CHAPTER EIGHT
Cause Seven: The Rise of Cruel Optimism
(or: Why Individual Changes Are an Important Start, but Not Enough)
“I was with my daughter that afternoon,” the Israeli American tech designer Nir Eyal said to me, as he looked back on the day that it hit him that something had gone really wrong. “We had this beautiful afternoon planned”—they were going through a daddy-and-daughter book, and she got to a page that asked: If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose? As she was contemplating this, Nir received a text, and “I started looking at my phone, as opposed to being fully present with her.” When he looked up, she was gone.
A childhood is made up of small moments of connection between a child and their parent. If you miss them, you don’t ever get them back. Nir realized with a lurch: “She got the message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was.”
This wasn’t the first time. “I realized—wow, I really need to reconsider my relationship with distraction.” Except Nir’s relationship to the technology causing this was different from yours or mine in a crucial way. Like Tristan, he studied with B. J. Fogg in his lab of “persuasive technology” at Stanford, and he went on to work with some of the most influential companies in Silicon Valley, helping them figure out how to get their users “hooked.” Now he was seeing it happen even to his own young daughter. She would scream at him: “iPad time! iPad time!” and demand to go online. Nir realized he needed to figure out a strategy for how to overcome this—for her, for himself, and for all of us.
He offers one particular way of dealing with this crisis that I want to engage with in detail. It is very different from the approach that Tristan and Aza have developed. Nir’s approach is important because it’s pretty clear this is going to be the approach that the wider tech industry offers us for the attention problems they are, in part, causing.
Somewhere at the back of his mind, Nir already had a template for what he believed he had to do. When he was young, Nir had been seriously overweight—something that shocked me when he said it, because he is now lean, bordering on buff. He was sent to “fat camp,” and tried all sorts of diets and detoxes, stripping out sugar or fast food. Nothing worked. Then, finally, he realized: “As much as I would have loved to blame McDonald’s for the problem, that wasn’t the problem. I was eating my feelings. I was using food as a coping mechanism.” Once he knew this, he said, he could “actually tackle the problem.” He got in touch with his own anxieties and unhappiness, and he took up wrestling, and slowly began to change his body. “Clearly, food had a role,” he said, “but it wasn’t the root cause of my problem.” He said he had learned a key lesson: “In my life, I had something that felt like it controlled me, and I controlled it.”
Nir came to believe that if we are going to overcome this process of becoming hooked on our apps and devices, we have to develop individual skills to resist the part inside all of us that succumbs to these distractions. He argues that to do that, we primarily have to look inward—to the reasons why we want to use them compulsively in the first place. People like Tristan and Aza, he said, “tell me about how bad these companies are. I say, well, what have you tried? Right? What have you done? Often, it’s nothing.” He believes individual changes should be “the first line of defense,” and “it has to begin with a bit of introspection, with a bit of understanding ourselves.” Yes, he says, the environment changed: “You [the average tech user] didn’t make the iPhone. It’s not your fault. I never said it’s your fault. I’m saying it’s your responsibility. This stuff isn’t going away. In some form or other, it’s here to stay. What choice do we have? We have to adapt. That’s our only option.”
So how can we adapt? What can we do? He began to read through the social-science literature, to find evidence for individual changes you can make. He laid out what he sees as the best answers in his book Indistractible. There is one tool in particular that he believes can get us out of this problem. All of us have “internal triggers”—moments in our lives that push us to give in to bad habits. Nir realized that for him, it’s “when I’m writing—it’s never come easy. It’s always difficult.” When he sat at his laptop and tried to write, he would often start to feel bored or stressed. “All of these bad things come bubbling up when I’m writing.” When that happened, it would trigger something inside him. To get away from these uncomfortable feelings, he would tell himself there was something else he had to do, for just a moment. “The easiest thing to do would be—let me just check email real quick. Let me just open my phone real quick.” He said: “I would think of every single conceivable excuse.” He would compulsively check the news, telling himself that’s what a good citizen does. He would google a fact supposedly relevant to his writing, and two hours later he would find himself at the bottom of a rabbit hole, looking at something totally irrelevant.
“An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state,” he told me. “It’s all about avoidance. It’s all about—how do I get out of this uncomfortable state?” He believes we all need to explore our triggers nonjudgmentally, think about them, and find ways to disrupt them. So whenever he felt that prickling feeling or boredom or stress come to him, he identified what was happening, and picked up a pack of Post-it notes, and he wrote on it what he wanted to know. Later, when he had finished a good stretch of writing, he would let himself google it—but only then.
