“Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.” Without the ability to focus our minds, our attention is led by others, and we are easily captured by “the omnipresent purveyors of marshmallows”—the alluring distractions on our phones. Crawford asks, “What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?”
