Memorable quotes
“It becomes exhausting.” More importantly, Sune said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It’s pulling us more and more up onto the surface.”,
“Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the”,
“Charles believes that—as he said to another interviewer —“every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep.” This goes on day after day. “That’s a major contributing factor to this epidemic of sleep deficiency—because we’re exposing ourselves to light later and later”,
“I wondered if one of the reasons why I slept so much better on Cape Cod was because I returned to something closer to this natural rhythm. When the sun sets on Provincetown, the town gets much darker, and by my beach house there was almost no artificial light, barely even a streetlamp”,
“They wouldn’t be buying things.” If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business”,
“Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone”,
“For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience— you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall”,
“What happens when that deepest layer of thinking becomes available to fewer and fewer people, until it is a small minority interest, like opera, or volleyball”,
“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”,
“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”,
“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”,
“I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter—in terms of followers and retweets—are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attentiondeprived, simplistic, vituperative”,
“It’s not friendship to pore jealously over another person’s photos and boasts and complaints, and to expect them to do the same for you. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of friendship. Being friends is about looking into each other’s eyes, doing things together in the world, an endless exchange of gut laughs and bear hugs, joy and grief and dancing”,
“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”,
“Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more”,
“You draw together the different parts of the book in order to make sense of the key theme,” he said. This isn’t a flaw in your reading. This is reading. If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book”,
“He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organized personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions”,
“It was only when he turned off the spotlight of his focus, and let his mind wander on its own, that he could connect the pieces and finally solve the problem”,
“Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.”,
“So we aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus—we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along”,
“If you want to think about thinking itself, he told me, you should see it as being like a symphony. “You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion—but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.” You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus—but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play Beethoven. You need mind-wandering to activate the other instruments and to make the sweetest music”,
“All this mania, all these demands on my time, I realized, made me feel important. I wanted in a sudden rush to send emails in order to get emails back—to feel needed again”,
“You think you control your attention; you think that if somebody messes with it, you will know, and you’ll be able to spot and resist it right away, but, in reality, we are fallible sacks of meat, and we are fallible in predictable ways that can be figured out by magicians and messed with”,
“Later, Tristan explained to me that this is a core insight of magic—you can manipulate people and they don’t even know it’s happening”,
“They were already thinking about another of the key lessons of the class, taken from B. F. Skinner: build in immediate reinforcements. If you want to shape the user’s behavior, make sure he gets hearts and likes right away. Using these principles, they launched a new app of their own. They named it Instagram”,
“How can we make this more engaging?” And that meant more attention-sucking, more interrupting—on and on it went, with better techniques being discovered every week”,
“What started to really concern me over the years,” he told me, “was just watching my friends who had originally gotten into this business because they thought they could make the world better, [and now] were caught in this arms race to manipulate human nature”,
“The job of technology, Jef believed, was to lift people up and make it possible to achieve their higher goals. He taught his son: “What is technology for? Why do we even make technology? We make technology because it takes the parts of us that are most human and it extends them”,
“Silicon Valley sells itself by articulating “a big, lofty goal—connecting everyone in the world, or whatever it is. But when you’re actually doing the day-to-day work, it’s about increasing user numbers”,
“Tony Fadell, who co-invented the iPhone, said: “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?” He worried that he had helped create “a nuclear bomb” that can “blow up people’s brains and reprogram them.”,
“It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic”,
“Imagine if I could predict all your actions in chess before you made them. It would be trivial for me to dominate you. That’s what is happening on a human scale now”,
“This isn’t some conspiracy theory, any more than it’s a conspiracy theory to explain that KFC wants you to eat fried chicken. It’s simply an obvious result of the incentive structure that has been put in place and that we allow to continue. “Their business model,” he says, “is screen time, not life time”,
“The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests”,
“So an algorithm that prioritizes keeping you glued to the screen will— unintentionally but inevitably—prioritize outraging and angering you. If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging”,
“But today, this attitude— condemn more, understand less—has become the default response of almost everyone, from the right to the left, as we spend our lives dancing to the tune of algorithms that reward fury and penalize mercy.”,
“The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen”,
“these algorithms are “debasing the soil of society…. You need…a social fabric, and if you debase it, you don’t know what you are going to wake up to.”,
“Over time, if you expose any country to all this for long enough, it will become a country so lost in rage and unreality that it can’t make sense of its problems and it can’t build solutions. This means that the streets and the skies actually become more dangerous—so you become hypervigilant, and this wrecks your attention even more”,
“But social media works exactly this way. There’s a “destination we want to get to, and most of the time, it doesn’t actually get us there—it takes”,
“Tristan believes that what we are seeing is “the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines.” We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused”,
“He always says to them: “Isn’t that exactly the moment, in the allegories, where you turn the thing off— [when] it’s starting to do things you can’t predict”,
“He says you should “time-box”—which means you should draw up a detailed schedule of what you are going to do each day, and stick to it”,
“At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them”,
“It’s hard to get from that hill to this hill, because we have to go through a valley. That’s the role of regulation—to help making crossing that valley easier. But the hill on the other side is much, much nicer.”,
“They’re not selling your data. They’re just selling an asymmetric knowledge about how you work—even more than you know about yourself—to the highest bidder”,
“It’s not that [people in this state are] not paying attention. It’s that they’re paying attention to any cues or signs of threat or danger in their environment. That is where their focus”,
“There’s a Buddhist saying—be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others”,
“How many people in the world feel that at the moment? Anything that reduces stress improves our ability to pay deep attention”,
“This is a condition of ‘domestication,’ keeping horses in unnatural situations,” he told me. “If they’d never been put in a stall, and they’d never been subjected to that psychological pressure early on, they wouldn’t develop it.”,
“Your individual efforts to improve your attention can be dwarfed by an environment full of things that wreck it”,
“Instead, we got slammed headfirst into a vision of the future—and we realized “we hate it. It’s not good for our wellbeing. We desperately miss each other.” Under Covid, even more than before, we were living in simulations of social life, not the real thing. It was better than nothing, to be sure—but it felt thinner”,
“His attention, which had been deteriorating for some time, was now shattered. He was on his phone almost every waking hour, seeing the world mainly through TikTok, a new app that made Snapchat look like a Henry James novel”,
“With this image in mind, I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention”,