Why we can't focus.

We are amusing ourselves to death: video, TV, movies, music, podcasts. And on top of that, constant notifications. They're all flooding in. We are always being stimulated, and as a result, it is killing our ability to focus. And this isn't just something that we've noticed about ourselves; research backs this up. Attention spans are declining.

It's easy to blame the internet for this problem, but it's actually much older than that. Though the internet's made it worse, if we want to do something about it, we need to be able to break down the problem and really talk about where it comes from. So, that's what we're going to do today. I'm breaking this problem down into three parts, and it all begins with a shift from books to television.

In the 1980s, Neil Postman wrote the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," and he was primarily interested in the cultural effects of a shift from using the written word as our primary way to transfer information to a shift towards mass media, and in particular, television. The invention of the printing press changed the world. Suddenly, mass communication was possible on a scale that had previously always been impossible.

And this is how new and radical ideas were able to so quickly spread. The Protestant Reformation probably wouldn't have happened without the printing press, or the Enlightenment, or the American Revolution. But media theorists like Postman—and here we should also mention the work of Marshall McLuhan—tell us that how we communicate ideas, the media that we use, actually changes the way that we think. McLuhan's favorite phrase here was, "the medium is the message."

So, Postman uses early American culture as an example of what he calls the typographic mind. This is a mind that has been shaped primarily through consuming books, and that means that it's a mind that's used to prolonged sessions of engaged serious rational activity. In other words, it's a mind that's used to focusing. So, that's the first takeaway: reading as an activity actually helps build your focus, and it shifts the way that you think.

But we've stopped reading. In Postman's time, more people were watching television than reading, and those numbers have only gotten worse. When you add screens, the internet, and phones to all of that, which we'll talk about later, well, that just exacerbates the problem. Two famous examples from American political history illustrate this really well.

The first one is the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. These are famous pieces of American political rhetoric; you should read them if you're at all interested. Some sources say that up to 18,000 people attended these debates, and they were later printed—that's how you can read them. It's actually how Lincoln became famous in the first place.

So, each debate was 3 hours long, and it would actually begin with a 60-minute opening statement from one of the candidates. Then there was a highly structured format with prolonged responses. This meant that the audience had to be able to stay focused for 3 hours and also needed to be able to follow a single complex thought for up to an hour or sometimes 90 minutes at a time.

Postman says that they're able to do this because this audience, which would have mostly been literate people, would be used to following long trains of thought because they had been reading books. And when you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you actually see them speaking in long, complex sentences. How they speak is actually being influenced by the kinds of sentences that they would have read.

But if you skip forward to 1960, and the Kennedy-Nixon debates, you see something really different. These were the first political debates that were on television. So instead of an hour for an opening statement, the entire debate was only an hour, and the opening statement that each candidate got was only 8 minutes. This meant that the audience watching at home didn't have to worry about following one thought for up to an hour or 90 minutes.

Instead, they just got it in small, condensed chunks of information that they could more easily consume. That mirrors their general media consumption that they would get from watching television all the time. The whole debate was only an hour; it literally was one slot of prime time television. And you know what the big takeaway of that debate was? It was that Nixon looked bad on TV. That's why people say that he lost; Kennedy looked better on TV.

Nixon's mom called him to ask him if he was sick. Generally, he just didn't perform well in front of the camera, and he lost the election. Political history, or probably world history, was made because of television.

So already, the media that we were consuming was changing the way that we were going to engage in politics. That's a big consequential change if you think about how much power an American president has. Television was making us used to consuming smaller, sort of bite-sized pieces of information, and it also made us more concerned with things like the appearance of a presidential candidate rather than what he was saying.

I imagine that if they had tried to have a three-hour debate on prime time television, ratings would have slowly declined. People weren't used to focusing for 3 hours at a time anymore. The media that we were consuming was changing our ability to think, and it was causing our ability to focus to decline. Focus is a skill that you have to develop, and if we're watching television all the time, we aren't training ourselves to be deep and reflective thinkers—especially not in the way that we would if we were reading good books.

So then, when it comes time to focus on something like trying to read a really good book, well, you can't do it. You never learned how. People will often tell me that reading books nowadays is inefficient and that there are just better ways to get information. I'm going to use some slang here that I think I'm too old to use sincerely, but this is pure cope.

Getting your information from summaries or even from YouTube videos, like the ones that I make, is a completely different experience than learning from a book. Because in a book, you actually get to follow an author's chain of thought. So as you read an author's thoughts in a book, you are actually thinking with him. You're actually training yourself to think, and as you train yourself to think, you're training yourself to focus. You get like a mental workout when you read, and you're not getting that elsewhere.

So, you're probably screaming at your screen right now because TV certainly isn't the most important form of media that we encounter nowadays. A cable news show gets fewer nighttime viewers than a really good YouTube video these days. And maybe the fact that we can't focus is due to the internet and the constant amount of notifications and this swarm of content that we're constantly in. Or, in other words, you might think that it's this that's to blame.

