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

“aliveness”—it’s how you learn to experience joy and pleasure.

TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.

Third, these sites learn—as Tristan put it—how to “frack” you. These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways—they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you.

These companies will never restrain themselves.

Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting.

wants us to understand that this design is not inevitable.

You believe that you are free, and that you make choices, and you have a complex human mind that is selecting what to pay attention to—but it’s all a myth. You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you have experienced in your life.

Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing,

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it’s always to improve the voodoo doll.