Project Liberty Newsletter:

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.”

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.

The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

• Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
• A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today’s college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
• A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.