles and starting to see the world as shaped like that technology.
So, think about television. Television tells us that the world should be really fast. Everything is happening at the same time. All of us think about our childhood memories: you picture them as looking like a TV show, right? That's not how human memory worked before.
I start to think about it. I was reading a lot of books when I was offline, and I obviously wasn't looking at social media. I started thinking, what is the message implicit in the mediums of social media? Think about Twitter. When you use Twitter, you're absorbing a certain set of implicit messages. The first is that the world should be described in 280 characters. That is a sensible way to describe the world. Secondly, that you should respond to things really quickly. What matters is how quickly you respond. Thirdly, what matters even more is whether people immediately agree with this very fast, very short thing you just said.
I suddenly realized why I feel so bad on Twitter, even when I'm winning and I'm doing well, I'm getting loads of retweets.
I don't think many things can be usefully said in 280 characters.
The world is complex. If you're reacting really quickly, you're probably wrong. Most things are worth saying require contemplation and depth. And it absolutely does not matter whether people immediately agree with you. Everyone that we admire, when someone started articulating the truths they spoke, most people disagreed with them. No one was retweeting Socrates or Martin Luther King, right? They were damning them.
Then I thought about the messages implicit in the physical book. It doesn't matter what the specific book is, the messages are firstly, slow down. If someone finds my book 100 years from now. It'll be saying the same thing that he's saying now. Secondly, it asks of you to think deeply about what it's like to be another person. To imagine the internal life of another human being. I realized this sounds maybe a bit pompous or grandiloquent, but I think those insights are morally true.
This is why I treat Twitter like Chernobyl. I think we need to take care of what technologies we use, because over time, your consciousness will come to be shaped by those technologies.
Kamea Chayne: That all just really struck a chord with me because I'm personally divesting my time away from both Instagram and Twitter because I've been thinking for myself, whatever content I want to put out. I want to inspire people to slow down, to go deep, to take the time, to sit with things and peel back the layers and meditate on it all and to not react. That fundamentally will not be rewarded by these platforms that reward reactive engagement. So, I'm thinking about what it means to orient myself towards intimate engagement, which just can't be measured by these quantifiable metrics used by platforms aiming to steal and maximize and grab attention. These are things I'll continue to ponder, especially with all the new learnings I've gained from this conversation.
All of this leads me to my last question, which brings us back what we talked about earlier in terms of endless economic growth. Instead of using economic measures to define our societal well-being, why don't we just use something like our capacities for attention and our capacities to show up deeply and presently for one another and our capacities for intimate engagement?
Every measurement by nature is reductive, but I feel like our capacities for attention feels a lot more holistic and indicative of our actual well-being and quality of life compared to economic productivity. So, what remarks would you ask and what tips do you have for our listeners so we can begin to translate this conversation into things that we can do in our own lives?
Johann Hari: I love the idea of replacing GDP with ADP, attentional domestic product, although the product won't be the right way of thinking about it.
I would urge people to think about a precedent in our history. It used to be normal, I remember it when I was a kid, the standard form of gasoline in the United States was leaded gasoline. A bit before my time, people used to paint their homes with lead paint, and it was known, going right back to ancient Rome, that exposure to lead is really bad for you. In the 1920s, an amazing scientist, Dr. Alice Hamilton, warned that leaded gasoline was going to lead to a public health disaster. But the lead industry funded a bullshit denialist pseudoscience to claim this wasn't happening.
But by the 70’s, the evidence was overwhelming and undeniable. So, a group of ordinary moms banded together, and they said, “Why are we doing this? Why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing a for-profit company to affect our children's attention and focus?” It's important to notice what they didn't say. They didn't say ban all paint. They didn't say ban all gasoline. They said ban the specific element that is causing harm to our children's brains, in the paint and in the gasoline.
They succeeded. They fought for years. There is no leaded gasoline in the United States now, there's no leaded paint in the United States now. It was in the build back better proposal to get rid of all the lead pipes that still exist in the country. (But you can thank Joe Manchin for the fact that that's taken out.) So, we are still exposed to some lead, but it's dramatically less. As a result, the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, has calculated the average American child now is three to five I.Q. points higher, has three to five IQ points more than they would have had we not banned lead. So that, to me, is a great model.
We identify a pathogen in the environment that is damaging attention. We band together, and we just get it out of the environment.
I'm going through, in Stolen Focus, pathogens in the environment. We can get rid of them. We don't have to accept this, as Dr. James Williams said to me: the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10000 days. [It’s the same] for loads of these factors.
We can deal with this stuff, but only if we transform our consciousness, understand how these factors are damaging our attention, and deal with them.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Johann Hari: Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. It gives anyone who reads that book a completely transformed prism through which to understand the world, and particularly about the [predominant] media that frames our world.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Johann Hari: My Scottish grandmother always taught me to never let anyone think they're worth more than you and never let anyone think they're worth less than you.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration right now?
Johann Hari: My friends, Paul Vautrinot and Rob Banghart. Paul and Rob lived in the tunnels beneath Vegas for seven years and they now run a charity called Shine a Light. They go into the tunnels all the time to help the people who are still living there, get them out, and help solve their problems. They are two of the most incredible people I've ever met.
Kamea Chayne: What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Johann Hari: Don't tolerate the invasion of your attention. We don't have to tolerate this. We don't have to permit it. There is an alternative, and we can get to the alternative. We can put it right.
