I had lost the versatility to turn ideas around and see them from different perspectives. ‘It felt like my imagination and use of language were vacuum packed. The constant stimulation, task switching, and adrenaline of an all-consuming and increasingly bureaucratized profession were, she felt, corroding her ability to think in a deep or creative way. Journalist and writer Madeleine Bunting recently downed tools and walked away from a twelve-year career and a named column at the Guardian Newspaper. Similar stories are circulating on this side of the Atlantic. An early adopter of living-in-the-web, Sullivan’s friendships had dwindled, and his health had suffered, but the rewards of unceasing engagement with an audience of 100,000 people a day propped him up in ‘a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego’. Explaining why he purposefully severed himself from his device, Sullivan (2016) wrote that his on-line life had begun to substitute for his real life, with virtual interaction filling the spaces where human encounters used to be, and that he had lost the attentional capacity to read books. In 2016, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative commentator and pioneer of the political blog, walked into a meditation centre and surrendered his smartphone.

Attention attention attention