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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.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 147)

It's not just the phone; it's the way the phone is currently designed. It's not just the internet; it's the way the internet is currently designed and the incentives for the people designing it. You could keep your phone and your laptop, and you could keep your social-media accounts- and have much better attention, if they were designed around a different set of incentives. Once you see it in this different way, Tristan came to believe, it opens up a very different path forward, and the beginnings of a way out of our crisis. If the existence of the phone and the internet is the sole driver of this problem, we're trapped and in deep trouble- because as a society, we're not going to discard our tech. But if it's the current design of the phones and the internet and the sites we run on them that is driving a lot of the problem, there's a very different way they could work that would put us all in a very different position. After you've adjusted your perspective in this way, seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 126)

"Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 125)

One of his studies showed that children are more empathetic if they read storybooks or watch movies, but not if they watch shorter shows. This appears to fit, it seemed to me, with what we see on social media if you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn't kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 88)

The more I talked with him, the more I reflected that empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy the realization by at least some white people that other ethnic groups have feelings and abilities and dreams just like them; the realization by some men that the way they have exerted power over women was illegitimate and caused real suffering; the realization by many heterosexuals that gay love is just like straight love. Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 87)

I realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature- that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me. And I don't agree with the messages in the medium of social media. I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature. It is why spending time on these sites even when, by the rules of the game, I am doing well, gaining likes and followers leaves me feeling drained and unhappy. I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 84)

This made me wonder what the message is that w absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site- it doesn't matter whether you are Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: you shouldn't focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them. How about Facebook? What's the message in that medium? It seems to be first: your life exists to be displayed to other people, and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting. Third: somebody is your "friend" if you regularly look at their edited highlight reels, and they look at yours this is what friendship means. How about Instagram? First: what matters is how you look on the outside. Second: what matters is how you look on the outside. Third: what matters is how you look on the outside. Fourth: what matters is whether people like how you look on the outside. (I don't mean this glibly or sarcastically; that really is the message the site offers.)

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 82)

I noticed that if I spent a day where I experienced three hours of flow early on, for the rest of the day, I felt relaxed and open and able to engage to walk along the beach, or start chatting to people, or read a book, without feeling cramped, or irritable, or phone-hungry. It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind -perhaps because I knew I had done my best. I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 60)

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it's a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it's like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task like you are the rock you are climbing.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 56)

Mihaly found that distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two or more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 55)

He called it a "flow state." This is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. It is the deepest form of focus and attention that we know of. When he began to explain to people what a flow state is and asked if they had ever experienced something like it, 85 percent of them recognized and remembered at least one time they'd felt this way and they often said these moments were the highlights of their lives. It didn't matter if they got there by performing brain surgery or strumming the guitar or making great bagels- they described their flow states with wonder.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 55)

Mihaly started to study adults who engaged in other activities -people who were long-distance swimmers, or rock climbers, or chess players. He only looked at first at nonprofessionals. Often they were doing things that were physically uncomfortable, exhausting, and even dangerous, for no obvious reward- -yet they loved it. He talked to them about how they felt when they were doing the thing that drew this extraordinary focus out of them. He noticed that although these activities were very different, the way the people described how they felt had striking similarities. One word kept cropping up again and again. They kept saying things like: "I was carried on by the flow."

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 54)

All around me, I could see reminders of why I had cast aside my phone in the first place. I sat in Café Heaven, a lovely little place in the West End of Provincetown, and ate an eggs Benedict. Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person. Something about their conversation seemed odd to me, and I couldn't place it at first. Then I realized they weren't, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, who was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother had died a month before. The blond didn't even offer a cursory "I'm so sorry to hear that"; he simply went back to talking about himself. I realized that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference. I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention -it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don't say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life sometimes several times a day- I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn't look at the feed, the news, the buzz- just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn't miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 48)

The evidence is clear, Earl told me: there's no alternative, if you want to do things well, to focusing carefully on one thing at a time. As I learned all this, I realized that my desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing my ability to focus was like my desire to eat at McDonald's every day and stay trim-an impossible dream.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 42)

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you'll make more mistakes, you'll be less creative, and you'll remember less of what you do. I wanted to know: How often are most of us engaging in switching like this? Professor Gloria Mark, at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who I interviewed, has discovered that the average American worker is distracted roughly once every three minutes. Several other studies have shown a large chunk of Americans are almost constantly being interrupted and switching between tasks. The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"-which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.

— Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (Page 41)