How We Lost Our Focus (and why it should scare you)

We are in a focus crisis. There are now a huge number of people reporting severe difficulties in focusing. Although the sensationalist headlines of humans having a shorter attention span than goldfish are almost certainly overblown, one survey found that up to 25% of US adults struggle with focus so much that they suspect they have a full-blown attention disorder. While the internet is replete with detailed anecdotes of People mourning their lost attention, I recently watched a couple of videos by fellow philosophy YouTuber Jared Henderson on our declining focus. And I wanted to explore this topic further because

I think that disrupted focus is potentially a far bigger problem than we realize and it threatens some of the most important aspects of our lives. But let's start with what actually threatens our focus because it involves far more factors than most people might think. My Name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice. But a key cause of declining focus is information overload. And if you want to combat that, then you should check out today's very kind sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around

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do check it out. They've become my go-to source for the news and I'm sure they will be for you as well. But anyway, back to the video. One, what is killing Focus? In the late 2010s, the journalist and author Johan Hari set out on a mission to discover the key factors behind our declining attention spans. He interviewed over 250 experts, read hundreds of papers, and traveled all around the world in search of the causes of our concentrational calcification. And I think I should start the video by going through a few of them because in the

midst of all of this philosophy, I think we can forget just how total the Allout assault on our attention truly is. First, there is the obvious factor, the phones. I know this discussion has been done to death, but there is no getting around the fact that we carry around with us devices which are designed by some of the cleverest people on the planet specifically to distract us. In his book Hooked, Near Ayal revealed exactly how almost everything we do on our phones is designed to keep us on them as long as possible as each System

or module of our minds is turned against us in a biological Trojan horse attack. This is particularly prevalent with social media where the way we intuitively assign significance has been hijacked for the sake of profit. I am certainly not innocent of this. No doubt I have titled this video something rather dramatic. Partly because I want to instill just how important this issue is, but also because my continued economic stability is predicated on your Attention. Social media algorithms do not care why we are watching something, just that we are watching something. As a result, fear, anger,

disgust, and hate are all weaponized to sap our time and our focus. In doing so, these algorithms tap into one of our mind's most benevolent and primal desires to alert us to threats and to keep us from harm. Our inner mother bear is constantly being told there is a vicious hunter just over the horizon, and she Understandably struggles to focus on anything else. Perhaps the most insidious part of this is that it recruits our own wills to work against our best interests. But for Hari, phones are just the tip of the iceberg. One of the

other major factors in our declining attention is our heightened stress levels. Hari argues that many of us live with this low-level background stress and that this is antithetical to the kind of deep relaxation that is best Conducive to focus. In some ways, we already know this. Early Buddhist monks described the ideal state for sustained meditative focus as alert relaxation. There is both the vigilance of consciousness and the comfort of unconsciousness. This mirrors what it feels like we're doing when we are focusing. We are highly conscious of one thing and totally unconscious of the rest of

the world. This description reminds me of one of my old friends who Was a chess champion in his youth and he used to quite often play games of chess on his phone. If you wanted to disrupt his concentration, it was not enough to shout his name or alert him to the fact that the train has now reached his stop. You would have to actively wave your hand in front of the screen, specifically breaking this beam of focus. He may as well have been in a coma as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

But he knew every detail in That chess game. In order for the mind to rest on one object in this sustained, determined fashion, it has to know that we are safe and so let itself relax. Again, this is a pretty good thing evolutionarily speaking. If my friend could maintain his laser-like focus in the presence of a saber-tooth tiger, his well-tuned brain would soon be the entree to the carnivorous feline supper. However, as we feel less safe, less relaxed, and more stressed in our Everyday lives, so too do we sabotage our ability to maintain our concentration.

There is significant empirical evidence to support this, with prolonged periods of stress negatively affecting areas of the brain associated with focus and stressful events increasing the diagnostic rate of attention disorders in children. One 2020 Yuggov poll found that stress was the number one self-reported impairment to focus with 48% of those struggling to Concentrate attributing it partly to stress. Hari even suggests that our food intake is working against our focus and that the glucose crashes associated with a high sugar diet mean that we are often either too energized to focus or too tired to. We are

also getting less and less sleep which increases our distractability and limits our capacity to put long-term gratification and development over short-term hits of pleasure. Since focusing does undeniably Take some investment of effort and so some discomfort, this has a knock-on effect on our focus. Anecdotally, this is a big one for me. I am an intermittent insomniac and in those periods where I struggle to sleep, it feels like someone has put a clamp on my thinking. I have to reread sentences over and over again. My writing sounds like the barely literate ravings of a man on

a street corner shouting about the end of the world. And I would not be Able to give something 10 minutes of sustained focused attention if you had a gun to my head. Lastly, this is not simply a confluence of incidental factors. Hari notes that there are people benefiting from our distinct lack of focus. He cites Netflix's declaration that their main enemy is sleep and the explicit profit motive social media companies have to sell as much of our time as humanly possible to advertisers. And everyone of those vested interests Benefits from our increasingly limited attention span.

Unfocused people are easier to distract. Thus, they get distracted more often and their focus is impacted further, making their time even more vulnerable and even more likely to be sold. This is why Hari titled his book stolen focus. Our focus has not just been lost. It has in some ways been taken from us. But I would add, we have very much been a willing accomplice to this process. It is less an armed Robbery and more a skilled confidence scam. We were sold infinite connectivity that we would be more informed, more able to understand the world

and have more fulfilling relationships with others. But as soon as we sign this Fouian bargain, we found our ability to focus ebbing away. And as Harri points out, this can all become a bit of a vicious cycle. When the pace of life speeds up due to endlessly new information, it makes less and less Sense to dwell on any specific piece of information for a long period of time. So focus is then further disincentivized and we are forever kept on our toes awaiting the next urgent piece of information to come flooding in. And once we get

