Stolen Focus

If all the energy people like me have put into shaming and starving ourselves had been put instead into demanding these political changes, there would be far less...misery.

Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.

To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

To recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void.

You are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day.

Our attention and focus have been raided, pillaged, and poisoned by huge external forces.

Many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way of flow.

Our society driving people to this point so often...

We’re very, very single-minded.

Sleep doubles your chances of remembering previously unremembered material.

Our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us.

You are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself.

Stress is not 'something we impose on ourselves.' It is something imposed on you.

It whispers: the problem isn’t in the system; the problem is in you.

Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness.

Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention.

Cruel optimism takes it for granted that we can’t significantly change the systems that are wrecking our attention, so we have to mainly focus on changing our isolated selves.

Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.

Stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.