Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going—and that inevitably degrades our attention over time.

a site battle makes it possible to “tell the story about the wider problem,” and when you do this, “it speeds up the national conversation” by waking up a lot of people to what’s really going on.

I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply?

For a long time we took our attention for granted, as if it was a cactus that would grow in even the most desiccated climate. Now we know it’s more like an orchid, a plant that requires great care or it will wither.

I thought about what Dr. Charles Czeisler had told me back at Harvard Medical School. If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: “We must love one another, or die.” I believe that now we must focus together—or face the fires alone.

At the moment we think we’re prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged to buy things—most of which don’t even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody l

In Britain there’s a law that says that in an emergency, you can break some rules—you don’t get charged with trespassing, for example, if you break into a burning building to save people. Ben and his legal team argued that this was an emergency: they were trying to prevent the planet from being set on fire. Twelve ordinary British jurors considered

began to think again about something that James Williams wrote: “I used to think there were no great political struggles left…. How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is the prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.”