It worked for him. This taught Nir that “we’re not beholden to habits. They can be interrupted. They get interrupted all the time. We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.” He developed a range of techniques like this. He believes we should all try adopting a “ten-minute rule”—if you feel the urge to check your phone, wait ten minutes. He says you should “time-box”—which means you should draw up a detailed schedule of what you are going to do each day, and stick to it. He recommends changing the notification settings on your phone, so that your apps can’t interrupt you and kill your focus throughout the day. He says you should delete all the apps you can from your phone, and if you have to keep some, then you should schedule the time you are willing to spend on them in advance. He advises that you unsubscribe from email lists, and—if you can—have “office hours” on your email, when you check it a few times a day, and ignore it the rest of the time.
By laying out these tools, he told me, “I wanted to empower people to realize—Look, this isn’t that hard. It’s not that tough. If you know what to do, it’s pretty simple how to handle distraction.” He seemed puzzled that more people don’t do it: “Two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. What? Right? This is not hard stuff. We just need to do this kind of stuff.” Instead of railing against the tech companies, he says, we need to ask what we have done as individuals. He asked me: “Why isn’t the beginning of the discussion—‘Okay, have we exhausted everything you can do right now? Can we do that stuff first?’…Change your notification settings! Come on, this is basic stuff, right? Turn off the fucking Facebook notifications every five minutes! How about planning your day, you know? How many of us plan our day? We just let our time be usurped by the news or whatever’s on Twitter or whatever’s happening in the world outside us, as opposed to saying— ‘Actually what do I want to do with my time?’ ”
I felt conflicted as Nir explained this to me. I realized he was articulating precisely the logic that had taken me to Provincetown. Something deep inside me thought like this. Like him, I believed: this is a problem in you, and you need to change yourself. There was clearly some truth in it. Every specific intervention Nir recommends is, I believe, helpful. I tried each one of them after going through his work, and several of them made a small but real difference to me.
But there was something about what he said that made me feel uncomfortable, and for a while, I couldn’t articulate it. Nir’s approach is absolutely in line with how the tech companies want us to think about our attention problems. They can no longer deny the crisis, so they are doing something else: subtly urging us to see it as an individual problem that has to be solved with greater self-restraint on my part and yours, not theirs. That’s why they began to offer tools they argued would help you to strengthen your willpower. All new iPhones have an option where you can be told how much Screen Time you have spent that day and that week, and a Do Not Disturb function where you can block out incoming messages. Facebook and Instagram introduced their own modest equivalents. Mark Zuckerberg even started using Tristan’s slogan, promising that time on Facebook would be “time well spent”—except for him, it was all about Nir-style tools where you reflect on what’s gone wrong with your own motives. I am writing this chapter about Nir not because he is unusual, but because he is the most candid of the people putting forward the dominant view in Silicon Valley about what you and I should do now.
Nir kept insisting that the tech companies have done a lot to make it easy for us to unplug. To explain this, he gave the example of a company boardroom he had been to where the boss took out his phone in a meeting, so everyone else felt free to do it. “I don’t know why that’s the tech company’s responsibility. In fact, if anything, the tech company gives you this beautiful little function here that [says] ‘do not disturb.’ The tech company gave us a button. All you have to do is that. What more responsibility do we want from Apple? For God’s sake, push the fucking button that says ‘do not disturb’ for an hour if you’re going to have a meeting with your colleagues. Is that so difficult?”
My unease about this approach only became clear to me when I turned to the book Nir wrote a few years before he produced his work about how to beat distraction. It was written for an audience of tech designers and engineers, and it was named Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He described it as a “cookbook” containing “a recipe for human behavior.” Reading Hooked as an ordinary user of the internet is strange—it’s like the moment in an old Batman movie when the villain is caught and reveals everything he did all along, step by step. Nir writes: “Let’s admit it: we are all in the persuasion business. Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.”
He lays out the methods to achieve this, which he describes as “mind manipulation.” The goal, Nir says, is to “create a craving” in human beings—and he cites B. F. Skinner as a model for how to do it. His approach can be summarized by the headline on one of his blog posts: “Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy.”
The goal of the designer is to create an “internal trigger” (remember them?) that will keep the user coming back again and again. To help the designer picture the kind of person they are targeting, he says they should imagine a user he names Julie, who “fears being out of the loop.” He comments: “Now we’ve got something! Fear is a powerful internal trigger, and we can design our solution to help calm Julie’s fear.” Once you have succeeded in playing on feelings like this, “a habit is formed, [and so] the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line,” he writes approvingly.
Designers should get you and me “to repeat behaviors for long periods, ideally for the rest of their lives,” he writes. He says he believes this makes people’s lives better, but he also notes: “Habits can be very good for the bottom line.” Nir says there should be some ethical limits to this: it is wrong to target children, and he believes designers need to “get high on their own supply” and use their own apps themselves. He is not opposed to all regulations—he believes it should be legally required that if you spend more than thirty-five hours on Facebook a week, you should see a pop-up saying you might have a problem and directing you toward a place to get help.