out of the habit of focusing, it becomes much harder to build it back up again. We get used to a given level of stimulus and then the prospect of going back to just dwelling on a single thing for an entire hour Becomes almost daunting. Some people online have started referring to this as a dopamine overload and recommended a corresponding dopamine detox to combat it. But as Jared pointed out in his video, focusing involves a lot more than one chemical. And the evidence that a dopamine detox has very much to do with dopamine itself is incredibly

flimsy. Moreover, I think part of the reason this cycle is so difficult to break is that once we've damaged or hampered our Ability to focus, we can forget what was so valuable about it in the first place. We have the vague sense that something is missing. And we may lament that we get less done than we would like. But the impact of losing focus stretches far beyond this. That is my aim for the rest of the video. I want to demonstrate how a decline in focus is a disaster at almost every level, be it physical,

social, philosophical, or even spiritual. We will be traveling from 19th century Germany to ancient India to the College of Cardinals at the heart of the Vatican to discover not so much how we lost our focus, but why getting it back is one of the most important quests of our age. And hopefully I will persuade you to join me in this internal rebellion. But let's start with something that most of us already feel that a lack of focus hampers our ability to act and to get things done. Two, the fractured will. At some level, most People

recognize the connection between focus and action. This is often discussed online in the productivity sphere where people share tips on how to remain lasered in on a task so that your material goals in the world can be more easily achieved. Many of these are genuinely helpful. But I also think that they only touch the tip of the iceberg because the ability to take considered focused action in the world is not just a question for work or productivity. It Is a question central to life itself. An awful lot of philosophers have noticed the importance of a

reasoned aligned will for acting in fulfilling ways. This stretches all the way back to Aristotle where he talked about the close connection between reflection, reason, and virtuous or udemonic behavior. At one level, this is very intuitive. We've all had times where we acted on sheer impulse and then immediately regretted it. But for Aristotle, breaking free of This impulsive cycle and becoming more virtuous is intimately related to careful reflection. This is especially true when we don't have a virtuous role model who can tutor us and who we can learn from directly via imitation. Hopefully, we've all

gone through something like the following process at some point. We act in the world, realize that how we are acting is making us feel awful or is going against our most fundamental values, and then we revise Our behavior, becoming more virtuous in the process. But this act of realization often requires careful focused reflection on our behavior and the role it has had in our unhappiness. We ought not to underestimate just how difficult this can be. It is almost always deeply uncomfortable to face up to the role that we have had in our own misery. And

so this is forcing our minds to focus on something deeply unpleasant for a long period of time in order to unpick it and Discover our own quite painful shortcomings. And it's worth noting focusing on something unpleasant is often more difficult than focusing on a neutral or pleasant experience given the extensive research that emotional or physical distress does hamper concentration. So undertaking the kind of reflective process that Aristotle envisions will require a developed skill in concentration. In other words, introspective awareness relies on our Ability to focus and that introspection is a key part of how we

consciously shape our behavior to make ourselves happier and to act more in line with our values. A related observation was made by Friedriik Ner who modeled the mind as a variety of different urges and forces. He thought that a key part of living a fulfilling life was aligning all of these facets of the will in a single direction. This was what he meant when he talked about being self-disciplined Or having a natural aestheticism as opposed to an unnatural aestheticism which he heavily condemned. Nature's pretty complicated. The idea of self-overcoming that features so prominently in his

philosophy is partly about bringing all of these desperate inner drives to heal, controlling them and sublimating them to a self-created value system. Now, it would be a gross oversimplification to boil all of this down into an act of focus. But focus is Clearly very much involved. When nature talks about disciplining the mind and forcing it to act as you will it, this involves directing attention at what you desire and what you value. This is partly what brings us an internal feeling of power over ourselves which nature thought was key to personal fulfillment. On the other

hand, to have a scattered or weak will makes us unable to create or legislate our own values and so to make life seem meaningful. Without the ability to self-overcome and to organize our wills, nature thinks we become fragmented and nihilistic. To quote him directly, opposition and imperfect coordination among the appetites within signifies a decline in the ability to organize or physiologically speaking in the will. For someone like nature, the disorganized, distracted mind is unable to take any decisive action, especially over a long period of time, and will Inevitably come to see its life as meaningless,

pursuing short-term pleasures to stave off the emptiness inside. This is how he characterizes the last man in thus zarathustra, as a sort of aimless being, totally survile to their little pleasures of the day. As nature puts it, one no longer becometh poor or rich. Both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wantth to obey? Both are too burdensome. For nature, the fragmentation of the Will is intimately connected with the feeling that life and any expenditure of effort is more trouble than it is worth. We certainly don't have to agree with everything nature

says about the mind to see how this might be relevant to our focus crisis. It is enough to see that endless distraction can prevent us from expending the kind of meaningful effort that makes life seem worth living and worth taking trouble over. This idea does also have some empirical support. It is now pretty well known that people view some of their most meaningful time as that spent in engaged, focused, challenging activity that they nonetheless found meaningful. The hour an author spends toiling over their book or an artist spends on their painting or a priest spends

in determined study of their god. These are some of the most meaningbringing activities known to humankind. and they are all placed under dire threat by this gradual dissolution Of the organized focused will. A few episodes ago we discussed the concept of authenticity and how we do not just find our true selves readymade but are intimately involved in their construction and development. And this too requires reflection and focus. As pointed out by Simoi Vagger, crafting our personal identities is partly considering what types of behavior and mental states we want to endorse and which we want to

reject. If we get the Urge to lash out at someone in anger, we don't have to let that define who we are, we can reject it, refuse to act on it, and endorse a separate picture of ourselves as a calm and collected person and then follow that. Although we don't have full control over our baser instincts or our innate psychological predispositions, we can nonetheless use our reason to consider questions like who do I want to be and then adjust our behavior accordingly. This is partly why Emanuel Kant connected reason and ethical agency so closely. This

