CONCLUSION
Attention Rebellion
If this was a self-help book, I would be able to serve up a delightfully simple conclusion to this story. Those books have a very satisfying structure. The author identifies a problem—usually one he’s had himself—and he talks you through how he personally solved it. Then he says: And now, dear reader, you can do what I have done, and it will set you free. But this is not a self-help book, and what I have to say to you is more complex, and it means starting with an admission: I have not entirely solved this problem in myself. In fact, at this moment, as I write this in lockdown, my attention has never been worse.
For me, the collapse came in a strange dreamlike month. In February 2020, I walked into Heathrow Airport to board a flight to Moscow. I was on my way to interview James Williams, the former Google strategist who you’ve seen quoted throughout this book. As I hurried through the alienating yellow light of the airport toward my gate, I noticed something strange. Some of the staff were wearing face masks. I had, of course, read in the news about the new virus that had emerged in Wuhan in China, but I assumed—as so many of us did—that like the swine flu or Ebola crises a few years before, this problem would be contained at source before it could become a pandemic. I felt a flicker of irritation at what I saw as their paranoia, and I boarded my flight.
I landed into a freakishly warm Russian winter. There was no snow on the ground, and people were wearing T-shirts and selling off their fur coats for a pittance. As I strolled through the eerily snowless streets, I felt tiny and disorientated. Everything in Moscow is massive—people live in enormous concrete lumps of apartment blocks, and they work in ugly fortresses, and they trudge between them across eight-lane highways. The city is designed to make the collective seem vast and to make you, the individual, feel like a speck on the wind. James was living in a nineteenth-century Moscow apartment block, and as we sat in front of a huge bookcase filled with Russian classics, I felt like I had stumbled into a Tolstoy novel. He was living there partly because his wife worked for the World Health Organization, and partly because he loved Russian culture and philosophy.
He told me that after years of studying focus, he has come to believe that attention takes three different forms—all of which are now being stolen. When we went through them, it clarified for me a lot of what I had learned so far.
The first layer of your attention, he said, is your spotlight. This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book. It’s called the spotlight because—as I explained earlier—it involves narrowing down your focus. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions like these.
The second layer of your attention is your starlight. This is, he says, the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time.” You want to write a book. You want to set up a business. You want to be a good parent. It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are traveling in. If you become distracted from your starlight, he said, you “lose sight of the longer-term goals.” You start to forget where you are headed.
The third layer of your attention is your daylight. This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out. He gave it this name because it’s only when a scene is flooded with daylight that you can see the things around you most clearly. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, James says, “In many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, [or] where you want to go.”
He believes that losing your daylight is “the deepest form of distraction,” and you may even begin “decohering.” This is when you stop making sense to yourself, because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals, or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world like retweets. You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.
He also said a different metaphor might further help us to understand this. Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once—and by doing this, they “overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can’t be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.” It crashes. This is called a “denial-of-service attack.” James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. “We’re that server, and there’s all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us…. It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.” We are so inundated “that it fills up your world, and you can’t find a place to get a view on all of it and realize that you’re so distracted and figure out what to do about it. It can just colonize your entire world,” he said. You are left so depleted that “you don’t get the space to push back against it.”
I left James’s apartment and walked the streets of the Russian capital, and I began to wonder if there is, in fact, a fourth form of attention. I would call it our stadium lights—it’s our ability to see each other, to hear each other, and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals. I could see a creepy example of what happens when this is lost unfolding all around me. I was in Moscow in winter, and people were walking around outside in T-shirts because it was so warm. A heat wave was just starting in Siberia—a sentence I never thought I would write. The climate crisis couldn’t be clearer—Moscow itself, ten years before, had been choked by the smoke from severe wildfires. But there is very little climate activism in Russia, nor—given the scale of the crisis—anywhere in the world. Our attention is occupied with other, less important things. I knew I was more guilty of this than most—I thought about my own horrendous carbon emissions.
