Lost in screen world
There is something that happened to all of us, gradually and then all at once, and it is slowly eroding our lives… minute by minute.
It’s demonstrated through the action of picking up your phone to check the time and putting it down 30 minutes later having watched 3 videos, read half an article, opened Instagram twice, and completely forgotten what you were originally looking for. Whilst also not remembering at all what you have just spent a significant chunk of time consuming. It’s the reunion dinner with old friends and whilst the energy and conversation is in full flow, there is still a pull somewhere inside of you, a low-level itch, to just quickly check your phone. It’s the way any silence in your day has started to feel unbearable or all together impossible to sit within without reaching for a distraction.
We’ve all felt it. We just haven’t talked about it directly enough.
But it’s not our fault?
Johann Hari spent 3 years trying to understand this phenomenon, interviewing over 200 of the world’s leading experts on attention for his book Stolen Focus. What he found wasn’t that we’re lazy, or weak, or addicted in the way we usually use that word. What he found was that our attention was taken, systematically, deliberately, by the most sophisticated technology ever built for exactly that purpose. As he put it: “Your difficulty in focusing is a system problem.” Not a personal one.
The average person now touches their phone 2,617 times every single day. Students can focus on a task for 65 seconds before losing it. Office workers manage 3 minutes.
These aren’t personality flaws…they’re design outcomes.
Because here’s what happened while we were busy living our lives: somewhere in the early 2000s, someone in Silicon Valley worked out that in a world of infinite content, the scarce thing wasn’t information, it was the human capacity to pay attention to it. And once you understand that, the entire architecture of the internet makes sense. Every notification, every infinite scroll, every algorithmic feed, all of it is engineered around a single goal: capture the most of that scarce resource, hold it as long as possible, and sell it to the highest bidder. Your attention became the product. And the business model of a generation was built on this very thing.
Terrifyingly, we now spend an average of almost 7 hours a day on screens. Gen Z (the first generation to grow up entirely inside of this system) clocks closer to 9 hours. We spend an estimated 5.7 years of our lives on social media alone. For context: that’s longer than most people spend in formal education...😨
The attention economy isn’t just taking a slice of our time, it is taking most of it.
Attention < Presence
All of that is more or less understood now. We know our phones are designed to be addictive, the feeds are engineered for compulsions to check. And alongside this we can feel that something rather important is at major risk of being lost forever. But still, we stay in the loop of habit.
This is where we must zoom out, because the answer isn’t individual willpower or developing a better relationship with your phone settings. What’s actually happening is an economic shift… one that’s just beginning to show up in the data, in the culture, in the choices people are making when no one’s watching them.
There is a principle that runs beneath every major shift in history: value migrates toward scarcity. Salt was precious where it couldn’t be found. Silk commanded fortunes because its secret was guarded for a thousand years. The scarce thing is never the same thing for long. And the moment something becomes infinite, it stops being the scarce thing. And therefore, stops being the most valuable thing.
Attention was scarce when content was limited, but that time is over. AI can now generate more content in a minute than any of us could consume in a lifetime. The machines are competing for attention too, and manufacturing the very things that fill it. Which means the economic logic that built the internet as we know it is quite literally inverting…
And the question we keep coming back to, the one we’re investigating closely through MOSAIC’s mission, is this:
If attention is no longer the scarce thing... what is?
We think it’s PRESENCE
And we want to be careful here, because presence is one of those words that’s been over-used in wellness culture which has sadly drained some of its original weight. We don’t mean presence as in mindfulness, as a yoga practice, or as a meditation technique. We also don’t mean the type of presence you have to ‘try’ to achieve. We mean: the lost in the moment type of presence.
Presence from the Latin root
praesentia.The state of being here. Whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly, whole-bodily, whole-souly
here.
You see, attention is a fraction of you, the cognitive, screen-facing sliver that can be captured and monetised and served back to you in a feed. Presence, however, requires the whole of you. Your body in a space, your nervous system calibrating to the room’s energy, your inter-relational awareness, your mind focused on the moment, your senses attuned to your surroundings. Presence is the part of us that reminds us what it means to be alive.
And here’s what we’ve noticed: you cannot automate it. You cannot generate it. You cannot serve it through a screen. The serendipity of a conversation that goes somewhere neither person planned, that’s not replicable. The particular quality of a room where something shifts and everyone knows it, that can’t be live-streamed. The experience of dancing for hours and not once thinking to check your phone, that exists only in the body that is dancing.
Is presence a skill? We’re not sure. An art might be closer representation. Or maybe it’s more like a sense, one that atrophies when it goes unused, and comes back, a little painfully and then suddenly all at once, when you give it the right conditions.
A return to the room
The run club replaced the running app, the supper club replaced the restaurant review, the pottery class is the new hype. People are leaving the screen and returning to the room. Not in a “put down your phone” preachy way. More like a hunger, slow-building, for something they couldn’t quite name until they found themselves in the right room at the right time and felt it.
This isn’t nostalgia. Most of the people most hungry for it never had it in the first place. It’s something more like an instinct reasserting itself, the deep human knowledge that this, right here, the actual physical experience of being alive alongside other people, is the whole damn point.
And if value migrates toward scarcity, then the most valuable thing in the world right now is the thing that can’t be automated, replicated, or generated at scale.
Embodied, shared, lived PRESENCE.
We’re building a collective of people who want to shape a more human future, if you wish to join us click here!
Sources
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (2022) — discussion of attention, task-switching and the 65-second / 3-minute figures.
YES to this! I couldn’t agree more