Do We Care So Much About Attention?

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We live in a world where it's getting harder and harder to focus. What i want to ask also is, why do we care about this? Well, to stay with doctor williams, whom i mentioned, has done work on this. He argues there are three layers of attention. I would argue there are four. The first level is the one that we think about most of the time when we think about being distracted. And its he calls it our spotlight. So your spotlight is your ability to filter out all the other things around you and narrow down to one thing. On the other side, if people can't listen to each other, they'll become more angry or bitter.

I’ve come to believe that the quality and richness of our lives is, in no small part, determined by the depth and quality of our attention. If it’s massively distracted, perpetually spinning out, and focused on negativity, that will also largely be the state of our lives, regardless of the actual objective circumstance of our lives. And, that is where we go in a powerful way with my guest today, Johann Hari.

Johann is a writer and journalist, whose work appears in everywhere from the New York Times, Le Monde, to The Guardian and many other newspapers and media outlets. His TED talks and NowThis viral video have been viewed almost 100 million times, and his work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky. He was the Executive Producer of the Oscar-nominated film “The United States vs Billie Holiday” and of a forthcoming eight-part TV series starring Samuel L Jackson. And following an incident with his Godson a few years back, he decided to turn his attention to the topic of attention, what attention actually is, how it affects us our mental and physical health, relationships, careers, and lives, what our ability to either harness or lose control of it is doing to us, and how our world, technology and global enterprise have built models designed to hijack our attention not in the name of the betterment of our lives or of humanity, but rather for their own good. Johann goes deep into his research and ideas in the groundbreaking book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again, and we explore what he calls an attentional pathogenic culture, how it’s making life both harder and sadder, and, importantly, what we can do about it to reclaim our attention and, in doing so, our lives.

You can find Johann at: Instagram | Website

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