reasoning is again a self-reflective process that requires our sustained attention. Deciding which aspects of ourselves we want to endorse and which we want to change is no mean feat. It means examining your personal ethics. Having an intimate knowledge of how you would feel given certain actions and an honest appraisal of what you consider to be your faults. Moreover, it means Continually working towards an idea of who you want to be over many, many years, hopefully growing ever closer to it and noting where you may have stalled or fallen back in your progress. This ability we

have to slowly become an author in who we are can imbue life with a sense of authenticity and a sense of meaning. As Alistister McIntyre might put it, it creates a broad narrative arc for our existence that organizes our actions, mind, and values into a Coherent hole. If we never have the opportunity to give sustained attention to these questions, then we are leaving our identity purely up to the chaos of the universe. This might not be a total disaster, but it means we may reach an advanced age only to realize that our very character is

antithetical to everything we want to be. I can only imagine the crippling cognitive dissonance such a situation would bring. In the past, I've had moments of Realizing that I was not the person that I desired to be, and they were some of the most mentally painful experiences of my life. Being able to stop and consider this issue of self- authorship will hopefully prevent people having such moments. But if we don't have the trained careful focus necessary to ask these questions, then we are abandoning things purely to chat. At its worst, this domination of distraction gives

us no way of approaching questions like who Am I? or what do I want to do with my finite existence on this planet? This then leaves us with a few options, none of which seem particularly appealing. Firstly, we could just follow whatever everyone else is doing. This is probably the best option as at least we're doing something and we may just stumble into a life that we find meaningful and fulfilling since chances are we are like most other people in at least a few ways. Secondly, we could leap from Action to action in a totally

disorganized fashion, never bringing our minds or our lives back into order. If nature is to be believed, this will eventually give way to hopelessness and a sense that none of our actions are aiming towards anything in the long term. Considering the research linking depression to limited time horizons, this does not seem like a desirable situation to be in. Thirdly, and perhaps most worryingly, we could disregard Action entirely and slump into total passivity, failing to see the point in anything at all. If there is nothing worth focusing on and nothing worth paying attention to, then there

is also no action worth taking and nothing worth being. This is almost a perfect description of an overwhelming felt nihilism. And again, there is pretty extensive research linking a lack of motivated action to unpleasant mental states like depression. So far, this is Mostly about our practical actions in the world. It is to do with what we do and how we align our behavior to create a fulfilling long-term existence. But I hope this has demonstrated that the concept of focused reasoned action is not just a matter of productivity or getting stuff done or achieving great things

at work. It is intimately connected to our overarching ideas about virtue, joy, and self-identity. And by relinquishing control over our Attention, we don't just become less productive, but lessen our power over some of the most important aspects of our lives. However, this is just the beginning. Here we have mainly dealt with the individual effects of distraction, but we are highly social creatures and concentration is also vital to our relationships with other people. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider becoming one of my wonderful backers on Patreon to get

access to exclusive content, including early access to blog posts and extra casual video content. You'll also gain access to my full interview with friend of the channel, Alex O' Connor. Three, attention and society. In many of her writings, the French philosopher Simone Vile analyzes life with this heady mixture of Christian thought, mysticism, and modern philosophy. She does not always attempt a reasoned argument for all of her Positions, but often distills down her observations of her inner mental state and what she has seen in others to bring out what she thinks is most important to humanity.

And on her analysis, attention, love, and togetherness are intimately connected. In one illuminating passage, she says the following. Attention taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. By this, she draws a similarity between The deep focus a worshipper gives their deity and the kind of attention we can give one another. Although her exact definition of attention is much more nuanced than just our commonplace ideas about it, and I can't go into it here. In this passage, to pray is not to make a request, but to recognize something

or someone as worthy of your undivided attention and to be totally open to it or them. It is thus a way of acknowledging and loving another person, Of building community, and of establishing friendship. I'm sure that many of us have experienced this connection at some point. If we are conversing with someone and we give them our full attention while they give us theirs, this can be extremely powerful. These are the talks that last long into the night where only the dim flickers of dawn disturb your discourse and you realize that you've spent the last few

hours totally captured by another Person. Such experiences are really quite rare, but they can be absolutely paradigm shifting. They can spark lifelong friendships or even romantic love and they are one of the most potent antidotes to loneliness out there. By its very nature, this is hard to empirically study on a broad scale. But it is pretty well established and also very intuitive that satisfaction with friendships is negatively correlated with loneliness. And if Vile is right, Attention and focus will have something to do with the quality of these friendships. In some ways, what distinguishes a friendship

from a mere contractual arrangement is that you freely give things to your friends. You give them your time, your goodwill, your charity, and your grace, and they do the same to you. But at no point did you sit down and hash this out as a transaction. Rather, it naturally emerged alongside a sense of fellow feeling. Part of what Sustains and develops a friendship is this continual giving. And one of the most wonderful things that anyone can gift a friend is their full undivided attention. It's also a form of recognition. In choosing to listen to someone

deeply and attentively, you recognize them as an agent with something valuable to say. You show in your actions that what they are expressing matters to you more than anything else in the world at that Precise moment. By contrast, being open to distraction communicates that you were listening to them for now, but something more important might come up that you need to attend to. In some situations, this might be entirely appropriate. In the final weeks of a loved one's pregnancy, you might want to stick near the phone in case she calls and you need to rush

to hospital. This is still saying that something more important might come up, but we all Recognize that your partner having a child truly is more pressing than anything your friend might have to say at that point in time. But barring these exceptional circumstances, your full focused attention probably means more to the person you're talking to than you imagine. We need only to remember the times we were truly listened to and how it made us feel cared for and acknowledged. Many philosophers since Hegel have recognized the importance of Mutual recognition for the development of our relationships

and how this recognition is a deep human need. They argue that to be acknowledged as an equal agent and moreover as an agent with value is vital for maintaining a positive view of ourselves and feeling connected with others. While this is often used as the basis for a political project, it also has serious implications for the more mundane everyday sphere as well. Being Recognized as important by others builds what Axel Honith calls social esteem. And being recognized in a loving way makes it far easier for someone to then go and love themselves. Recognition theory is

