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

"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"

"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."

Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.

"After the war, he + his parents ended up in a refugee camp, which he found squalid, + lacking in hope. One day, in these ruins of a life, Mihaly was told that he was going to join a Scout troop for boys in the camp, + he started going out into the wilderness with them. He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult, like navigating a steep ascent.... He thinks this experience saved him."

"I turned to my piles of books, thinking idly of how, all through my teens and twenties, I would spend days on end lying in bed, doing nothing but reading in one great gulp. But [now]... I had been reading in a rushed, hyperactive way...."

"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."