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How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span
The infinite scroll has ruined our ability to focus. Is wasting more time the key to getting it back?
For the past two years, a group of friends and I have gathered each Wednesday to discuss our progress on a famously grueling book, beginning with Infinite Jest and The Power Broker and continuing with Ulysses and Gotham, a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. Twenty years ago, an adult could focus on a screen without interruption for an average of two and a half minutes, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Half of adults in the U.K. believe their attention span is shrinking, and about that many say that “deep thinking has become a thing of the past.” Multiple best sellers in recent years have attempted to diagnose or cure this problem, from Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing to Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, while others, including Jean Twenge’s iGen and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, blame much of the distractibility and misery of young people on smartphones and social media.
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