And I think that's right! Just like we shifted from books to television, we've now moved from television to the internet, and that's a different way of thinking about information. Postman couldn't write about the internet because he was writing about it in the 80s, but another writer has come along to try to pick up some of these thoughts, and that's Nicholas Carr, who wrote the book "The Shallows."

If you had to describe one word to sort of sum up your experience of the internet, I have a feeling it would be something like chaos. The whole point of a page on the web is actually just to keep you looking at it. So if you look at, like, say your YouTube home screen, you're going to see rows and rows of videos. Then you're going to see possibly notifications if you have any of those turned on. You're going to see a search bar that tells you that you could go find anything that you wanted if you search for a video.

Well then very quickly, you're going to be given recommendations. Click on one video, and you're immediately recommended like 12 more. The whole point of that design is that if you ever get bored for even a second, you can click on something else so that you can stay engaged. We're so used to it that it feels normal, but it is a chaotic experience.

And I think YouTube is not even the worst offender by far. I mean, look at TikTok. I don't really use TikTok, but when I've opened the app like twice, I feel like I got a headache almost immediately. And I know I sound old in this video. The idea here is to always give you something to click on next—always. So, even if you are watching a 10-minute video and you think it's a really good 10-minute video and you want to finish it until the end, well, if you're bored for even a second, you have something that could be potentially more exciting. You could click on it, and you could see.

Because these platforms actually don't really care if you keep watching one particular video or if you keep reading one particular article. They just want you to stay on the platform. TikTok wants you on TikTok. YouTube wants you on YouTube. The New York Times wants you to stay on the New York Times site. That's how the internet works. This medium teaches you that information is easy and disposable. If you're even a little bit bored, you can move on. In fact, you should move on. That's implicitly what these platforms are telling you.

In Carr's book, he really likes to stress the plasticity of our brains—that's our ability to change, actually how our brains are structured in response to our environments. Our brains actually change based on what we do, what we need to do, and what kind of tools we use. So look at this chart for the average screen time for Americans, and now ask yourself what do you think that is doing to our brains.

Well, one of the things is it's ruining our ability to focus. The bad news is that your brain is plastic, so the fact that you use your phone all the time or that you watch too many YouTube videos means that you are slowly ruining your ability to focus. The good news, though, is that your brain is plastic so you could fix this.

If you made an effort to read more books, watch less YouTube, throw your phone into like the fires of Mount Doom so it could never bother you again, well that would actually give you a way to save your ability to focus. This really is a solvable problem, but you have to remember that there is a war going on for your attention, and it is not a fair fight. There are large corporations with PhDs in psychology and the best design engineers that they can find, all working to keep you engaged.

And that's why I like to say that the internet is a hostile design environment. So here's a quote from the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker: "The thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them—was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. And that means we need to sort of give a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever."

And that's just one very telling admission from someone who would know. If you listen to other people talk about designing digital experiences, though, it really is basically the same. It's all about capturing and really holding on to your attention. By comparison, something like this—a book—it's not that good at holding your attention unless you're really used to giving your attention to it.

I think that's a nice way of putting it: a book you have to give your attention to. But phones, screens, the internet, videos—they steal your attention. That's why I say that it's a hostile design environment. It is an environment that has been designed in order to steal your attention and thus rob you of your ability to focus as much as possible because people make money from it.

I mean, look, I have to even say this: if I can keep you watching until the end of this video, I make more money. And the people who design these platforms, they're not thinking about what this does to you long term. Steve Jobs told the New York Times that he wouldn't let his kids use an iPad, and Mark Zuckerberg and his wife don't let their kids use Facebook.

I don't even know if they let their kids have phones. Basically, these are people who would really know the effects of these technologies. They help to design and build them and popularize them, and they know what it does to people. And they wanted to protect their kids from that, so I would ask: why don't you want to protect yourself from that?

Now, there are things you can do to build your focus, but they're all easier said than done. First, you have to turn off your phone. You have to learn to take long breaks from it. If you can take a day-long break from it, if you can go an entire day without looking at your phone, then you're already well on your way. But you have to get used to it—having something in your pocket that can always grab your attention with a single sound or a buzz. Even if you have it on silent, the ability, the sort of promise, that if you just turned it on, maybe you would find something fun, that is going to rob you of your ability to focus.

Next, you want to start consuming media that actually demands that you pay attention. This could even be movies; it doesn't always have to be books. But if you're going to watch movies, they can't be those new Netflix movies because those movies are actually being written and produced with the intention that you will watch them while you're also scrolling on your phone. They're made for people who are distracted. It's already changing the way that we make art.

So, watch actual good movies. Go to a movie theater that will kick you out if you turn your phone on. And the third way is probably the most important: get used to not being digitally stimulated all the time. Go on morning walks and don't take your phone at all. Just go and be there with your thoughts. Maybe even see how long you can go on that walk while you sustain a thought in your head. You know, thinking through an idea, debating with yourself—just try it out.

It can be more fun than it sounds. The point is to just get used to not needing to be stimulated by a phone or by a screen all the time. And by doing that, we are going to be training our brains to actually rewire themselves. We are actually then encouraging our minds to get used to focusing again, and maybe we can make a little bit of progress, and we'll actually be able to focus on things that we care about.