As I flew back to London, I felt like on this long journey I had learned a huge amount about attention—and I felt I could fix mine a little, step by step. When I landed, I noticed that everyone who worked at the airport was now wearing a mask, and the newspaper stands were full of images of hospitals in Italy where people were dying on the floor or in the corridors. I didn’t know it then, but these were the last days before air travel all but ceased across the world. Soon after, Heathrow would be empty and echoing.
A few days later, I was walking home when I noticed that my teeth were chattering. It was a mild winter in London too, and I assumed I was caught in a cold draft, but by the time I got home half an hour later, I was shivering and shaking. I crawled into bed, and I didn’t get out again, except to go to the bathroom, for three weeks. I had a raging temperature, and I became feverish and almost delusional. By the time I was able to understand what was going on, British prime minister Boris Johnson was appearing on television telling everyone that they must not leave their homes, and then, soon after, he was in the hospital himself, almost dead. It was like a stress dream, where the walls of reality start to collapse.
Up to this point, I had been applying what I’d learned on this journey steadily, step by step, to improve my own attention. I’d made six big changes in my life.
One: I used pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much. Pre-commitment is when you realize that if you want to change your behavior, you have to take steps now that will lock in that desire and make it harder for you to crack later. One key step for me was buying a kSafe, which—as I mentioned briefly before—is a large plastic safe with a removable lid. You put your phone in it, put the lid back on, and turn the dial at the top for however long you want—from fifteen minutes to two weeks—and then it locks your phone away for as long as you selected. Before I went on this journey, my use of it was patchy. Now I use it every day without exception, and that buys me long stretches of focus. I also use on my laptop a program called Freedom, which cuts it off from the internet for as long as I select. (As I write this sentence, it’s counting down from three hours.)
Two: I have changed the way I respond to my own sense of distraction. I used to reproach myself, and say: You’re lazy. You’re not good enough. What’s wrong with you? I tried to shame myself into focusing harder. Now, based on what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi taught me, instead I have a very different conversation with myself. I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.
Three: based on what I learned about the way social media is designed to hack our attention spans, I now take six months of the year totally off it. (This time is divided into chunks, usually of a few months.) To make sure I stick to it, I always announce publicly when I am going off—I’ll tweet that I am leaving the site for a certain amount of time, so that I will feel like a fool if I suddenly crack and go back a week later. I also get my friend Lizzie to change my passwords.
Four: I acted on what I learned about the importance of mind-wandering. I realized that letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention, but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right. It is when you let your mind drift away from your immediate surroundings that it starts to think over the past, and starts to game out the future, and makes connections between different things you have learned. Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my attention space to roam, my thinking is sharper, and I have better ideas.
Five: I used to see sleep as a luxury, or—worse—as an enemy. Now I am strict with myself about getting eight hours every night. I have a little ritual where I make myself unwind: I don’t look at screens for two hours before I go to bed, and I light a scented candle and try to set aside the stresses of the day. I bought a FitBit device to measure my sleep, and if I get less than eight hours, I make myself go back to bed. This has made a really big difference.
Six: I’m not a parent, but I am very involved in the lives of my godchildren and my young relatives. I used to spend a lot of my time with them deliberately doing things—busy, educational activities I would plan out in advance. Now I spend most of my time with them just playing freely, or letting them play on their own without being managed or oversupervised or imprisoned. I learned that the more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention. I try to give them as much of that as I can.
I would like to be able to tell you that I also do other things I learned I should do to improve my focus—cut out processed foods, meditate every day, build in other slow practices like yoga, and take an extra day off work each week. The truth is I struggle with this—so much of how I deal with ordinary anxiety is tied up with comfort eating and overworking.
But I would estimate that by making these six changes, I had—by the time I went to Moscow—improved my own focus by about 15 to 20 percent, which is a fair whack. It made a real and marked difference to my life. All of these changes are worth trying, and there will probably be other tweaks to your life that you are considering based on what you’ve read in this book. I am strongly in favor of individuals making the changes they can in their personal lives. I am also in favor of being honest about the fact there are limits to how far that can take you.
