Well, this weekend certainly busted my bracket. My strategy of going heavy on SEC teams wiped me out. And teams I hate like Gonzaga advanced. In all likelihood I am out of the office pool. However, my prediction of two weeks ago is unfortunately already coming true-calls to Florida’s gambling helpline have doubled this year. And it is being driven in large part by online gambling and young men-
“Younger men have driven the growth in calls for help, Kruse [executive director of the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling] said. She said young people are now graduating college, getting jobs, accessing credit and earning significant income for the first time amidst a proliferation of online gambling options . . .. Kruse said some young people are getting into gambling before their brain is fully developed and are therefore more susceptible to developing problems when they gamble.”
Time to turn off the tv and crack a good book-
It’s a rather sorry excuse for a book club. But it is a great excuse to get three friends together for breakfast over the holidays.
The idea is we get together a week or two before Christmas and exchange books with each other. We don’t really meet to discuss the books. There are no themed dinners like my wife’s book club. There is no wine. As the years have progressed there is less bacon and more steel cut oatmeal. We don’t talk about books much at all but we will trade them around with each other during the year.
The books we pass around the table are good. They keep me reading some things I would never pick out myself. It is always good to stretch out of your routines and patterns. And it is good to read books.
The average American spends 17 minutes a day reading a book, and 5.4 hours on their phone. Those statistics are from 2017 and it is likely worse now. With this shift has come a loss of the ability to focus for extended periods of time, along with a loss of patience, empathy and other benefits of deeper reading.
Stolen Focus
One of the books exchanged this year was Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Hari, a NYTimes best selling author, noticed in himself a loss of ability to focus and do deeper work so he set out to find the causes and solutions.
I found he stacked the causes in a very compelling way. He starts with the idea that every year we get more and more information thrown at us. This was true prior to the internet1, but the online pipeline has greatly accelerated the trend. And our brains are just not up to processing the amount of information we are consuming every day. This leads to surface skimming and no deeper consideration of our intake. Humans really don’t “multitask” and the constant task switching we do from all this information input wears us out.
The internet accelerated the trend and social media companies turbo charged it by tapping into our psychological wiring to make continued information consumption an addictive and repetitive habit. These companies make money by commanding your attention. Their desire to keep you on their platform has led them to use a number of psychological triggers to motivate you to keep scrolling.
So, we are manipulated and tired. We don’t read books like we used to. We jump from topic to topic without deeper thought or full consideration. We need to rest, slow down and moderate our information consumption. How does Hari suggest we do this to get our focus back? Here are the changes he suggests-
Pre-commit to stop multi-tasking. That means putting your phone away, turning off all the alerts and work on one thing at a time.
Be a little kinder to yourself if you get distracted. Companies are spending millions of dollars to develop algorithms to suck you in. Instead, work on getting into your flow state. Getting into a flow state and doing deeper work is rewarding. And this reward is better than shaming yourself.
Get off social media for extended periods of time. (My version of Dry January is staying off facebook for the month.)
Give yourself time for your mind to wander. Don’t pull out your phone the minute you are bored. Go for a walk and let ideas marinate.
Sleep more.
Engage in person with your family and friends.
As I mentioned, the book is written in a very compelling manner. I had worked on getting more sleep over the Christmas break and was already seeing some benefit from that. Hari did inspire me to take the month of January off of facebook. I really didn’t miss being on the site. The main realization I had was how often, even after 30 days, I still had an urge to check it. Now that I’ve knocked down that impulse, I’ve added Instagram to my efforts and seeing how that goes. If you are looking for an exit ramp from social media, this might give you the inspiration you need.
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau
So I am curious as to any good books you’ve read lately. And how has your focus been this year?
Consider the first paragraph of C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, where the devil cites “the weekly press” as a method of distraction and interruption of reason. This was written in 1941, imagine the devil’s thoughts on the introduction of television and the 24 hour news cycle-
