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.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 274)