The phenomenon of depleted focus is a social epidemic.
The paradox of prohibiting surveillance capitalism on social media

Recently, I had something embarrassing to confess. I had days where I couldn't focus on work at all. I thought I was addicted to Instagram, so I limited my screen time to 10 minutes a day. But then a game ad popped up, so I downloaded a mobile game. And that's how I spent a week, getting sucked into the game and even topping up my cash.

It was only when my game money ran out and I could no longer play that I snapped out of it and deleted the game. This was something that I, who had lived as a professional "self-development" person, never thought would happen to me.

My focus was stolen. I felt a sense of admiration for the "designers." I marveled at their ability to create a design that was so well-crafted, it was difficult to escape once you got sucked in. And then a sense of self-loathing washed over me, "I lost, and you won."

Having spent a week hooked on a game after trying to escape social media, I wondered how many people could actually break free from such sophisticated designs. And I started reading Johan Hari's book, "Stolen Focus" which pinpoints the root cause of our declining focus not as a lack of self-control but as a societal system.

Most people, like me, think that our inability to concentrate and our being distracted is a result of failing to exercise our self-control. But Johan Hari, in this book, holds the "designers" responsible for our focus problem.

The ability to focus is collapsing in all corners of the world. American teenagers can't focus on one thing for more than 65 seconds, and the average focus time for working adults is a mere 3 minutes. The author argues that the serious phenomenon of focus depletion in modern society is a social epidemic like "obesity."

Obesity was very rare 50 years ago, but today it's an epidemic in the Western world. It's not because we suddenly became greedy. It's because of the changes in our environment: the quality of food we eat has deteriorated, our food supply chain has changed, and cities have been built that make it difficult to walk or bike, which has led to changes in our bodies. The author argues that similar changes are happening to our focus. We live in a society that is "designed" for us to lack focus.

First, let's look at social media. Their fuel is our "focus." The longer people stare at their phones, the more ads they see, and the more money social media companies make. That's why social media is "designed" to strengthen their algorithms and exploit our weaknesses to keep us scrolling down the screen endlessly.

Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer who actively speaks out against the harmful nature of this design, confessed that there is a real team of Google engineers who control the thoughts and emotions of a billion people. He also tried to persuade his Google colleagues that their actions in creating a system that destroys focus are unethical.

The author argues that we need to prohibit the "surveillance capitalism" of social media companies and stop them from continuing in this direction with our own hands. In addition to social media, another factor that hinders our ability to focus is cheap and lousy food. Global experts say that we are ignoring the fact that changes in food are taking away a significant portion of our focus.

Most of the food we eat today is "ultra-processed food." Ultra-processed foods are "like putting rocket fuel in a BMW mini," which triggers an energy crash, and as a result, we lose our focus. The author says that we each need to change to some extent, but we need to confront the bigger forces behind this.

Unless we own mountains and farms and don't farm, we can only buy our food from supermarkets, which are filled with cheap processed foods. This is something that is advertised to us from the moment we are born with a huge budget, making it hard to break free from it. In addition to this, the author talks about various problems that prevent us from focusing, arguing that this is a social epidemic and calls for a fundamental change in the system.

As I read the book, I felt a strange sense of relief. I felt deeply ashamed of having focus issues and whipped myself for it, but it felt good to know that I wasn't the only one with this problem.

The author also confesses that he changed his way of reacting to being distracted while writing the book. Originally, he used to make himself feel ashamed and force himself to focus, but now he thinks about what he needs to do to reach a state of flow and focus deeply, what meaningful activities he can do right now, and what is beyond his capabilities. He said he realized that pursuing a state of flow was much more effective than self-punishing shame.

The number of people searching for "how to make your brain focus" has increased by 300%. People are saying everywhere on social media that their minds are not working. But the world mainly sends messages to whip ourselves. That's not a fundamental solution.

The problem of focus goes beyond being a personal problem and can cause major social problems. If we can't read long texts and can't focus, it will become difficult to carry out a healthy democracy. Democracy is possible when there are people who can exchange healthy opinions, but if we can't focus, no one will understand who is saying what, how society is functioning. This can lead to populism and the risk