I have finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (affiliate link).
I went into this book much more worried about the state of attention in our communities than I was when I came out. Having read about it I kinda don’t feel that we really do have an urgent problem with so many people on earth being constantly engaged with their smart phones.
I might have trouble now starting a conversation with a family member because they are engrossed in their phone, and I might think this is new or different, but thirty years ago it would have been the same thing if they had their nose in a book or a newspaper.
I think by and large it’s good when we’re paying attention to things and engaging with them. That’s not only how entertainment gets done, that is also how work gets done.
I suspect one of the driving forces behind the surge in ADHD diagnoses (and Hari didn’t say this) is that people are getting the diagnosis deliberately because they want access to prescription amphetamines.
Anyway. I would still recommend reading this book. Hari does a good job of covering all the bases and investigating all the topics, including:
- context switching and its effects
- effects on flow
- physical and mental exhaustion
- sustained reading
- mind wandering
- tracking and manipulation
- stress and its triggers
- diet and pollution
- ADHD
- physical and psychological confinement
This matches my (unscientific) intuition: any time I hear people say, “Oh X is a big problem now” I translate it as “kids these days”. I.e. I have a hard time believing anything is really new here.
I will say that, as a parent of a kid with ADHD tendencies (whom we did not medicate), I don’t tend to agree that desire for meds is a driver. I think among the youth, what they really want is a DIAGNOSIS. They want to know there’s some external reason for the difficulties they face. This is pretty understandable – humans seek explanations, and if school or whatever is hard it sucks to think it’s just because you’re not good enough. But of course there are always other implications.
Oh yes, I totally agree that the stories we tell ourselves, our narratives, are both important and useful. Also I don’t think 100% of ADHD diagnoses are for the purposes of access to drugs, but I’m pretty sure it would some percentage. It would be interesting to know what the numbers were, but it probably wouldn’t be politically correct to start asking around about such things.