Zoë’s Reviews > Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again > Status Update

"One day, I spent three hours reading the same first few pages of a novel, getting lost in distracted thoughts every time, almost as though I was stoned, and I thought—I can't continue like this. Reading fiction had always been one of my greatest pleasures, and losing it would be like losing a limb. I announced to my friends that I was going to do something drastic."

"The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.' "

"He said it might help me grasp what's happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the Western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent.... The way we lived changed dramatically—our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or bike around...."

"I watched him scrolling through his phone.... Milling past him was a stream of people also staring at their screens. I felt as alone as if I had been standing in an empty Iowa cornfield, miles from another human."

"At every stage in this trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down... he immediately took out his phone, while we were still in our seats. 'You promised not to use it,' I said. He replied: 'I meant I wouldn't make phone calls. I can't not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.' He said this with baffled honesty, as if I had asked him to hold his breath for ten days."

"our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking. I could feel it happen to me—I would buy piles of books, and I would glimpse them guiltily from the corner of my eye as I sent, I told myself, just *one* more tweet. I still read a lot, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. I had just turned forty... we would lament our lost capacity for concentration"