As I was recovering from Covid-19, I found myself in a weird mirror image of where I started this journey. I began by going to Provincetown for three months to escape the internet and cellphones. Now I was shut away for three months in my apartment with almost nothing but the internet and cellphones. Provincetown had liberated my focus and attention; the Covid-19 crisis brought it lower than it had ever been. For months, I couldn’t focus on anything. I skipped from news channel to news channel, seeing fear and fever spread across the world. I took to spending hours listlessly watching live webcams of all the places I had been to research this book. It didn’t matter where they were—Memphis or Melbourne, Fifth Avenue in New York or Commercial Street in Provincetown—they were all the same; the streets were almost empty, except for short sightings of masked people scuttling. I was not alone in finding it impossible to focus. Some of what I experienced was likely a biological aftereffect of the virus—but many people who hadn’t been infected were reporting a similar problem. There was a 300 percent increase in people googling “how to get your brain to focus.” All over social media, people were saying they couldn’t get their minds to work.
But now, I felt, I had the tools to understand why this was happening to us. Your individual efforts to improve your attention can be dwarfed by an environment full of things that wreck it. This had been true for years leading up to Covid-19—and it was even more true during it. Stress shatters attention, and we were all more stressed. There was a virus we couldn’t see and didn’t fully understand and it was threatening all of us. The economy was tanking and many of us were suddenly even more financially insecure. On top of this, our political leaders often seemed dangerously incompetent, which ramped up the stress further. For all these reasons, many of us were suddenly hypervigilant.
And how did we cope? We turned more heavily than ever before to our Silicon Valley–controlled screens, which were waiting for us, offering connection, or a least a hologram of it. As we used them more, our attention seemed to get worse. In the U.S., in April 2020, the average citizen spent thirteen hours a day looking at a screen. The number of children looking at screens for more than six hours a day increased sixfold, and traffic to kids’ apps trebled.
In this respect, Covid gave us a glimpse of the future we were already skidding toward. My friend Naomi Klein, a political writer who has made many strikingly accurate predictions about the future for twenty years, explained to me: “We were on a gradual slide into a world in which every one of our relationships was mediated by platforms and screens, and because of Covid, that gradual process went into hyper-speed.” The tech companies were planning for us to be immersed in their world to such an extreme extent in a decade’s time, not now. “The plan was not for it to leap in this way,” she said. “That leaping is an opportunity, really—because when you do something that quickly, it comes as a shock to your system.” We didn’t slowly acclimatize to it, and get hooked on its increasing patterns of reinforcements. Instead, we got slammed headfirst into a vision of the future—and we realized “we hate it. It’s not good for our well-being. We desperately miss each other.” Under Covid, even more than before, we were living in simulations of social life, not the real thing. It was better than nothing, to be sure—but it felt thinner. And all the while, the algorithms of surveillance capitalism were altering us—tracking and changing us—for many more hours a day.
I could see that in the pandemic, the environment changed—and this wrecked our ability to focus. For many of us, the pandemic didn’t create new factors that ruined our attention—it supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years. I saw this when I talked with my godson Adam, whom I had taken to Memphis. His attention, which had been deteriorating for some time, was now shattered. He was on his phone almost every waking hour, seeing the world mainly through TikTok, a new app that made Snapchat look like a Henry James novel.
Naomi told me that the way we felt when we were spending all day in lockdown on Zoom and Facebook was awful but “also kind of a gift,” because it showed us the road we were headed down with such clarity. More screens. More stress. More collapse of the middle class. More insecurity for the working class. More invasive technology. She calls this vision of the future the “Screen New Deal.” She told me: “The ray of hope in all of this is that we are in touch with how much we dislike this vision of the future that we have just trial run…. We weren’t going to have a trial run. We were going to have a gradual rollout. But we got a crash course.”
One thing was now very clear to me. If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day—then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems. But there is an alternative. It’s to organize and fight back—to take on the forces that are setting fire to our attention, and replace them with forces that will help us to heal.
