Why we can't focus.

We are amusing ourselves to death. Video, TV, movies, music, podcasts, and on top of that, constant notifications are all flooding in. We are always being stimulated, and as a result, it is killing our ability to focus. This isn't just something we've noticed about ourselves.

Research backs this up: attention spans are declining. It's easy to blame the internet for this problem, but it is actually much older than that, although the internet has made it worse. If we want to address this issue, we need to break it down and discuss its origins. That's what we will do today.

I'm breaking this problem down into three parts, and it all begins with a shift from books to television. In the 1980s, Neil Postman wrote the book *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, and he was primarily interested in the cultural effects of a transition from using the written word as our primary means of transferring information to a shift toward mass media, particularly television. The invention of the printing press changed the world. Suddenly, mass communication became possible on a scale that had previously been unimaginable. This is how new and radical ideas were able to spread so quickly.

The Protestant Reformation probably wouldn't have happened without the printing press, the Enlightenment, or the American Revolution. However, media theorists like Postman—and here we should also mention the work of Marshall McLuhan—tell us that how we communicate ideas, and the media we use, actually changes the way we think. McLuhan's favorite phrase here was "the medium is the message." Postman uses early American culture as an example of what he calls the "typographic mind." This is a mind that has been shaped primarily through consuming books.

And that means that it's a mind that is accustomed to prolonged sessions of engaged, serious, rational activity. In other words, it's a mind that is used to focusing. So that's the first takeaway: reading as an activity actually helps build your focus and shifts the way you think. But we've stopped reading.

In Postman's time, more people were watching television than reading, and those numbers have only gotten worse when you add screens, the internet, phones, and all of that, which we'll talk about later. Well, that just exacerbates the problem. Two famous examples from American political history actually illustrate this really well. The first one is the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. These are famous pieces of American political rhetoric you should read if you're at all interested. Some sources say that up to 18,000 people attended these debates, and they were later printed, which is how you can read them. It’s actually how Lincoln became famous in the first place. Each debate was three hours long, and it would actually begin with a 60-minute opening statement from one of the candidates.

And then there was a highly structured format with prolonged responses. This meant that the audience had to be able to stay focused for three hours and also needed to be able to follow a single complex thought for up to an hour or sometimes 90 minutes at a time. Postman suggests that they were able to do this because the audience, which would have mostly been literate people, would be accustomed to following long trains of thought from their reading. When you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you can actually see orators speaking in long, complex sentences. The way they spoke was influenced by the types of sentences they had read.

But if you skip forward to 1960 and the Kennedy-Nixon debates, you see something really different because these were the first political debates that were on television. Instead of an hour for an opening statement, the entire debate was only an hour, and the opening statement that each candidate received was only eight minutes. This meant that the audience watching at home didn't have to worry about following one thought for up to an hour or 90 minutes. Instead, they received information in small, condensed chunks that they could more easily consume. This format mirrored their general media consumption, which they had grown accustomed to from watching television regularly.

The whole debate was only an hour. It literally was one slot of prime time television. And you know what the big takeaway from that debate was? It was that Nixon looked bad on TV. That's why people say that he lost.

Kennedy looked better on TV. Nixon's mom called him to ask if he was sick. Generally, he just didn't perform well in front of the camera, and he lost the election. Political history, or probably world history, was made because of television. Already, the media we were consuming was changing the way we were going to engage in politics.

That's a big consequential change if you think about how much power an American president has. Television was making us accustomed to consuming smaller, bite-sized pieces of information. It also made us more concerned with things like the appearance of a presidential candidate rather than what he was saying. I imagine that if they had tried to have a three-hour debate on primetime television, ratings would have slowly declined. People weren't used to focusing for three hours at a time anymore.

The media we were consuming was changing our ability to think and causing our ability to focus to atrophy. Focus is a skill that you have to develop, and if we're watching television all the time, we aren't training ourselves to be deep and reflective thinkers, especially not in the way we would if we were reading good books. So, when it comes time to focus on something, like trying to read a really good book, we find that we can't do it; we never learned how. People often tell me that reading books nowadays is inefficient and that there are better ways to get information.

And I'm going to use some slang here that I think I might be too old for, but this is pure cope. Getting your information from summaries or even from YouTube videos, like the ones I make, is a completely different experience than learning from a book. In a book, you actually get to follow an author's chain of thought. As you read an author's ideas, you are genuinely thinking alongside them. You're training yourself to think, and as you do so, you're also training yourself to focus. You get a mental workout when you read, and you’re not getting that experience elsewhere.

So you're probably screaming at your screen right now because TV certainly isn't the most important form of media that we encounter nowadays. A cable news show gets fewer nighttime viewers than a really good YouTube video these days. Perhaps the fact that we can't focus is due to the internet, the constant stream of notifications, and the overwhelming amount of content we are constantly exposed to. In other words, you might think that this is to blame.

