Recently, my kid’s school held a little book club meeting for the parents. The topic was Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The meeting was what you’d expect from a classical, closet conservative primary school – lots of PhDs singing choir to the melody scored within the book. The main thesis is that kids who hit adolescence after about 2012 have had what’s needed for developing strong character removed from their lives, and replaced by intense addiction to the social draws of the online world, primarily represented by smartphones and online gaming.
A ton of the book resonated strongly with me. For example, I do remember riding my bike around town with my friends around 10 years old, and getting into truly risky situations. I still hark back to lessons learned during those times, while navigating the adult professional world. Parents in my social circles today in 2024 would never let their kids get into risky situations, outside parental supervision. Where should kids learn those kinds of lessons today?
But the big topic that grabbed me, and is absolutely pertinent to my blog here, is the subject of attention fragmentation. It’s been kind of an undercurrent subject over the past decade or two that attention spans are shortening dramatically, and that it’s due to the prevalence of smartphones. However, the synopsis of how our attention has been intentionally broken up over the past decades is downright spooky.
Before we get into the tinfoil hat stuff, let’s start with what’s so important about attention.
What is, and why develop, your attention?
Human beings have landed on the Moon. We proved the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, and proved it from the Earth. We split the atom, and put it back together. We feed far more people than the Earth’s habitable land could support naturally. And we tend to live two to three times longer than the average person lived 200 years ago, because we discovered and learned to fight invisible entities called germs.
How are these things possible? One word – OK, a few more than one word: Man was created with the ability to discover principles that govern actions in the universe, and then develop technologies that leverage those principles to increase our power to survive in this universe. To make those discoveries, you need to sustain attention.
According to William James, attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what see several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought… It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” Losing attention is when that train of thought jumps the track. It takes effort to keep that train on the right track, sometimes almost physical effort.
For example, you’re probably one of 90% of schooled adults who had to analyze a poem in primary or secondary school. You are also probably one of the 90% of people whose eyes just glazed over at the mention of poetry! It takes a LOT of attention to sit still and think long enough about a poem to dig the meat out of it. Take this one – a famous sonnet from Shakespeare, pretty short at 14 lines:
For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident.
For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate
That ’gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind.
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove.
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
You probably didn’t even pay attention long enough to read to the last line!
But that’s OK, because the point here is that training your attention on some task that doesn’t have an immediate feel-good effect, for an extended time, is hard work. For all of us. If you are one of the readers who have actually analyzed a poem or two in the past, you know that the reward is worth it. The effect can be seen when you finally get it, and a smile pops on your face.
Go give that poem above another try now. Give it about 15 minutes, the next sentence can wait.
How your attention is being usurped
Your attention span is extremely valuable. So valuable, that it is the primary commodity of several of the largest companies in the world.
The way platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google make money, is by feeding your attention to advertisers. When you’re scrolling your feed, see an ad for something like the new Acme toilet plungers, and then can’t last one more minute without flipping open Amazon to buy an Acme plunger before your toilet explodes, Google just got paid for your purchase. These platforms expend billions of dollars a year to refine their algorithms for tailoring ads to fit exactly your desires, because other companies will pay them to place those ads for your attention.
If the Googles and Metas couldn’t steal your attention, then nobody would pay them for ad space. Your attention is their product.
So let’s look at what companies do to keep your attention on their platforms. Haidt cites a book by Nir Eyal called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products for the general pattern. Eyal says the model for making something addictive has four components:
- Trigger – this is the something that first catches your attention. The vibration of your phone, the ding of a notification, the picture of cheesecake on the restaurant table.
- Action – The trigger causes you to want you to do something. Check your phone, eat the second doughnut, put one more coin in the slot machine.
- Variable Reward – This is the kicker, which I’ll talk about more below. Not every action causes a shot of pleasure, but enough that you know there’s one in there somewhere.
- Investment – This is the secret sauce of social media platforms. You put a little of yourself into the program, so you need to see how your investment is doing. “Did someone like my post? Why do I suddenly want a plunger?”
Components 1 through 3 are how lottery tickets work. I got into scratch off tickets when I was in my early teens, because my mom wanted me to see how it works, and there was a gas station kiddie corner to the house. You pay a buck and get a ticket, which you then scratch off to reveal the prize. You win a couple dollars every once in a while. Each time you scratch off and lose, you think “maybe the next one,” and you buy another.
This is called the variable-ratio schedule, which behavioral psychologists found drives the strongest and post persistent behavior.
When you put a rat into a cage where it has learned to get food by pressing a bar, it gets a surge of dopamine in anticipation of the reward. It runs to the bar and starts pressing. But if the first few presses yield no reward, that does not dampen the rat’s enthusiasm. Rather, as the rat continues to press, dopamine levels will go up in anticipation of the reward, which must be coming at any moment!. When the reward finally comes, it feels great, but the heightened levels of dopamine make the rat continue to press, in anticipation of the next reward, which will come…after some unknown number of presses, so just keep pressing! (Haidt, p. 132)
Social media platforms have mastered this principle with two specific innovations.
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Pull to refresh – Your feed loads at the top. Pulling down with your thumb is the natural motion to see what’s new. When you do, the little “working” circle spins at the top. Sometimes it refreshes with a new post, sometimes it doesn’t. Never mind the fact that the new post will appear at the top regardless of whether you pull to refresh! Each time you pull, you get a little jolt of anticipation, a little dose of dopamine.
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Bottomless scroll – Sometimes your internet connection sucks, and you can see this in action. When you get to the bottom, it takes a while for the feed to show more. But generally, more posts get added to the bottom of the webpage without you noticing, so you can just keep scrolling forever. “Doom Scrolling”. You can scroll for a while before there’s anything really interesting. But there might be something just below, so you keep scrolling, in anticipation of the incredible.