far more complex and nuanced than the brief sketch of it I've given you here, but the general point is still illustrative. Acknowledging people in a way that communicates their importance to you is key to how we form social bonds and aid the development of one Another's self-esteem. If these theorists are right about the importance of recognition, and there is increasing empirical evidence from studies in social rejection that they are, then becoming a confident, self-assured person is just not something we can do alone. We must instead facilitate social situations that allow us to tell one another

in our words and our actions that we are worth something. A decline in focus threatens some of the most Common ways that we do this. We've already talked about conversation and giving someone your full attention when you're talking to them, but it certainly doesn't stop there. The ability to sustain friendships or relationships over a long period of time is in some ways an exercise in long-term focus. It means making a conscious commitment to someone's importance in your life over many, many years. Remaining close to someone involves not getting distracted By the thrill of novelty, but

exploring the depths and intricacies of someone's mind, however familiar they might appear on the surface. This needs attention and focus. If we quickly get bored of our friends or our romantic partner and set off to explore greener grass at the drop of a hat, then our relationships will consist almost entirely in the short-term excitement of getting to know someone on a surface level, and we will thus deprive ourselves of anything Deeper or more enduring than this. One of the hottest button issues today is loneliness. An increasing number of people, especially young people, are feeling lonely

and isolated with over a quarter of UK adults reporting feeling lonely at least some of the time and those aged 16 to 24 reporting higher levels of loneliness than any other group. Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that this is all about distraction or those darn phones. Increases in Loneliness involve a variety of factors, including the decline in social centers since the 2008 financial crash and our increasingly atomized living arrangements. However, I do think that focus as a whole may have something to do with it. One of the benefits of immersing yourself in a social situation

is that you temporarily forget you and your problems. For a few hours, you meld with a community of people so completely that you lose track of time and your ego Goes into retreat. In Zen Buddhism, a momentary loss of ego is called samadi and is associated with deep meditative practice. Though Zen Buddhists would not call this state of communal social absorption samadi, I do think that something somewhat similar is going on. And being able to forget yourself for however long is a fantastic antidote to feelings of isolation and loneliness. It challenges this picture that can

form internally of us against the world. I've Spoken before about being alone in company. That is continuing to feel isolated even when you are with other people. Obviously, sometimes this is caused by just spending time with the wrong people for you or because you're going through a particularly awful experience for which no one else around you has any frame of reference. But sometimes it may stem from us or those around us being distracted and having lost the ability to fully focus on other People while in their company. And just imagine what would happen if we

totally failed to give others our undivided attention. It will be difficult to build trusting societies at all. We will stop gifting the kind of focus that reassures us of our value to one another and we will become increasingly wrapped up in ourselves. We will be prideful not in the sense of viewing us as superior to other people but in the early Christian sense of being unable to forget or lose Sight of ourselves. We will stop feeling seen or heard by others. There will be a universal sense of social rejection and isolation. And given the pretty

robust finding that social rejection can make people more violent, angry, and antisocial, this is pretty bad news for the continued health of our communities. Luckily, we are certainly not here yet, but it goes to show the importance of tackling this issue head on. Moreover, advancing as a community is often partly About giving attention to the needs of the whole and putting ourselves aside for a little while for the benefit of others. But if we feel totally disconnected to these people, then this idea will seem absurd. It reminds me of an observation once made by the

conservative philosopher Roger Scrutin who said that the strength of a community was measured in whether the members of that community were willing to sacrifice for one another and if need Be defend one another. This is not just a conservative position. A similar idea was put forward by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in his theories of mutual aid. The general thrust is that when we learn to sacrifice for one another and share a sense of community, we all benefit. We feel less alone and can genuinely draw upon one another's skills and resources to advance the group.

This is often analogized to a family. Each individual Adult in a functioning family will occasionally sacrifice something, be it money or time or energy, safe in the knowledge that anyone else would do the same for them. This provides a sort of familial safety net. When I was younger, my grandparents would babysit me if my parents were busy. Now my grandparents are a little bit older, individual members of the family put in effort to look after them. Not only does this foster a sense of togetherness, it also Helps people feel safer since they know that they

will never face disaster by themselves. Remember this point about cooperation and togetherness as it will definitely be reemerging in the next section. My broad point is that the potential ramifications of declining focus are not simply felt at the level of individual accomplishment. Focus is involved at every stage of the community building process because it is a fantastic form of sacrificing for Others. We let people know they are important when we gift them our attention. And we create communities when we put long-term focus in the community. Often sacrificing our own time, effort, or resources in the

process. Without focus, it becomes much harder to do any of these things. And so we become more isolated as a result. But we are fundamentally social creatures. and prolonged feelings of isolation are linked to a whole host of undesirable Outcomes like depression and anxiety. Of course, tackling the issues of community building is going to take a lot more than just fixing our focus. But at the very least, it will give us the tools needed to help another person feel valuable, noticed, and listened to. And that sounds like a great place to start. But next, I

want to move on to something incredibly close to my heart. It may seem like a quaint concern, but I hope to show that it is one of the most Underappreciated parts of existence and that we let it decay at our peril. Four, the lifeblood of learning. In my video on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, or Fahrenheit 451 as I've been told it's actually pronounced, we talked about the effect banning books might have on a society. But this was just a taste of a wider issue. Namely, what is the point of learning both individually and collectively? And

what happens when we stop? I don't think I need to say much To argue that focus is an inextricable part of learning. Learning anything to any degree of depth takes time, attention, and careful processing. To truly get something out of a book, a paper, a lecture, or even just a chat with an informed friend, we have to point our minds in that direction. If we get distracted every 5 minutes, then not only will it take us much longer to finish, say, a book, but we won't settle into that deep attention that allows us To analyze,

evaluate, and critically examine what we are reading. This is especially true as we reach adulthood and we leave the educational institutions that force us to learn whether we like it or not. But even if you are at a university or a school, there is no substitute for self-motivated and self-directed learning about a topic that you find fascinating. I know at least two people who found school incredibly dull, but Have an in-depth knowledge of trains that would shock a lot of engineers. Given this, we can predict that a damaged focus will have a detrimental impact on

someone's ability to learn new information. But why should we care? Well, I think because learning is one of the most underrated aspects of life. It brings significant pleasure and it contributes to the well-being of our societies. I'll first tackle the individual impact and then move on to The social one. To return to Aristotle, one of his most famous observations about humankind is that we take pleasure in simply knowing things. He probably felt this more than most, what with writing treatises on everything from biology to metaphysics to ethics. But I think the point broadly still stands.

