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12 Reasons You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again
These 12 forces are pouring acid on your attention span and stealing your life away right from under you (but you can take your life back)
If you think that you’re gradually losing your ability to focus on anything for a prolonged period of time…you’re probably right.
It’s happening to damn near everyone today, and there are causes.
In the incredibly well-researched book, Stolen Focus, Johann Hari investigates 12 distinct causes of our dwindling attention spans — several of them systematic causes — and offers a degree of hope, even though none of us are able to win the battle for our attention alone.
Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire book is that your increasing inability to focus is not completely your fault, and believing that it is a personal failing of yours is simply unhelpful in the very worst way.
The fact is that you and I are living within a society that is systematically siphoning off your attention, and as valuable as self-discipline is, it’s not going to be enough to solve what Hari calls “the attention crisis.”
And it really is a crisis.
I mean, you’ve got the average American worker being distracted roughly once every three minutes, and even…
