incredibly disappointing book

Such a waste of time. the writer could be someone like Karl Marx, focusing solely on collective responsibilities and evil corporations and not giving really any tips how to regain focus. Everyone else is at fault but not you, so you cannot regain focus. what a bummer. I genuinely hated listening to this book.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

this book is bad

this book is highly political. most chapters go something like this. Here are facts and here is science (this is fine) and then the conclusion of the chapter is: and thats why my political beliefs are correct. let's go and start a marxist revolution against our tech overlords!

The author has very little understanding of B.F. skinners works and paints him as an evil scientist. Yes his experiments were used to manipulate people and make them addicted to phones, but skinner died in 1990 long before the age of social media. Its like calling Alfred noble evil cause people used his invention to bomb houses.

B.F. skinners work was about explaining the effect the environment has on organism. The problem he had is that it is very hard to isolate a variable in the environment. he solved this by inventing the skinner box which is a box that you put a pigeon in. the box has a key on the wall that can be manipulated. The key is the only thing in the pigeons environment that changes and thus he could scientifically explain what effect that variable had on the pigeon.

Later people in silicon valley realised that this experiment is very similar to our experience when we interact with our phone or our computers or video games. Sins the only variable that changes is what is happing on the screen they could use the same principles that skinner used to manipulate his bird to manipulate the people using the devises.

Our phone addictions don’t make skinner bad, it just proves him right.

Last is the weird connection to climate change in the book that is also political mumbo jumbo. His argument is if we cant focus we cant solve climate change. But i really don’t see what climate change has to do with the topic. It was just thrown in there to give people with the same political believes as Johann Hari a political boner and doesn't really belong in this book.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

Feminine story telling

After two hours of listening I stopped and deleted it. Reminder of the book might be better but probably isn’t. Shallow, emotional and useless story telling, you probably know the kind. It offers little new to learn and instead fills pages with emotion loaded personal stories.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Best book in a long while

This book is full of information, and yet it is written so that it’s easy to follow and understand. Writer tells the story in very fascinating way and the book just gets better and better the longer you listen to it.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Good book… too woke

I have been following the author for a while, with other brilliant books. This one, in my honest view, misses the mark. Too many woke ideas and climate change propaganda, a negative bias and (from a psychologist), a lack of rigor on the ADHD issue. In general, the book has very interesting ideas, but the organization and focus is… just not there. Cannot recommend unless you just want to get a simple view on the issue for a very, very general audience. That, of course, leaving aside the biases from the author. The quality from his previous works is just not there, but I did still enjoy a few ideas from the book that I found valuable. What a pitty, nice try though!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Great book drawing attention to a real challenge

Hi enjoyed the breadth of the book and that there are practical suggestions on what can be done while not diminishing the scale of the shift needed in the system as a whole

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

so important

listened at 1.2 speed, reccomend! so important, I'm so glad I picked up this book - Thank you for the resources at the end!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

It deserves more yet….

The author does a really good job of laying out his arguments and excellent job of interviewing experts. The 1st half was eye opening to say the least, the chapter on adhd and learning was mind blowing and took me back to my childhood of play and learn. However, the author keeps inserting climate change into the narrative (this is his hidden bias). It made no sense to the many times he made reference to it and maybe once or twice introduced interviews of his “hand”picked experts to support his beliefs. Something he avoided in all other chapters where he listened to both sides of the aisle. If this book was strictly about stolen focus, I would have rated it it much higher, but it’s not, it’s also about climate activism with no background, and forethought as to how his personal opinion without facts can affect the listener, especially since in one of the chapters I loved he spoke of how we, as a society, don’t deep dive anymore into serious subjects and let those short “clips” guide our beliefs. The author needs to do a “deep dive” on his climate change concerns before he spouts off trivial and superficial opinions on a subject that deserves its own book and certainly a lot of interviews from opposing and different points of views so we as a society can critically and intelligently come tou our OWN conclusion as to best serve the earth we live on.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

An excellent perspective on how we lost focus

Excellent book on explaining why we are having so much difficulty in maintaining focus. Johann carefully presents different scientific research on the why (which is the result of different "forces"), with a genuine preoccupation in presenting conflicting views when those are present. Nevertheless, and that's the reason why is a 4 star review (and not a 5 star), is that at the end the "revolutionary" prescription is, in my humble opinion, a little biased, and very much anchored on the idea that we all had very healthy lives 100/50/30 years ago and know we are at the brink of collapse because of technology and capitalism. Other than this bias and excessive simplicity, this is an excellent book with a very, very important message

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Affirming what we already know, but still captivating

What my title says..
I gave a lower rating to performance of this audiobook because most of the time I was really bothered by Johann’s reading. He is clearly not suitable for this kind of long winded performance, he swallows often and that’s very distracting, and sounds tired. I wish he had agreed to let a professional performer to read this.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!