There is something deeply satisfying about learning new things and adding to your store of knowledge. This is especially true when you already have a Pre-existing interest in the topic. The best illustrations of this are knowledge that for all intents and purposes seems useless. My personal favorite is video game law. If you look at the wikis for some beloved video games like the Elder Scrolls series or Dark Souls or Fallout, you will find literally thousands of hours of work put into collating, relating, and prolating on completely and utterly useless topics. There are pages and pages of

indexing on Miscellaneous items or in-game writing that even most people playing these games would not use. To be clear, I am in no way denigrating this pursuit. I am an ardent admirer. I can think of no better example of the sheer joy of learning than this. It is what St. John Henry Newman would call knowledge as its own end. And this is only the start. Knowing about something also has a direct impact on the pleasures we can take in it. I've used this example Before, but in Bertrram Russell's essay, useless knowledge, he describes how the

experience of eating an apricot is enhanced by knowing where it's come from, some of its inner workings, and having a sense of its history. Looking at a great work of art is often all the more enjoyable for knowing about the artist and the particular techniques they use in their artistry. Reading dstoyvski is often more pleasurable the more you know about the man, his Philosophy, and his interests. What could be a single dimension of happiness is transformed into a rich network of associations, each lighting up on contact with the stimulus in question. This is to be

expected. One of the ways our minds assign significance to something is by how we link it with other ideas. This is reflected in memory research where people retain information more readily by linking it to pre-existing knowledge. This is partly What these videos are for me. I consolidate my reading and research by connecting it with my own ideas and those of the philosophers I already know. Both to make the knowledge more memorable and much more importantly more pleasurable. However, if you're not convinced by the mere pleasure of learning, then we can think of its utility. I

am always surprised at how useful seemingly useless knowledge turns out to be. This is both true at the Personal level and more widely. I could not have foreseen that devoting hundreds of hours to reading 19th century Russian literature would not only be enjoyable, but would fundamentally change the way I view myself and my interactions with my fellow man. I had no idea that learning the basics of game theory would help me with aspects of cognitive linguistics. And if you would have told me that reading novels by Standal would aid my romantic relationships, I would have

Laughed at you. I learned none of these things with practical ends in mind. And yet, when I knew them, uses were found for them. Likewise, the mathematician Gail Cantor could not have predicted just how important his set theory would become for the development of mathematics. Frager could not have known that his logical notation would be influential in the modern computer. And when Democrus theorized that the world was made of tiny particles called atoms, I doubt he had even an inkling of the modern atomic theory that this would spawn. It is remarkable how so many of

our practical inventions and theories of the world relied on people hundreds of years beforehand coming up with ideas that probably seemed pointless or at the very least not as useful as we know them to be now at the time. Strangely, treating knowledge as an end in itself reaps the kind of practical rewards that valuing merely instrumental knowledge May struggle to produce. Though this is, of course, an unverifiable statement since the human hunger for knowledge, regardless of its utility, has made it practically untestable. My worry is not that the human desire for knowledge will lessen, but

that the ability to attain it will. As we said, learning something requires focus and attention. It is a sacrifice that you make for the knowledge that you value. But the harder it is to focus, the more and more Difficult that sacrifice becomes. If you already enjoy sitting down for an hour and reading something, then you don't have to pay a very high price for your new knowledge. On the other hand, if the thought of that fills you with dread and that you know every few minutes you will be scrolling through your phone or have to

get up to make a cup of tea or just stare into space, then any learning that you undertake demands a much steeper tribute. I would argue it is often still Worth that tribute. But it is a truism of human behavior that the harder something is to do, the less we will do it. And so the sheer pleasure of learning becomes harder and harder to grasp. What's more, our tapestries of associations for different ideas and experiences become sparer, making life seem that bit more empty and that bit less rich. And these are only the individual consequences.

Perhaps even more worrying is the prospect of a Society that has come to devalue learning or where too many people have rejected it as more trouble than it's worth. Not just because we'll be deprived of the joys of learning, but also because learning is a big part of how communities develop and how societal problems get solved. It took Fritz Harbor years to create the groundwork for the Harbor Bosch process and it took a comparably long time for Carl Bosch to scale this up to an industrial level. This is one of the most important agricultural developments

in history. It saved millions of lives and has led to a global decrease in famine. And it took long-term commitment, attention, and collaboration between equally focused individuals. And this says nothing of even longerterm intergenerational focuses. It took multiple generations of scientists, logicians, and mathematicians to create the modern computer. all the way from the creation Of Boolean algebra in 1847 to the first electronic computer in 1945. From there, thousands, perhaps millions of people have further refined computing, making it more efficient, facilitating more computations in a shorter time frame, and allowing more computational power to fit into

a smaller physical space. This involved untold minds each focusing on different smaller tasks contributing to a shared study and creating a modern miracle. As a result, the higher our General focusing skill, the more opportunity we will have to develop these long-term innovations and inventions. The more people who take pleasure in learning and to have the ability to do so, the greater our communal advancements may be. Of course, this is not the only cog in the machine of intellectual and technological development. There is ensuring people have access to highquality education, that they have the freedom and