I started thinking about why we need to do this with an analogy that seemed to tie together a lot of what I had learned. Imagine you bought a plant and you wanted to help it grow. What would you do? You would make sure certain things were present: sunlight, and water, and soil with the right nutrients. And you would protect it from the things that could damage or kill it: you would plant it far from the trampling feet of other people, and from pests and diseases. Your ability to develop deep focus is, I have come to believe, like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children and flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wander so you can make sense of your life, to exercise, to sleep properly, to eat nutritious food that makes it possible for you to develop a healthy brain, and to have a sense of safety. And there are certain things you need to protect your attention from, because they will sicken or stunt it: too much speed, too much switching, too many stimuli, intrusive technology designed to hack and hook you, stress, exhaustion, processed food pumped with dyes that amp you up, polluted air.
For a long time we took our attention for granted, as if it was a cactus that would grow in even the most desiccated climate. Now we know it’s more like an orchid, a plant that requires great care or it will wither.
With this image in mind, I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper.
The idea of building a movement sometimes seemed to me still to be quite hard to picture concretely—so I wanted to talk to people who had built movements around really big, impossible-seeming goals, and actually achieved them. My friend Ben Stewart was the head of communications at Greenpeace U.K. for years, and when I first met him more than fifteen years ago, he told me about a plan he was drawing up with other environmentalist activists. He explained that Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and this revolution had been powered by one thing: coal. Because coal contributes more than any other fuel to global warming, his team was drawing up a plan to force the government to end all new coal mines and new power stations in Britain, and move rapidly to leaving all the country’s existing coal in the ground to ensure it will never be burned. When he explained it, I literally laughed out loud. Good luck to you, I said. I’m on your side, but you’re being a dreamer.
Within five years, the development of every single new coal mine and new coal power plant in Britain was stopped, and the government had been forced to set in stone plans to close down all the ones that already existed. As a result of their campaign, the place that launched the world on the road to global warming had begun to seek out a path beyond it.
I wanted to talk to Ben about our attention crisis, and how we could learn from other movements that have succeeded in the past. He said: “I agree with you it’s a crisis. It’s a crisis for the human species. But I don’t think it’s being identified [like that] in the same way that structural racism or climate change [are]. I don’t think we’re at that point yet…. I don’t think that it’s understood that it’s a societal problem, and that it’s caused by decisions by corporate actors, and that it can change.” So Ben told me the very first step to building a movement is to create a “consciousness-raising breakthrough cultural moment, where people go—‘Shit, my brain’s been frazzled by this stuff. It’s why I don’t have some of the pleasures in life I used to have.’ ” How do we do that? The ideal tool, he said, is what he calls “a site battle.” This is where you choose a place that symbolizes the wider struggle, and begin a nonviolent fight there. An obvious example is Rosa Parks taking her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Think, he said, about how we did it with coal. Man-made global warming is a rapidly unfolding disaster, but—like our attention crisis—it can easily seem pretty abstract, and far away, and hard to get a handle on. Even once you do understand it, it can seem so huge and overwhelming that you are often left feeling powerless to do anything. When Ben first drew up his plans, there was a coal-fired power station in Britain named Kingsnorth, and the government was planning to authorize the construction of another coal station right next to it. This, Ben realized, was the whole global problem in microcosm. So after a lot of planning with his allies, he broke into the power station and rappelled down its side, painting onto the side of the building a warning about the extreme weather events that coal unleashes across the world.
They were all arrested and put on trial—which was part of their plan. They intended to use the justice process—in a jujitsu move—as a perfect opportunity to put coal itself on trial. They called some of the leading scientific experts from all over the world to testify, to explain what the burning of coal is doing to the ecosystem. In Britain there’s a law that says that in an emergency, you can break some rules—you don’t get charged with trespassing, for example, if you break into a burning building to save people. Ben and his legal team argued that this was an emergency: they were trying to prevent the planet from being set on fire. Twelve ordinary British jurors considered the facts—and they acquitted Ben and the other activists on all counts. It was a sensational story, reported all over the world. In the wake of the negative publicity around coal that emerged out of the trial, the British government abandoned all plans to build new coal-powered stations—and began to shutter the ones that remained.
