In America, teenagers can only focus on a task for sixty-five seconds before they lose focus. Office workers average about three minutes.

That's what I read on the front leaf when I opened Stolen Focus in a local bookstore. Apparently, we're turning into goldfish. We can't focus.

The author had the same struggle. Flipping device to device, tab to tab, multi-tasking, jumping from one task to another. He said he saw his own struggle to focus and he hated it. What a depressing way to live, he said.

So he interviewed the world's leading experts on human attention only to find out everything we thought we knew about attention — was wrong.

I flip over the book, see the review by Susan Cain, author of QUIET.

"Johann Hari writes like a dream. He's both a lyricist and a storyteller — but also an indefatigable investigator of one of the world's greatest problems: the systematic destruction of our attention. Read this book to save your mind." — Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

That did it for me. I bought the book.

In the introduction, Hari tells a couple of stories about people being a little dumb, honestly. Like when he went to see the Mona Lisa. Standing in crazy long lines and watching the people ahead of him in line. They'd get to the front. Walk up to the Mona Lisa, turn their backs and take a selfie. And then they'd just walk away. He watched, shaking his head.

I read that, laughed a little. Because we all know what that's about. Social media photos. Made me shake my head at the world we live in today.

In the intro, there's also a little story about taking his godson to Graceland. It made me laugh. Apparently when you get there, instead of tour guides, they hand you an iPad. So he shared a story of what a couple was doing with their iPads. It made me laugh but he made a good point about habitual behavior and not really paying attention.

"If your New Year's resolution was to be more focused this year, then this is the book for you." — Inc.

Chapter one opens with Hari preparing to go to some isolated little cabin for three months without his phone. Because it's what everyone thinks and says. Our phones are eating our brains, right? So he's determined to spend some time with no phone, no internet access. To just read and write.

I'm reading that, shaking my head. Saying nope. Dude. It's not your phone.

I know because I was the holdout. I didn't want a phone. For years. Had a flip phone in the early days, never gave anyone the number. I only had it because when you're lady shaped, it's nice to carry 911 in your pocket. Didn't have a texting app. Didn't have it connected to the internet.

I didn't get a smartphone until two-factor-auth at Stripe demanded I have one. Around 2018 maybe? So I knew. Phones aren't the problem. Because even before I had a smartphone, I was experiencing the same struggle to focus. I saw it. And I hated it. Made me wonder why. You know?

Why is it so hard to focus, why are we such goldfish?

"If you read just one book about how the modern world is driving us crazy, read this one" — The Sunday Telegraph

Chapter six and seven are worth the entire price of the book. I was so angry reading those two chapters I had to set it down and walk away. Kept coming back to it. Read more. Get angry. Put it down. Come back. Read more.

In chapter seven he tells the story of the CFC scare in the seventies and I remembered that. I was just a little girl and my big sister would take me to the library on the bus. We'd get off the bus and there was this guy wearing sandwich boards that said the world is ending. He'd yell at us about hairspray and my sister would grab my hand and we'd run away.

It was true, though. CFCs were making a hole in the ozone layer that protects us from the sun's rays. You know what saved us? Average people. Ordinary citizens forming activist groups and putting pressure on politicians until they banned CFCs.

He says if that happened today, we'd fry. If the ozone layer was threatened today, scientists would be shouted down by bigoted viral stories claiming the threat was invented by the billionaire George Soros, or there's no such thing as an ozone layer, or the holes were made by Jewish space lasers.

And he's not wrong.

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that during the 2016 election, flat-out falsehoods on one social media site outperformed all the top stories at nineteen mainstream news sites combined. Why? Profit.

Turns out rage and anger fuel engagement, and engagement is profit.

Another social media site has, as of 2022, "recommended" Alex Jones videos more than fifteen billion times. He's the conspiracy theorist who says Sandy Hook never happened and the parents faked it. People see that in their feeds as recommended, they click, they watch, they get angry.

Here's the problem with fueling anger and rage for profit. It increases the stress hormones flooding our body, which erodes our ability to focus. And it happens across all social media. And the effect doesn't stop when we log off or close the tab. Rage for profit is costing us our ability to focus.

It's just one thing that's affecting our ability to focus and concentrate. But there are twelve. Not one. Not put down your phone, pal. Twelve things. Each chapter covers a separate thing that's affecting our focus. Most of them are deliberate decisions someone made to increase profit.

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, Mashable, Mindful.

Let me tell you about Johann Hari. He's the author of three New York Times best-selling books. He was twice named 'National Newspaper Journalist of the Year' by Amnesty International and his TED talks have been viewed more than 93 million times.

He's written for some of the world's biggest newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Spectator, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Sydney Morning Herald, Politico and more.

Now let me tell you the bad part because if I don't, it'll just creep into comments. In 2011 he created a sock puppet account on Wikipedia and butted heads with some people he didn't like and got banned. He admitted his mistake, called his behavior juvenile and apologized publicly.

Also in 2011, he was charged with plagiarism for failing to cite correctly and accurately when he interviewed people. I like to think he's learned that lesson the hard way given that his most current book has forty pages of citations and acknowledgements listed at the end.

Stolen Focus was published in January 2022 and went best-seller on three continents. It's the story of a journey that took him from Silicon Valley dissidents who figured out how to hack human attention, to a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in an unusual way, to an office in New Zealand that figured out how to give workers their attention span back.

You'll learn a lot from this book, and its well-researched data is presented in a highly readable style laced with stories and personal anecdotes. Which is to say, against all odds, it will hold your attention." — The Wall Street Journal

The reviews are killer. 7,541 reviews on Amazon and 63% are five-star. Another 24% of the reviews are four-star.

I found it interesting that the most highlighted passages in Kindle are from the section where he talks about how to get into a flow state, which is the antidote to lack of focus. I enjoyed that section and it told me what I'm doing right. For me, reading and writing. For you, it may vary.

Having read the entire book and the twelve different factors that slowly eat away at our ability to focus and pay attention, I think it's pretty safe to say we can stop blaming our phones. It's not our phones. It's far, far more.

"If you want to get your attention and focus back, you need to read this remarkable book. Johann Hari has cracked the code of why we're in this crisis, and how to get out of it." — Arianna Huffington