Opportunity to pursue interests in these fields, and that their potential brilliance is capitalized upon and allowed to flourish. But without focus, it's difficult to get any of these done. I'm certainly not suggesting that innovation will somehow stop, just that we are putting our societies at a disadvantage by neglecting the importance of focus. Frankly, this can sound more abstract or insightful than it actually is. It all boils down to Basically this. Advancement takes learning and learning takes focus. The less we can focus, the less we can learn and the more potential cultural and scientific innovations we

leave on the table. Of course, opposing the more insidious technological advances will also require learning and focus. How else will we anticipate the negative consequences of these innovations and rally against them? But beyond concerns about advancements in collective Learning, there is the matter of self-governance. A number of philosophers like John Stewart Mill, John Dwey, and Martha Nusbam have argued that for democracy to flourish, the population must be open to learning and must have the opportunity to learn. Mill argued that we must be the guardians of our own representative systems. But we can only do this

if we know what a danger to that system looks like. If we lose our critical thinking skills, we Can easily be fooled by propaganda. And if we do not learn the history of our societies at least a little bit, then how will we know who should govern and represent us? This thought is echoed in Machaveli who argued for republican governance with a virtuous and learned populace. It's not hard to see why. In any democratic or semi-democratic system, we citizens have an enormous responsibility. At its best, we collectively form our own rulers and Each in our

own small way are king, parliamentarian, pressure group, and watchdog all rolled into one. We are handed the task of choosing our governors, keeping an eye on them, and removing them when they are not acting in the public good. How will we be up to this task if we are constantly distracted and never have the opportunity to learn about governance and decide what we want governance to look like? Plato's big critique of Democracy is that it hands over power to us, the people, and that we are totally unfit to wield it. I desperately want to prove

Plato wrong. But if our learning is badly hampered by a lack of focus, then we will give him significant argumentative ammunition. Lastly, our learning is part of our contribution to one another. As many today will admit, there is simply too much information out there to not rely on others in some way, shape, or form. We could never hope as Single individuals to get at it all. It is only when we pull our epistemic resources that we have a chance at both understanding the world and working out how we might want to change or develop it.

For this, we need to trust one another, but also have something to contribute to this collective knowledge. When constructing a house, each person has something to bring to the table. The architect crafts designs. Engineers outline a sound structure. Estimators Allocate resources. And a whole team of construction workers, from brick layers to machine operators to excavation crews, do the specialized, intricate, skilled work of physically putting the house together. If any one of these groups were not present, then the house would almost certainly not be built with as much skill. And if someone had to do the

whole project by themselves, it would take much more time and require them to know how to do the jobs of Everyone else that would be involved. Likewise, we pull our collective knowledge to achieve amazing things. But for us to do this, we both need enough focus to acquire our skills and our understanding and enough to collaborate with others. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but this is part of how we build, maintain, and develop our communities. And while it requires many things, one of those things is focus. However, I still think this does not Quite

do justice to the importance of focus in itself. As well as allowing us to learn, focus can bring its own pleasures. And to explore this, we will have to step outside traditional philosophy and look at the long history of religious meditative traditions. Five, focus and absorption. On average, philosophers are very keen on reason. This is broadly a pretty good thing. When we become totally untethered from reason, this can easily give way to Any idea finding acceptance, regardless of its evidence or its defensibility. But this emphasis on what can be articulated and defended in propositional form

does sometimes cause analytically minded philosophy enthusiasts like myself to disregard ideas that are largely based on individual mystical experiences. However, when it comes to focus, there is no getting around it. Most examinations of focus until very Recently were seen through a quintessentially spiritual lens. And yet, I think these accounts are very much worth listening to, as they can teach us something about the value of focus, not just as a means to an end, but something desirable in and of itself. A warning for my regular viewers. This section is going to be significantly more woowoo than

normal. But do bear with it for a second. I am going somewhere with this. In many Buddhist monastic practices, focus is seen as a key step on the path to enlightenment and the way to reach heightened states called the Janna. These Janna are increasingly deep immersions in meditative absorption. According to tradition, there are four of them. The first two bring some kind of pleasure with them and help to calm our racing thoughts. While the third and fourth still the mind almost completely and allow for totally equinimous states. That is a non-reactive position of calm where

the mind is left open to insight or vipasa. According to early Buddhist tradition, it was either in this state or emerging from this state that the Buddha achieved enlightenment and the full realization that there was no self. Now, it's difficult to know what to say about claims like these because by their very nature, the Janna, especially the later ones, are only ever achieved by a few select people. There has been some Empirical research on people who claim to enter the Janna, but these are in their infancy, and it seems like the only safe thing to

say is that there is something odd going on neurologically speaking, but it's difficult to say exactly what it is. However, I just want to note the general structure of the experience described. In effect, the meditator calms their mind, manages to hone their attention to a laser sharp point, and in doing so achieves deep Inner peace and the possibility of some kind of realization. Regardless of whether or not you think that realization reflects a deep spiritual or metaphysical truth, it is nonetheless extremely psychologically affective for the meditator and can fundamentally alter the way that they perceive

the world in a way that they deem positive. I wanted to outline this structure because we see it crop up in other meditative traditions as well. Though it Goes far less appreciated than its eastern counterparts, Christianity has a rich history of meditative focus and even builds aspects of this meditation into their more everyday services. The most common of these today is praying the rosary. This series of prayers will be very familiar to any Catholics in the audience and takes about 20 minutes. All the while, the mind gives its full unbroken focus to the holy mysteries

and remains open to God. The importance of Focus to this process is so profound that the rosary center even has a guide on how to pray it without distraction. St. Louis de Monfor saw it as a way to get closer to God while still in this fallen world. He views it as having the power to convert someone from sin. Although he clearly does not just mean converting a pagan or a non-believer to Christianity, as you would be pretty hardressed to persuade them to pray a full rosary every day. Rather, he also Means it will allow

you to enact God's will through a mysterious transformative power. In other words, it can reportedly change your character and behavior to be more holy, not through rigorous argumentation, but through a spiritual experience found in focus. Another good example of this in a Christian context is the desert fathers. A group of monastics who lived in the 3rd century and are some of the first people to practice ritual chanting in the Christian traditions. St. Anthony the Great practiced solitary unceasing prayer. While other desert fathers would work on having their minds and hearts continually focused on God, working

