Stolen Focus

I mean, actually, this technology addiction was going to be sharing the 40 collages that I made after reading two other books about technology addiction.

They were Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke and Stolen Focus by Johann Harry.

Those two books really inspired me to create 40 collages, and I was just going to share the collages.

But I started writing about what I knew about recovery and addiction just in general, and then more specifically about technology, media, and Internet addiction.

Oh, yeah.

I'm just going to bring up what Victoria said.

She said, Stolen Focus is a great book, and I love that you made collages to react to it.

Yeah.

On the surface, it looks like a win-win, but in reality, this change had far worse consequences.

In Johan Hari's best-selling book, Stolen Focus, he documents exactly what went wrong when these platforms rolled out these kinds of feeds.

algorithm is neutral about the question of whether it wants you to be calm or angry that's not its concern it only cares about one thing will you keep scrolling unfortunately there's a quirk of human behavior on average we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm

like this no i know but go like this for the video

So that is a reality we're all experiencing.

Um, what is the response to it? And also, if you look at the, like, the, the different, uh, reactions to it, I've, I'm thinking of the book, uh, Stolen Focus from Johann Hari.

Mm-hmm.

Um, or Nir Eyal, who has a different approach, which basically, uh, is all about indistractable and just you having to come up with a discipline to avoid being distracted, and some other people think it's, you know, the system needs to change.

The, the book recommendation circle is now so vast that, uh, books enter the circle, and we don't much care where they came from as long as you pick it up.

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari.

I'm holding this up to the screen, and I marked a page on here.

There's actually several pages I would love to go into, but the one that was most provocative to me dealt with the concept of what this man defined as...

I can't remember if this came up in a recent webinar or d- another podcast I did, but I was bashing the birthday texts.

I'm not on social media anymore, Dan.

I read that book, Stolen Focus.

I heard about the 200,000 human lifetimes.

Yeah.

But, you know, but they book back in-

Mm

... and they come back and have the same terrible haircut.

... and that charisma-

Yeah

... and you can make someone laugh, you'll be fully booked.

I've worked with hairdressers that are so talented and aren't busy-