Author Johann Hari
Genres Self Help
Rating 💖💖💖💖🖤
Date Finished 17/12/2023

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

  1. Systemic problems require systemic solutions; individual solutions are only a temporary measure.
  2. The best engineers in the world are working to steal your attention and derail your focus.
  3. We are in what could be called surveillance capitalism, where we are digitally monitored so that advertisers can understand us and target us with as many ads as possible.

🎨 Impressions

I like the book. It doesn’t offer a solution and it doesn’t pretend to offer one because there is no solution. The author even admits that he only partially fixed the problem of spending too much time looking at a screen. I like how it addresses various problems, smartphone related ones, like food quality, dangerous untested substances, and ADHD.

How I Discovered It

I was looking for a book to help me understand the reason I spend so much time on some social media, and how to reduce it to be more productive and have more quality time for the things that matter.

Who Should Read It?

Everyone. For real. Now virtually everyone has a smarthphone and I would bet that the average person spends more than an hour a day looking at it. Think about it. That’s 15 days of time in a year that you could be using to pursue something more meaningful to you rather than waste it doom scrolling and feeding the ego of some random social media “influencer”.

🍀 How the Book Changed Me

  • I cancelled some of my social media accounts.
  • I uninstalled social media apps.
  • I have a widget on my home screen to keep track of my screen time.
  • I am now more aware of my scrolling habits and sometimes ask myself why I’m looking at what I’m looking. Sometimes I quit on the spot. Other times it requires more effort. It’s still a work in progress.
  • I already eat a relatively healty diet and exercise regularly, so nothing changed on that front.

📒 Summary + Notes

Smartphone / Tech:

  • Most app are designed to steal your attention and keep you glued to the screen. There are some tricks you can use to minimize the effect, but it’s a losing battle. To win would mean to renounce your smartphone/laptop and that would partially disconnet your from reality since now a lot of interactions happen online. But that doesn’t mean we can use internet to improve our real world social life, it just takes effort.
  • What we eat predicts how well our brain functions. A healty natural diet will give the brain all the necessary nutrients to function optimally.
  • The environment often shapes our behaviour. It’s easier to be distracted and hypervigilant when stressed or economically weak.
  • We might be poisoning our body with unknown chemicals used by bit corporations. By default those chemicals are treated as innocuous until proven dangerous (like lead), but it should be the other way around.

One thing I did before reading the book that I recommend is to find a way to reduce/disable ads. At home I have a network wide ad blocker and on my phone I use a VPN that blocks ads. I user various extensions to diable tracking, ads, cookies and more. For YouTube I use a few extensions to ignore sponsorships and disable recommendations.

It helps that I basically despise ads. I think it’s the worst use of internet and human resources. Whenever I see an ad of somethings I automatically think the product is inferior (because money spent on marketing is money not spent on R&D) and I never buy products that are sponsored by influencers.