Johann Hari, the British writer and journalist whose books Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections and Stolen Focus have been international bestsellers, believes we are living through a profound crisis of attention. Speaking at Ready25 in Sydney, he argued that the erosion of focus is not the result of individual weakness but of powerful external forces that have rewired the way we live.
“The average office worker in Australia now focuses on any one task for forty-six seconds,” Hari told the audience. “For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there’s now a hundred children who’ve been identified with that problem.”
The Graceland Realisation
Hari’s wake-up call came through his godson, who as a child had been enchanted by Elvis Presley. At nine years old he made Hari promise to take him to Graceland one day. By the time he was 19, however, he was spending almost every waking moment flicking between devices.
“It was just this blur of WhatsApp and YouTube… almost like he was spinning at the speed of Snapchat,” Hari recalled. Hoping to break the cycle, he took him to Memphis. Yet even at Elvis’s mansion, his godson was transfixed by Snapchat.
“I know you’re afraid of missing out,” Hari told him in frustration, “but this is guaranteed missing out. You’re not showing up in your own life. You’re not present at the events of your own existence.”
That was the moment Hari realised distraction was inescapable. “We came away to get away from this problem of distraction. But there was nowhere to escape to. It’s everywhere. It’s the air we all breathe.”
The Science of Focus
Hari then spent three years travelling the world, interviewing more than 200 scientists in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology. “It turns out there’s scientific evidence for twelve factors that can make your attention better or worse,” he said. “Most of the factors that can make your attention worse have been rising sharply. If you’re struggling, or your kids are, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with the way we’re living.”
One of the most damaging effects is task-switching. “The human brain can only consciously think about one or two things at a time,” Hari explained. “But what’s happened is we’ve fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at once. You can’t. You’re just juggling between tasks, and that juggling comes with a cost.”
Studies show that cost is steep. “If all of us sat down now and smoked a fat spliff and got stoned, our IQs would go down by five points. But being chronically interrupted the way we are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned.”
Even a simple text message, he added, derails concentration: “It takes you on average twenty-three minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. Most of us never get twenty-three minutes without being interrupted, so we’re constantly operating at that lower level.”
Sleep, Food and Stress
Hari pointed to other culprits. “We sleep on average twenty per cent less than people did a hundred years ago. The average British child sleeps eighty-five minutes less than the average child did in 1945. Even if nothing else had changed except that we sleep so much less, that alone would be causing a huge attention crisis.”
Diet also plays its part. A typical sugary breakfast floods the brain with glucose, giving a short-lived burst of energy followed by a crash. “What that does,” Hari said, “is put us on a rollercoaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day, which leaves us with these long rolling patches of brain fog.”
Stress and uncertainty compound the decline. “Small amounts of stress in the short term boost attention. In the long term, stress shatters it,” he said. “When you’re in a state of stress and shock, you can’t focus on reading a book because your brain is scanning for danger.”
The Machinery of Distraction
The most powerful force of all, Hari argues, is technology designed to keep us hooked. “Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces,” he said.
He recounted what former Silicon Valley colleagues told him: “All of these geniuses have been deployed to figure out one thing and one thing only—how do we get you to open these apps as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That’s it.”
Just as fast food is engineered to be addictive, so too are social media platforms. “All these companies care about is how much of your attention did we take, how much of your kids’ attention did we take. And they are unbelievably good at it.”
The algorithms also prey on negativity. “People will stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we will at things that make us feel good. And when that combines with algorithms that learn you intimately, it has a catastrophic effect. Democracy is the most precious form of attention. And it cannot survive these algorithms for much longer.”
Fighting Back
Hari is clear that individuals alone cannot solve the problem, though tools such as phone lockboxes and blocking apps can help. “This crisis didn’t happen because you had bad habits, or your kids had bad habits,” he said. “This happened because of really big invasive forces.”
He points to Australia’s ban on leaded petrol as a model for change. “A group of mums here banded together and said, ‘Why are we allowing this?’ They fought. They won. And as a result, the average Australian child is five IQ points higher. That is a really great model for what we need to do now.”
He also urged parents and schools to restore childhood freedoms. “Only fifteen per cent of Australian children play outside their house for an hour a week. This childhood we lost contains so many things that are essential for children to learn attention and focus. Our kids crave exploration. If we don’t give it to them, they’ll find it in video games. But just beneath the surface, they’re still the same kids. Give them freedom, and they’ll go build a fort in the woods.”
Owning Our Minds
Hari closed with a rallying call. “Stop being angry with yourself and stop being angry with your kids. We are not medieval peasants living at the table of King Musk and King Zuckerberg, begging for a few little crumbs of attention from their table. We are the free citizens of democracies, hard-won democracies. And we own our own minds. Together, we can take them back if we want to.”