And I think that's right. Just like we shifted from books to television, we've now moved from television to the internet. And that's a different way of thinking about information. Postman couldn't write about the internet because he was writing about it in the '80s, but another writer has come along to try to pick up some of these thoughts, and that's Nicholas Carr, who wrote the book *The Shallows*. So, if you had to describe one word to sort of sum up your experience of the internet, I have a feeling it would be something like chaos.

The whole point of a page on the web is actually just to keep you looking at it. So if you look at, let's say, your YouTube home screen, you're going to see rows and rows of videos. Then you're likely to see notifications if you have any of those turned on. You'll see a search bar that indicates you can find anything you want. If you search for a video, then very quickly, you'll be given recommendations.

Click on one video, and you're immediately recommended about twelve more. The whole point of that design is that if you ever get bored for even a second, you can click on something else to stay engaged. We're so used to it that it feels normal, but it is a chaotic experience. I think YouTube is not even the worst offender by far. I mean, look at TikTok.

I don't really use TikTok, but when I've opened the app a couple of times, I feel like I get a headache almost immediately. And I know I sound old in this video. The idea here is to always give you something to click on next, always. So even if you are watching a 10-minute video and you think it's a really good 10-minute video, until the end, if you're bored for even a second, you have something that could be potentially more exciting to click on, and you could see. These platforms actually don't really care if you keep watching one particular video or if you keep reading one particular article; they just want you to stay on the platform. TikTok wants you on TikTok, YouTube wants you on YouTube, and The New York Times wants you to stay on their site. That's how the internet works.

This medium teaches you that information is easy and disposable. If you're even a little bit bored, you can move on. You should move on. That's implicitly what these platforms are telling you. In Carr's book, he really emphasizes the plasticity of our brains.

That's our ability to change how our brains are structured in response to our environments. Our brains actually change based on what we do, what we need to do, and what kind of tools we use. So, look at this chart for the average screen time for Americans. Now ask yourself, what do you think that is doing to our brains? One of the effects is that it's ruining our ability to focus.

The bad news is that your brain is plastic. The fact that you use your phone all the time or watch too many YouTube videos means that you are slowly diminishing your ability to focus. The good news, however, is that your brain is plastic, so you can fix this. If you made an effort to read more books, watch less YouTube, and throw your phone into the fires of Mount Doom so it could never bother you again, that would actually provide you with a way to preserve your ability to focus. This really is a solvable problem.

But you have to remember that there is a war going on for your attention, and it is not a fair fight. There are large corporations with PhDs in psychology and the best design engineers they can find, all working to keep you engaged. That’s why I like to say that the internet is a hostile design environment. So, here's a quote from the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker.

The thought process that went into building these applications, with Facebook being the first of them, was all about how to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. This means we need to provide a little dopamine hit every once in a while when someone likes or comments on a photo, post, or whatever. That’s just one very telling admission from someone who would know. If you listen to others talk about designing digital experiences, it really is basically the same idea: it's all about capturing and really holding on to your attention. By comparison, something like a book is not as effective at holding your attention unless you are truly accustomed to focusing on it. I think that's a nice way of putting it. With books, you have to actively give your attention, but phones, screens, the internet, and videos can easily steal your attention. That's why I refer to it as a hostile design environment; it is designed to take your attention and, in turn, rob you of your ability to focus as much as possible because people make money from it. I have to even say this: if I can keep you watching until the end of this video, I make more money. Unfortunately, the people who design these platforms are not thinking about the long-term effects this has on you.

Steve Jobs told The New York Times that he wouldn't let his kids use an iPad. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife also don't allow their children to use Facebook. I'm not sure if they even let their kids have phones. Essentially, these are individuals who truly understand the effects of these technologies, as they help to design, build, and popularize them.

And they know what it does to people. They wanted to protect their kids from that. So I would ask, why don't you want to protect yourself from that? Now, there are things you can do to build your focus, but they're all easier said than done.

First, you have to turn off your phone. You need to learn to take long breaks from it. If you can take day-long breaks from your phone, and if you can go an entire day without looking at it, then you're already well on your way, but you must get used to it. Having something in your pocket that can always grab your attention with a single sound or buzz— or even if you have it on silent, the promise that if you just turn it on, you might find something fun— will rob you of your ability to focus.

Next, you want to start consuming media that actually demands your attention. This could even include movies; it doesn't always have to be books. However, if you're going to watch movies, they can't be those new Netflix films because those movies are often written and produced with the intention that you will watch them while also scrolling on your phone.

Like they're made for people who are distracted. It's already changing the way we make art. So, watch actual good movies. Go to a movie theater that will kick you out if you turn your phone on. The third way is probably the most important: get used to not being digitally stimulated all the time. Go on morning walks and don’t take your phone at all; just go and be there with your thoughts. Maybe even see how long you can go on that walk while sustaining a thought in your head—thinking through an idea, debating with yourself. Just try it out; it can be more fun than it sounds. The point is to get used to not needing to be stimulated by a phone or a screen all the time.

And by doing that, we are going to be training our brains to actually rewire themselves. We're encouraging our minds to get used to focusing again. Perhaps we can make a little progress and actually be able to focus on things that we care about.