Stolen Focus By Johann Hari Thoughts

Personal Context

I think it is quite pertinent to put a huge disclaimer as I begin my opining on this book: As I am doing this, in the last two weeks I have turned 23 years old. The reason I mention this is because for all intents and purposes, I never existed outside of the Internet Age. While I vaguely remember the days of no smartphones, there were Blackberrys and portable video game consoles with internet access and laptops you could bring around (though not nearly as sleek and powerful as they are now). The older I have gotten though, my focus has started to wane. Even with the advent of the smartphone happening in my formative years (The first iPhone came out when I was six years old), I read frequently, could lose hours upon hours in research binges of whatever topics interested me during summer break, and could watch movies and TV for hours on end. Nowadays though, I consider it a tremendous accomplishment when I read one book to completion over the summer that wasn’t assigned to me, and I was only able to with the aid of a text-to-speech software reading it to me while I read it myself for a good chunk of it. I no longer have the ability to watch live-streams of content creators I appreciate for hours on end, and I can only go about 2 hours tops with a binge session of a TV series before I get worn out. I always blamed it on my waning mental health that while always poor, took a nosedive during the pandemic and tried to find ways to work around it. Whether it be the aforementioned text-to-speech software usage, to having friends and loved ones on a voice or video call with me while I work, to establish a person of accountability and a vessel to spill my thoughts into rather than them building in my brain and causing distraction. Even very childish things such as making my EPUB file reader my favorite color so to draw my eye. Up until this point I have been using recent technologies as a means to be helping my focus, with mostly positive results. So when it is implied in Johann Hari’s beloved book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How To Think Deeply Again that there are these greater forces at play that have co-opted our technological advances to lead to the deterioration of our ability to maintain attention on anything, I remember telling my boyfriend of three years, Zachary,

“Did Society Really Give Me ADHD?!”

It sent me into an existential spiral the likes of which I hadn’t felt in quite some time. Having believed my ADHD had been hereditary, given both my parents were diagnosed and my father took medication for it for some time, I believed I was just born in a different way, and had to exist in a neurotypical world as a neurodivergent person. But if some amount of it was societally put upon me given what I was raised around, that means it could’ve been mitigated or prevented in some capacity, and if one type of mental disorder could be exacerbated or even created due to norms of society, who says more aren’t? These were my emotions going into the book and after reading the introduction, so take what comes going forward with this in mind.