him into every aspect of their life. In this practice, they would experience intense spiritual joy as well as gain insight into God, sometimes in the form of visions. We again see the same pattern. The intense focus on something deemed meaningful both brings its own kind of Happiness and seems to have this transformative power to it. Though these experiences are most documented in religious traditions, that is not the only place they occur. We see a similar pattern in the accounts of great artists like Michelangelo who described his sculpting in very spiritual language, losing himself in his

work and coming to view it not as merely an act of creation but as freeing the beauty that was already inside the marble that he Worked. He saw this beauty as not simply attractive but divine. And the effect seemed to come to him from outside himself rather than simply from within. or at least that's how he saw it. It reminds me of the habit certain ancient poets had of viewing their poetry as a sort of collaboration with the muses, the gods of art. Homer's Iliad begins with the line, "Sing, O muse, of the wroth of

Pelleon Achilles." The act of artistic creation itself requiring Extraordinary focus is described in remarkably similar terms to these religious experiences of deep meditation. In both cases, there is an immersive joy in the experience and the sense that the experiencer is connecting with something higher. If you're religious, you might, as many others have done, think of this something higher as God. But if you're not, then we can just see this as a profound psychological experience. Extreme focus Or enrichment is also associated with the appreciation of beauty itself. One of my favorite descriptions of being totally captured

by beauty comes from the pessimistic philosopher Philip Mainlander. He talks about aesthetic contemplation as a particular psychological state where we appreciate something for its own sake. He describes the farmer who after a long day's toil sits back and admires the landscape. The farmer no longer thinks about the crops Or tomorrow's weather or what parts of the farmland require improvement. He is completely immersed in the appreciation of the environment. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who once said that the closest experience he could compare with falling in love was gazing at a mountain landscape. In

both cases, he felt his whole mind was utterly bound by an experience. Not drifting, not wavering, but temporarily both joyful and strangely calm. To quote Mainlander Directly, "In the state of deep aesthetic contemplation, it is for the will as if its usual motion has suddenly ceased and it had become motionless." Mainlander means something quite specific by the will, but we don't need to go into that now. His description of aesthetic contemplation is remarkably close to the kind of joyful absorption that characterizes artistic creation and meditative states. He says we experience a temporary timelessness, describing it

As absolute rest and unspeakably blissful. Never mind that he thinks that it's also an illusion. My point is that the phenomenological experience is simultaneously one of utter focus, deep joy, and transformative power. For mainlander, the transformative part is the discovery of this new peaceful state in a world of chaos and confusion. Importantly, Mainlander states that aesthetic contemplation is a collaborative process between the Contemplator and the object of contemplation. Some objects are beautiful and so far easier to contemplate in this way. But there is also a skill at aesthetic appreciation. If the farmer is so wrapped

up in concerns about work or activity that he cannot forget it for even a moment, then it would be impossible for him to find the temporary rest and joy brought on by the beautiful landscape. Thinking about work will distract him and pull him out Of the contemplative state with a jut. And I think the specific kind of distracted mind we cultivate today is particularly prone to this sort of disruption. While a certain low-level distraction might not totally stop us from being productive or making friends or even of acquiring deep knowledge on something, it will prevent

us from entering these profound absorptive states that keep cropping up all over the world as some of the most important And transformative experiences of people's lives. The sort of total stillness and focus described in the Janna or by Christian monastics or by these artists or by mainlander precludes even a slight disturbance in our minds. If we get used to there being a new piece of information to attend to every few minutes, then our consciousness never gets the chance to settle down in this way. So what you might say, I'm not particularly interested in these Transformative

states anyway. I'd sympathize with this point, but the capacity to become captured by the object of your focus, be that your breath or God or just something utterly beautiful, is also seen by these traditions as a place of deep rest. It's a way to have a brief experience of stillness and calm in a universe that is otherwise hectic, fast-paced, and in the modern day ever accelerating. In his book, The Burnout Society, philosopher Bjungchan describes how we've slowly turned ourselves into self-p policing productivity machines, forever seeking out the next thing to optimize about our life or

to achieve in the world. And he suggests this has a large part in the wave of burnouts sweeping the globe. He argues that we have forgotten how to rest. I would add to this that in a world where we've trained ourselves to seek out not just distractions but outright stressful distractions and Turned our minds into engines pumping out anxious thoughts like exhaust fumes. Focus and rest are almost inseparable. The common thread here is that the mere act of being enraptured by something in total focus can bring on deep calm, a strange kind of joy and

even a transformative experience. Again, this is partly just speculative, but the sheer breadth of accounts of this same basic pattern make me think there is definitely something in this. The Particular contents of the experiences seem to change between cultures and people with Buddhists finding characteristically Buddhist states and Buddhist transformations while Christians describing their experiences as finding connection with their God. More aesthetically minded thinkers talk about being enraptured by beauty or of contemplating it. The common denominator is not the contents of the experience but its character. The act of deep total Focus for a prolonged period

of time seems like it can bring both bliss and rest. Moreover, focusing on a particular object seems to allow it to seep into the very recesses of our mind in a slightly mysterious and not totally rational way. Again, there is no definitive empirical proof of what exactly is going on here. But the independent convergence on this general structure by multiple different spiritual and philosophical traditions Make it at least worthy of consideration in our discussion. And I wanted to talk about focus for its own sake for a couple of reasons. The first is because I think

we are so in the habit of justifying things based on their material consequences that we can forget the pleasures they bring in and of themselves. It's true that focusing will help you behave more in line with your values and build communities and deepen your learning, but it is also a deeply Worthwhile skill apart from these practical ends. At its best, it can even provide restbite from the trials, tasks, and tribulations demanded by this world and help us glimpse a taste of what religious thinkers have called eternity, but others might call timelessness or simply rest. The