The phantom vibration
When you were working on that poem up above, how many times did your phone notify you with some new update? If you’re like the average American, at least two or three times.
With each ding or vibration, your attention flits to the feed.
“Maybe someone liked my post!”
“I bet that’s that one email!”
“Did Biden just drop out of the race?!”
Each time your attention flits, it takes effort to bring that attention back to what you were doing. Even if you phone isn’t dinging and buzzing, it builds a habituated pattern of thought, where every couple minutes, you think about checking your phone for a notification. Once upon a time, I would even start feeling the periodic vibrations on my hip when I didn’t have my phone with me.
So you end up only spending about half the allotted time paying attention to your work, and that attention is fragmented into little spurts. There’s no way to get deep into the material at all. Some people like to lie to themselves by saying they’re multitasking, but there is no such thing as multitasking, only context switching.
The glimmer of hope
People used to read poetry, and watch long stage productions. People used to read the Bible – the whole thing. Each of the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas lasted several hours, not the barely one hour presidential debates of today. People used to learn to direct their attention, and keep it there.
After doom scrolling for an hour, we don’t feel exuberant with joy, but rather deflated. That’s the feeling of maybe having gotten some things done, but those things didn’t move the needle of your life.
Your mind is thirsting for the kind of deep concentration needed to really find things out! So, here are some practices I’ve found to help train my attention to stick on a topic for more than a minute or two:
- Pomodoro technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a practice where you set two timers, one for 25 minutes, and one for 5 minutes. First, start the 25 minute timer, and use that time to focus on one task. When it goes off, start the 5 minute timer, stand up, walk away from your work, and take a break. After five minutes, go back, sit down, and start the 25 minute timer again. Each cycle of 25 minute work, 5 minute break, is called one Pomodoro.
The reason this works is because, when your mind starts drifting, you can remind yourself that a break is not far away, and bring your attention back to the task at hand. It helps to keep a pen and piece of paper nearby to write down anything that grabs your attention, so you can attend to it during the 5 minute break.
- Morning pages
For this, you need three pieces of paper, and something to write with. As soon as you get up in the morning, start writing down whatever is in your head. Don’t stop until you’ve filled those three pages. It doesn’t matter what you write, even if it’s “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this”. I write down my dreams if I remember them, or write down ideas for new blog posts, or hash out whatever has me worried.
The trick here is that you MUST write on a physical piece of paper. The goal is to slow your mind, not get ideas down as fast as you can. I’ll write more about this in a future post, but for now suffice it to say that it sets the pace of the day, with a half hour of unbroken attention.
- Study a piece of classical music
Pick something by one of the traditionally classical composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. You can sit and just listen to it, but I find it’s more effective if you print out the score, and follow the music while listening. You can get pretty much any score from the Petrucci Music Library.
This is similar to working on poems, in that your eyes might be watering at the thought of spending a half hour listening to such boring stuff. But, pop music is far too easy to just have in the background. With one of the great compositions, things you hear later in the piece relate to things you heard earlier. If you can hold your attention on the music, you’ll start hearing these recapitulations.
For example, the clearest, if not longest, example of this is Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The fourth movement quotes from each of the first three right at the beginning, and then develops a whole new theme out of them that can’t be completed without bringing in a chorus of human voices singing about the Creator’s incredible universe.
If you set yourself just five minutes to concentrate on a piece of music, you’ll find yourself getting sucked in. This in itself trains your concentration.
- Dumb down your phone, or get a dumb phone
This is probably the most drastic measure you can take, outside of moving to the hills. That smartphone in your pocket is like having a little gremlin on your shoulder, hollering in your ear every few minutes. Get rid of it!
The best option here is to replace it with a so-called dumb phone. These are the candy bar or flip phones of yore that can’t do much except call and send texts.
In the United States, our selection is a little limited because the FCC wiped out all the 2G and 3G cellular technology. You can’t just buy a well cared for Motorola Razr off eBay and throw a SIM card in it anymore; you’ll need to buy one of the newer phones with 4G or 5G antennas. In other countries, you might be able to get away with one of the classics, though.
“But what about my maps app, or WhatsApp, or [some other app I can’t live without]?” Modern dumb phones usually run a modified version of Android, and can run a few of these apps on which we’ve become dependent. Nokia makes a few of these newer 4G dumb phones, as well as a few other companies. If you go on the r/dumbphones subreddit, you can get some suggestions, or try out the dumbphone finder built by the moderator, Jose Briones.
Maybe you just can’t go whole hog yet. In that case, you can start by stripping the most distracting apps off your smartphone. Get rid of Instagram, X, and whatever else pings you incessantly. Turn off all the notifications except for calls and texts. There are even apps you can install that will dumb down your phone for you.
Reclaim your attention, reclaim your future
We’ve explored how our attention spans are under assault and fragmented by the very tools and companies that had promised us connection. The resulting fragmentation hinders us from achieving the accomplishments of humanity’s past, and future.
But there is hope!
- Be Aware: Recognize the tactics that huge tech companies use to keep eyes glued to the screen, and that those tactics work on your eyes too.
- Train your Attention: Use some of the tips above, such as studying classical music and switching to a dumber phone, and consciously expand control over your own attention.
- Tell others: Progress is a collaborative endeavor among powerful individuals. Get your friends and family to see the importance of training their own attention, and build a team.
By taking control of your attention span, you can go deeper into complex ideas, develop more meaningful connections, and help you achieve your dreams.
As usual, thank you for taking the time to read this! Please leave a comment below with your thoughts, and sign up to receive regular updates.
