So, for episode 5 of the big blogs that I’m trying to do once a month (you can watch the video version here) I want to talk about 3 books and the concept of stolen focus.
The 3 books that are most important in this little discussion are Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
This story starts in 2015 when I realised that I had to come off social media because it was affecting my relationships with everybody else because I was spending so much time on social media.
I was realising that the positive influence of social media was more important to me than my social contacts in the real world and so I stopped.
It’s fair to say that this raised a few eyebrows and more than raised a few eyebrows and people thought I was f@cking mental.
I’m not sure anyone could suggest that it’s held me or my career back since then in any way.
And so, in some of the books that I’ve read about this over that time and probably to justify myself from stopping I’ve gained a lot and learned a lot and realised that I wouldn’t have had time to read the books if I was actually on social media.
And so, Oliver Burkeman’s book is critically important because Four Thousand Weeks is all you have and if you spend 4 hours a day on social media, that’s 28 hours a week and that means you lose a day a week and that’s four thousand days that you’re losing to social media so let me just say that again to be absolutely clear on a line on its own.
4 hours a day on your phone is 4 thousand days lost.
I’m pretty sure as you get close to the other end you would do anything for those 4 thousand days.
But the stolen focus thing is critical because it’s not just that the time that we spend on social media is lost, it’s that it’s changing us as humans into less of ourselves and a shadow of what we could and should be.
To give you one example the feature of infinite scrolling which is your ability scroll upwards on Instagram for as long as you can be arsed is available to 3 billion people around the world and has doubled people’s social media usage just with that feature.
It’s now estimated that people waste the equivalent of 200,000 lives every single day as a result of infinite scrolling.
The guy who invented it has developed significant mental health issues due to the guilt and understanding of what he’s done and how he has damaged the world.
And then, for this blog if you factor in the issues in Talking to Strangers which is the extraordinary piece of work done by Malcom Gladwell pre-George Floyd in the United States when he just wanted to make sense of how people were talking to each other and how that’s influenced by the fact that our children now are much more comfortable talking digitally than they are face-to-face.
None of this stuff ever makes a difference when you’re sat at your desk at work dictating a blog and hoping that people will read it and change but it should, and I hope it does for one person who reads this.
I dare you to turn off Instagram and delete it from your phone (don’t worry they’ll be pestering you to go back so you can go back anytime you want).
I dare you to go onto audible (better still buy the book) and get Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and if you do that then try Stolen Focus and if you manage to get through both then do Talking to Strangers and then do everything Gladwell has ever written and then you’ll wonder how you ever had time for social media.
Once you’ve done that, understand that if you work in healthcare like I do the most important skill you can develop is empathy and as Johann Hari talks about in Stolen Focus, the best way to develop empathy is to read fiction and then get some fiction and read some fiction.
So, that’s the homework for the rest of your life. That’s your prescription.
Please don’t blame me when you don’t do it and don’t come back to me and let me say I told you so.
It’s long past the time for a change.
Blog Post Number - 3145
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