second is that this transformational power states of deep focus seem to have suggests that this skill has an immense potential that I can't quite rationally explain. But I do Observe from these different spiritual and philosophical traditions that if we focus on an object of great meaning to us for long periods of time, we will come to understand it at a more fundamental level. And its impact will not just be felt in our cognition, but in our emotions and instincts as well. For me, this is too tantalizing a proposition to give up, even if I can't

pretend to understand exactly how it might work. But given the importance We've now established for focus, we have a vital further question. What should our new philosophies of focus be? And how should we go about fixing this crisis we've got ourselves into? And this is just my final point. Six, a philosophy of focus. As it's traditionally defined, philosophy is a love of wisdom. I hope to have demonstrated that focus is part of the foundation upon which that wisdom must rest. It facilitates our reasoned Actions. It enables us to bond together. It enhances our learning and

it brings the kind of restful contemplation that Aristotle thought was the backdrop to a philosophical life. Not only does it create pleasure, but it allows us to enjoy the other pleasures of life to a greater degree. And finally, turning our unadulterated focus towards something that truly matters to us even has the potential to create transformative experiences that stick with us for the Rest of our days. So why have we let focus slip from us so readily? Well, alongside the material factors that we discussed in the first section, I think we severely underestimate the scope and

virtues of focus. And so we don't defend the treasure that we hold so precariously in our possession. We tend to think of focus as a skill. And indeed I've used that framing for much of this video. But this can lead us to think of it as analogous to other skills like Being a good writer or a talented musician or a decent footballer. But focus has a far broader remmit than any of these. I would even go so far as to call it a transcendent skill in the sense that it stands above or behind almost all

of our other pursuits, enhancing and facilitating them. It's less like being a skilled bird watcher or a perceptive art critic and more like having good eyesight. I'm currently wearing contact lenses and as a result I Can see very clearly and so employ all of my other visual skills like reading and writing and spotting people I know on the street. All of these capacities are dependent on me currently having the gift of clear sight. When I take my contact lenses out, I lose all of the skills that rest on the foundation of that sight. Likewise, when

we lose the ability to focus, this doesn't just deprive us of a single skill, but causes a cascade of further effects that bleed Into every single aspect of our lives. First, there is the practical. The ability to take action over a long period of time and to craft our characters through our reasoned decisions in the world. the capacity to form lasting friendships and relationships and to pursue those connections to their deeper levels without being distracted by shiny new opportunities. How to make others feel seen and to undertake the dedicated work Of forging bonds and communities.

Then there is the mental, our ability to learn, to process ideas, to think clearly, and to contribute that learning to a communal hole. The pleasures we take in discovery, even those discoveries that seem utterly pointless, and a rich view of the world, replete with associations built up over long engagement with it. Our role as citizens to think about what we want our societies to look like and form clear Ideas of their future development or defend those aspects that we already hold dear. And finally, there is, for want of a better word, the spiritual, the quasi

mystical experience of being enraptured in focus and in that timeless seeming state, finding respite from the everchanging nature of the world, to grow emotionally and intellectually closer to the objects of focus we find most meaningful, and to contemplate those aspects of existence that we wish To unpack and unpick. All of these are under threat. It is difficult to understand just how valuable focus can truly be at its higher levels. This video was originally meant to be a lot shorter. But in researching these different thinkers and different facets of focus, I realized just how limited my

own concentration had become. Sure, I have enough focus to read a book, but I can't remember the last time I was truly lost in aesthetic contemplation or Wrapped up in my writing in the way that Michelangelo describes being engaged with his sculpting. I've tried meditating before just to relax and cope with my chronic pain, but I'd never come close to the kind of joy and peace described in Buddhist sacred texts. Likewise, when I was a Christian in my younger years, I would pray. And I thought I was praying with focus. But I never lost track

of time or became totally enraptured in the way that many Of these monastics described their own prayer. And this got me thinking, if an average focuser like me could not imagine these higher levels of total immersion, then can losing focus take us unawares? Are we unconscious of just how much our personal concentration may have degraded? After all, I can't imagine how sitting in the same spot for hours on end could bring such deep joy. But I don't think that all of these meditative practitioners are outright lying to me. Perhaps the most pericious part of degrading

focus is that we forget just how much pleasure it can bring. When I was younger and my concentration was significantly worse than it is now, I would wonder what possible pleasure could be found in an hour of reading. And yet today, reading is one of my greatest joys. This is why I wanted to write this video to remind myself and hopefully some others that focus is not some peripheral aspect of life, nor is It simply a tool to become more productive at work. It is part of the lens through which the whole of reality is

interpreted. To lose the ability to focus is to limit the ways in which we can experience the world. I don't think that societal change is fully downstream of culture. The careful interplay of state actors, cultural figures, bottom-up communities, and active political organizations is just too complicated for the causal arrow to run In a single direction. However, I do believe the more modest almost benile claim that cultural shifts can influence people's background behaviors and attitudes on quite a wide scale. And a cultural shift can come with a change in values and a change in priorities. So,

this is what this video is meant to be, an impassion plea for the revaluing of focus and of placing concentration at the forefront of what constitutes the good life. The good life has always been One of the primary objects of philosophical inquiry and it spawned the field of what we now call ethics. So I want to propose something of an ethics of focus, a shared recognition that concentration is not some ephemeral concern to be outsourced to productivity gurus and management consultants. not to be regarded as merely the domain of business interests, of profits, and of

the world of work, but instead to be seen as an overarching skill that Enhances almost every aspect of our existence. So that when we come to teach the next generation about what makes a fulfilling life, we include focus among its most central pillars. The word focus originally comes from the Latin term for a hearth or a fireplace. And maybe this best sums up what I would like for a new conception of focus. Something at the heart of the dwelling of life that brings light and warmth when a flame and when lying unlit and untended leaves

us Cold dims our illumination and will not revive itself until we actively decide to spark it again. something that requires fuel and care and can grow from a small flicker to a glorious roaring blaze if we decide to make it a focal point of our value system. Or we can let the embers die and content ourselves with shivering. I hope you enjoyed this video and have a wonderful day.