Why You Can't Pay Attention And Focus - Johann Hari

If you can't pay attention, you can't achieve your goals. "I wanna read this book." Or a bigger goal, "I wanna write a book. I wanna set up a business. I wanna be a good dad." Whatever it might be. Whatever your goals are, if you lose your ability to pay attention, you cannot achieve those goals. That's true at a personal level and that's true at the level of a whole society, right? A society of people who a- are dawdling and can't pay attention won't be able to achieve collective goals either.

(wind blowing) Johann Hari, welcome to the show.

Hey, Chris. Good to be with you.

Really glad to have you back, man.

I'm very excited. Hooray.

Yes. Precisely.

(laughs)

So you say that each book that you write is trying to solve or work out a different mystery. Why did you get interested in the mystery of attention?

Oh, God. You know, for so many years, I felt my own attention getting worse. I looked at so many of the people I knew, and I could see their attention was getting worse. But I was responding to that by saying... really by blaming myself, like everyone else I knew was blaming themselves, and thinking, "Oh, you know, you're just weak. You're not strong enough. You don't have enough willpower." Um, and then I, I was sort of... I also reassured myself by saying, "Well, every generation feels like this, right?" You can read letters from monks almost a thousand years ago, where one of them writes to the other one and says, "Ugh, my attention ain't what it used to be," right? It's not an exact quote, but that's the gist of what they said. And I thought, "Okay, so this is just, you know, you get older, your attention gets worse." But really, it was looking at the young people in my life and some young people I love that made me think, "You know what? This really does feel markedly different." And then I started looking at some of the studies of this. There's a small study, for example, of American college students that found that on average, they focus on any one task for 65 seconds, and the average office worker focuses on any one task for three minutes. And I thought, "Well, is something deeper going on here?" So I ended up going on this huge journey all over the world, fortunately pre-plague. Uh, I, I met, interviewed over 200 of the leading experts in the world about focus, what causes it to boost, what causes it to deteriorate. I went from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, um, and I went to places that have been affected by this attention crisis in all sorts of different ways, from a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where attention had collapsed in a particularly disastrous way, to an office in New Zealand, where they found an incredible way to boost attention. And, and what I concluded, having met the kind of leading experts in the world, is there's actually scientific evidence for 12 factors that can boost or, or, or degrade your attention. Loads of those factors have been really significantly increasing in recent times, and we are in a real and acute attention crisis, which is actually on course to get even worse unless we deal with these deep underlying causes of the crisis.