In fact, it is the one we have to solve. It looks innocent: it’s flashy and immediate; it rewards us; it makes us feel we are in control. It seems to be nice to us.

But it is a liar. It controls us. It does this by being an intricate, intentional, invisible, social ‘system of interruption’. We have seen how devastating our relationships of interruption are. But social systems of interruption are an even beastlier beast.

And even this architecture of distraction is not the molten centre of the problem we are facing. That core is the fact that multiple distractions chemically kill discernment. Distractions, as we have seen, raise anxiety, i.e. cortisol and adrenaline, in the brain. These hormones in turn reduce our ability to think for ourselves. They make us want to give in to the wandering hands of distractors. This design of distraction is, therefore, not an oh-I-apologize, just-ignore-me-please by-product of the platform architecture. It is the goal of the architecture. It sets out to generate the hormones that make us want more distraction.

In fact, just the other day I was sent an analysis of this phenomenon by Alan Lightman, physicist and writer:

By not giving ourselves the minutes – or hours – free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is a subtle phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation – all have happened quickly and almost invisibly.

The situation is dire. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world. I would like to make a bold proposal: that half our waking minds be designated and saved for quiet reflection.

We need a mental attitude that protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

This secondary sensing phenomenon is actually erosive. Matthew Crawford, in his The World Beyond Your Head (another masterpiece you should read before you do a single other thing), says that one of the ways we lose our ability to think is to surrender it to secondary sensing devices. We stop thinking when we obey the perceiver that is not in the room.

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.

But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?