But as I read all this, I was troubled. Nir’s “cookbook” for how to design apps became hugely successful—the CEO of Microsoft, for example, held it aloft and told her staff to read it, and Nir is a hugely popular speaker at tech conferences. Many apps inspired by his techniques were built. Nir was one of the people who led Silicon Valley in the charge to “drive them crazy”—and yet when people like my godson Adam were, in fact, driven crazy, he told me that the solution was primarily to change our individual behavior, not the actions of the tech companies.
When we talked, I explained to him that, for me, it seemed like there was a worrying mismatch between his two books. In Hooked he talks about using ferociously powerful machinery to get us “fiendishly hooked” and in “pain” until we get our next techno-fix. Yet in Indistractible he tells us that when we feel distracted by this machinery, we should try gentle personal changes. In the first book, he describes big and powerful forces used to hook us; in the second, he describes fragile little personal interventions that he says will get us out.
“I see exactly the opposite, in fact,” he said in response. “Everything I talked about in Hooked, you can turn off with the tap of one thumb. Fuck them.”
I understood my growing discomfort with Nir’s approach more fully when I talked it over with several other people. One was Ronald Purser, who is professor of management at San Francisco State University. He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “cruel optimism.” This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.
Ronald gave lots of examples of this idea, which was first coined by the historian Lauren Berlant. I started to really grasp this idea when he applied this concept to one that’s related to attention but separate from it—stress. I think it’s worth taking a little time to go through it, because I believe it can help us see a mistake that Nir—like many of us—is making when it comes to focus.
Ronald talked to me about a bestselling book by a New York Times reporter that tells its readers: “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.” Stress is a feeling. Stress is a series of thoughts. If you just learn how to think differently—to quiet down your rattling thoughts—your stress will melt away. So you just need to learn to meditate. Your stress comes from a failure to be mindful.
This message sings off the page with optimistic promise—but Ronald points out that in the real world, the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.” If you don’t have health insurance and you have diabetes and you can’t afford insulin, or if you are forced to work sixty hours a week by a bullying boss, or if you are watching your colleagues get laid off one by one and you suspect with a sickening feeling that you will be next, your stress is not “something we impose on ourselves.” It is something imposed on you.
Ronald thinks that meditation can help some people, and I agree, but that this typical bestselling book, which tells you to meditate your way through stress and humiliation, is “bullshit…. Tell it to Hispanic women working three jobs with four kids.” The people who say stress is just a matter of changing your thoughts are, he says, talking “from a privileged position. It’s easy for them to say that.” He gave me the example of a company that was cutting back on providing healthcare to some people—and was, at the same time, congratulated by the same New York Times writer for providing meditation classes to its employees. You can see clearly how this is cruel. You tell somebody there’s a solution to their problem—just think differently about your stress and you’ll be fine!—and then leave them in a waking nightmare. We won’t give workers insulin, but we’ll give them classes on how to change their thinking. It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present.
While at first glance, cruel optimism seems kind and optimistic, it often has an ugly aftereffect. It ensures that when the small, cramped solution fails, as it will most of the time, the individual won’t blame the system—she will blame herself. She will think she screwed up and she just wasn’t good enough. Ronald told me, “it deflects attention away from the social causes of stress,” like overwork, and it can quite quickly turn into a form of “victim-blaming.” It whispers: the problem isn’t in the system; the problem is in you.
As he said this, I thought about Nir again, and the wider Silicon Valley approach he exemplifies. He makes his living from marketing and promoting a digital model that “hooks” us and plays on our fears and that even he says is designed to make us “crazy.” That model, in turn, hooked him. But because he is in a position of incredible privilege—in terms of wealth, and knowledge of these systems—he was able to use his own techniques to regain some sense of control. Now he thinks the solution is simply for all of us to do the same.
Set aside the fact that it’s very convenient for him if we all blame ourselves rather than tackling the deeper problems—after all, his income depends on the tech industry. Look at something more basic. The truth is that it’s not so easy for everyone else to do what he has done. This is one of the problems with cruel optimism—it takes exceptional cases, usually achieved in exceptional circumstances, and acts as if they can be commonplace. It’s easier to find serenity through meditation when you haven’t just lost your job and you aren’t wondering how you’re going to avoid being evicted next Tuesday. It’s easier to say no to the next hamburger, or the next Facebook notification, or the next tab of OxyContin if you aren’t exhausted and stressed, and in desperate need of some kind of salve to get you through the next few stress-filled hours. To tell people—as Nir does, and as the wider tech industry increasingly does—that it’s “pretty simple” and that they should just “push the fucking button” is to deny the reality of most people’s lives.
And, most importantly, people shouldn’t have to do it. 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. But why should we accept these systems as a given? Why should we accept an environment full of programs designed to “hook” us and drive us “crazy”?