Ben explained that a site battle makes it possible to “tell the story about the wider problem,” and when you do this, “it speeds up the national conversation” by waking up a lot of people to what’s really going on. For this first stage, Ben said, “you don’t need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people’s attention, and then enough people feel that it’s a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there’s a clear direction.”
So Ben asked: Should people be surrounding Facebook HQ? Twitter? What’s the site battle here? What’s the issue we start on? This is something activists need to debate and decide on. As I write this, I know one group is considering projecting a video of Holocaust survivors talking about the dangers of supercharging far-right ideas onto the side of Facebook’s HQ. Ben stressed that site battles alone don’t deliver victory—what they do is establish the crisis clearly in the public’s mind, and draw more people into a movement. Their participation after that will take many different forms. On attention, Ben said, a site battle is an opportunity to explain to people this is a fight “about personal liberation”—about “liberating ourselves from people who are controlling our minds without our consent.” That is “something that people can coalesce around—and it’s highly motivating as well.” That then becomes a movement millions of people can join—and that movement can then begin to fight at lots of different levels. Some of it will be inside the political system, organizing within political parties, or lobbying the government. Some of it will continue to be outside the political system, with direct action and persuading other citizens. To succeed, you need both.
As I talked with Ben, I wondered if a movement to achieve these goals should be named Attention Rebellion. He smiled when I suggested it. “It is an attention rebellion,” he said. I realized this will require a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back.
At times it seemed to me that this would be a hard movement to get off the ground—but then I remembered that all the movements that have changed your life and my life were hard to get off the ground. For example, when gay people first started organizing in the 1890s, they could be put in prison just for saying who they loved. When labor unions started fighting for the weekend, they were beaten by the police and their leaders were shot or hanged. What we face is, in many ways, vastly less challenging than the cliff they had to scale. Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called “naive.” The exact opposite is the truth. It’s naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.”
I realized that we have to decide now: Do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it. As one politician said: “You don’t get what you don’t fight for.”
Even as it became clearer to me what we need to do now, there were some unresolved thoughts that kept nagging at me. Lying beneath so many of the causes of this crisis that I had learned about, there seemed to be one big cause—but I was reluctant to reckon with it because it is so big, and, to be honest, I hesitate to write about it now, in case it daunts you too. Back in Denmark, Sune Lehmann had shown me the evidence that the world is speeding up, and that process is shrinking our collective attention span. He showed that social media is a major accelerant. But he made it clear that this has been happening for a very long time. His study started analyzing data from the 1880s, and it showed that every decade since, the way we experience the world has been getting faster, and we have been focusing on any one topic less and less.
I kept puzzling away at this question. Why? Why has this been happening so long? This trend far precedes Facebook, or most of the factors I have written about here. What’s the underlying cause stretching back to the 1880s? I discussed it with many people, and the most persuasive answer came from the Norwegian scientist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who is a professor of social anthropology. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, he said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea—economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy—and each individual company in it—should get bigger and bigger. That’s how we now define success. If a country’s economy grows, its politicians are likely to be reelected. If a company grows, its CEOs are likely garlanded. If a country’s economy or a company’s share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organizing principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world.
Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets—by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn’t have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth. Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more and more in the same amount of time.
As I read Thomas’s work more deeply, I realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going—and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. In fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about—our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.
I thought about what Dr. Charles Czeisler had told me back at Harvard Medical School. If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.” This is true of sleep—and it’s true of much more than sleep.
It was intimidating to realize that something so deeply ingrained in our way of life is—over time—an acid on our attention. But I already knew we don’t have to live like this. My friend Dr. Jason Hickel, who is an economic anthropologist at the University of London, is perhaps the leading critic of the concept of economic growth in the world—and he has been explaining for a long time that there is an alternative. When I went to see him, he explained that we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a “steady-state economy.” We would abandon economic growth as the driving principle of the economy and instead choose a different set of goals. At the moment we think we’re prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged to buy things—most of which don’t even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals that don’t raid our attention, and don’t raid the planet’s resources.
