Indistractable by Nir Eyal review – letting tech off the hook

The author of Hooked, a bible of addictive tech design, now offers advice on how not to be distracted. But is his self-help argument convincing?

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley points out that the Lord's Prayer has 50 words, and six of them are dedicated to imploring God not to lead us into temptation. When I was a child sitting in Sunday school in west Texas, I often wondered why God would engineer these temptations into our environment in the first place - much less lead us into them - if he was only going to enjoin us to avoid them later.

Today I feel the same way about the creators of our technological environments. We are bombarded at every turn with persuasive design that exploits our psychological weaknesses and often leads us into temptation, habituation and distraction. At the same time, we are expected to take up arms against these distractions, to muster superhuman levels of self-regulation, just to adapt to this all-out war others are waging for our attention.