I could see this most clearly when I thought about Nir’s own analogy with the obesity he experienced when he was a kid. I think it’s worth taking a moment to think through this comparison, because I think it tells us a lot about where we are going wrong now. It seems incredible to us today, but fifty years ago, there was very little obesity in the Western world. Look at a photograph of a beach taken back then: everyone is, by our standards, slim. Then a whole series of changes took place. We replaced a food-supply system based around fresh, nutritious food with one consisting mainly of processed junk. We massively stressed out our populations, making comfort eating a whole lot more appealing. We built cities that are often impossible to walk or bike around. In other words, the environment changed, and that—not any individual failing on the part of you or me—changed our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. The average weight gain for an adult between 1960 and 2002 was twenty-four pounds.
Then what happened? Rather than acknowledge the wider forces that have done this to us, take them on, and build a healthy environment in which it’s easier to avoid obesity, we were taught by the diet industry to blame ourselves as individuals. We learned to think: I got fat because of a personal failing. I chose the wrong food. I got greedy, I got lazy, I didn’t get a handle on my feelings properly, I’m not good enough. We resolved to count the calories better next time. (I’ve been there.) Individual diet books and diet plans became the primary answer offered by the culture to a crisis with primarily social causes.
How is that working out for us? The scientists who have studied this have discovered that 95 percent of people in our culture who lose weight on a diet regain it within one to five years. That’s nineteen out of every twenty people. Why? It’s because this way of approaching the problem misses most of why you (and I) gained weight in the first place. It has no systemic analysis. It doesn’t talk about the crisis in our food supply, which surrounds us with addictive, highly processed foods that bear no relationship to what previous generations of humans ate. It doesn’t explain the crisis of stress and anxiety that drives us to overeat. It doesn’t address the fact that we live in cities where you have to squeeze yourself into a steel box to get anywhere. Diet books ignore the fact that you live in a society and culture that are shaping and pushing you, every day, to act in certain ways. A diet doesn’t change your wider environment—and it’s the wider environment that is the cause of the crisis. Your diet ends, and you’re still in an unhealthy environment that’s pushing you to gain weight. Trying to lose weight in the environment we’ve built is like trying to run up an escalator that is constantly carrying you down. A few people might heroically sprint to the top—but most of us will find ourselves back at the bottom, feeling like it’s our fault.
If we listen to Nir and the people like him, I fear we will respond to the rise of attention problems in the same way that we responded to the rise in weight problems—and we will end up with the same disastrous outcomes. It’s not just Silicon Valley that pushes this approach. Almost all the existing books about attention problems (and I read a lot as research for this book) present them simply as individual flaws requiring individual tweaks. They are digital diet books. But diet books didn’t solve the obesity crisis and digital diet books won’t solve the attention crisis. We have to understand the deeper forces at work here.
There was a different way we could have reacted to the obesity crisis when it began forty or so years ago. We could have listened to the evidence that purely practicing individual restraint—in an unchanged environment—rarely works for long, except in one in twenty cases like Nir’s. We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways. We could have used government policy to make fresh, nutritious food cheap and accessible, and sugar-filled junk expensive and inaccessible. We could have reduced the factors that cause people to be so stressed that they comfort eat. We could have built cities people can easily walk or bike through. We could have banned the targeting of junk food ads at children, shaping their tastes for life. That’s why countries that have done some of this—like Norway, or Denmark, or the Netherlands—have much lower levels of obesity, and countries that have focused on telling individual overweight people to pull themselves together, like the U.S. and U.K., have very high levels of obesity. 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 obesity now, and a lot less misery.
Tristan believes we need a similar shift in consciousness around tech. When he testified before the Senate, he told them: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” This is precisely what Nir refuses to fully acknowledge—even though he has been one of those designers himself. I stress again: I am in favor of each individual piece of advice he offers. You really should take out your phone now and turn off your notifications. You really should figure out your internal triggers. And on, and on. (Tristan believes this too.) But it’s not “pretty simple” to get from that to being able to pay attention in an environment designed—in part by Nir himself—to invade and raid your focus.
My discussion with Nir got a little heated as we spoke more. Because this is one of the only contentious interviews in this book, to be fair to him, I have posted the full audio on the book’s website, so you can hear his responses—including the ones I don’t have space to quote here—in full. Our conversation clarified my thinking in a really helpful way. He made me realize that to get our attention back, we are going to have to adopt some individual solutions, to be sure—but we have to be honest enough to tell people that they alone probably won’t be enough to get most of us out of this hole. We are also going to have to collectively take on the forces that are stealing our focus and compel them to change.
There is an alternative to cruel optimism, which offers inadequately small solutions. It is authentic optimism. This is where, together, we build a solution that actually deals with the underlying causes of the problem. I felt this was a breakthrough in my understanding, and I felt a little glow that I saw it clearly—but I only felt smug for a few minutes.
Then I realized I was now left with a really difficult question: How, precisely, do we start to do that?