As Jason and I talked, in a public park in London in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, I looked around us, where people were sitting in the middle of a workday under the trees, enjoying nature. This was, I realized, the only time in my life the world had truly slowed down. A terrible tragedy had forced us to do it—but there was also, for many of us, a hint of relief. It was the first time in centuries that the world chose, together, to stop racing, and pause. We decided as a society to value something other than speed and growth. We literally looked up and saw the trees.
I suspect that, in the long run, it will ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. I can’t tell you I have all the answers to how we do that—but I believe that if an Attention Rebellion begins, we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself.
But we will have to do this in any event—for another reason. The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds—but it is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits. And these two crises, I was coming to believe, are intertwined.
There is one particularly large reason why we need an Attention Rebellion today. It’s stark. Human beings have never needed our ability to focus—our superpower as a species—more than we do at this moment, because we face an unprecedented crisis.
As I write these words, I am looking at a webcam of San Francisco, showing the streets where I walked with Tristan Harris. He told me there—just over a year before—that his biggest worry about the destruction of our attention is that it will prevent us from dealing with global warming. Right now, on those streets, it’s midday, but you can’t see the sun—it has been blacked out by ash from the massive wildfires ripping across California. One in every thirty-three acres in the state has burned. The house Tristan grew up in, not far away, has been consumed by the flames, and most of his belongings have been destroyed. The streets where I had this conversation about the climate crisis with him have ash flecked across them, and the sky is glowing a low, dark orange.
The three years I’ve worked on this book have been years of fire. Several of the cities I’ve spent time in have been choked by the smoke from huge and unprecedented wildfires—Sydney, São Paulo, and San Francisco. Like a lot of people, I read about the fires, but only a little—I began to feel quickly overwhelmed. The moment when it became real to me—when I felt it in my gut—was a moment that might seem small when I describe it.
Starting in 2019, Australia experienced what became known as its Black Summer, a series of wildfires so vast that they are hard to describe. Three billion animals had to flee or were burned to death, and so many species were lost that Professor Kingsley Dixon, a botanist, called it a “biological Armageddon.” Some Australians had to huddle on the beaches, surrounded by a ring of flames, as they wondered if they should try to scramble onto boats to escape. They could hear the fires getting closer. It sounded like a raging waterfall, witnesses said, and it was broken only by the sound of bottles smashing as their houses burned up, one by one. The smoke from the fires was visible 1,200 miles away in New Zealand, where the skies over the South Island turned orange.
About three weeks or so into the fires, I was on the phone to a friend in Sydney when I heard a loud shrieking sound. It was the fire alarm in his apartment. All over the city, in offices and homes, these alarms had started to sound. This was because there was so much smoke in the air traveling in from the wildfires that the smoke alarms believed each individual building was on fire. This meant that one by one, many people in Sydney turned off their smoke alarms, and they sat in the silence and the smoke. I only realized why I found this so disturbing when I talked it over with my friend Bruno Giussani, a Swiss writer. He said to me that we were turning off the warning systems in our homes that are designed to protect us, because the bigger warning systems that are meant to protect us all—our society’s ability to focus on what scientists are telling us, and act on what they say—are not working.
The climate crisis can be solved. We need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and toward powering our societies by clean, green sources of energy. But to do that we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. These solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in algorithm-pumped fury. We can only solve the climate crisis if we solve our attention crisis. As I contemplated this, I began to think again about something that James Williams wrote: “I used to think there were no great political struggles left…. How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is the prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.”
When I look now at the orange, fire-scarred skies over San Francisco on this grainy webcam, I keep thinking about the light in Provincetown in the summer I spent there without my phone or the internet, and how pure and perfect it seemed. James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life—my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light—the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive—and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.
When I hung up on my friend in Sydney so he could unscrew his fire alarm and switch it off, I thought, if our attention continues to shatter, the ecosystem won’t wait patiently for us to regain our focus. It will fall and it will burn. At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: “We must love one another, or die.” I believe that now we must focus together—or face the fires alone.