we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals

I thought about what Dr. Charles Czeisler had told me back at Harvard Medical School. If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s

I realized that we have to decide now: Do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it. As one politician said: “You don’t get what you don’t fight for.”

Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called “naive.” The exact opposite is the truth. It’s naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the

As I talked with Ben, I wondered if a movement to achieve these goals should be named Attention Rebellion. He smiled when I suggested it. “It is an attention rebellion,” he said. I realized this will require a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are

Ben explained that a site battle makes it possible to “tell the story about the wider problem,” and when you do this, “it speeds up the national conversation” by waking up a lot of people to what’s really going on. For this first stage, Ben said, “you don’t need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems

So Ben told me the very first step to building a movement is to create a “consciousness-raising breakthrough cultural moment, where people go—‘Shit, my brain’s been frazzled by this stuff. It’s why I don’t have some of the pleasures in life I used to have.’ ” How do we do that? The ideal tool, he said, is what he calls “a site battle.” This is

Your ability to develop deep focus is, I have come to believe, like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children and flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wander so you can make sense

If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause