Our struggle to concentrate is nothing new

Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications.

But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle to concentrate is not. Caleb Smith’s elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention begins with the perplexities of Henry David Thoreau in early19th-century England. Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on the quiet borders of Walden Pond. But he found distraction lurking even there: the fish in its depths were disturbed by the rumble of passing trains.

Because a physical escape from modernity was impossible, it was vital to rise above its harmful buzz.