"Obesity is not a medical epidemic- it's a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat." The way we live changed dramatically our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or bike around- and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. Something similar, he said, may be happening with the changes in our attention and focus. He told me that after studying this topic for decades, he believes we need to ask if we are now developing "an attentional pathogenic culture"-an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it. There's scientific evidence for many factors in poor attention, he said, and for some people there are some causes that lie in their biology, but he told me what we may also need to figure out: Is "our society driving people to this point so often, because we have an epidemic [that's being) caused by specific things that are dysfunctional in our society?" Later I asked him- -if I put you in charge of the world, and you wanted to ruin people's ability to pay attention, what would you do? He thought about it for a moment, and said: "Probably about what our society is doing."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 13)