An essay-diary in which the author shifts and enriches the debate on the attention crisis.—Adrien Naselli, Libération, 31/12/25

I highly recommend reading this book.—Étienne Klein, France culture, 10/02/26

Fixing your lack of concentration by watching frogs: Apolline Guillot’s salutary lesson. A funny and profound essay on the benefits of intellectual scatteredness, which threatens us all.— Le Figaro

For readers of Cal Newport’s books.

Contrary to all the advice currently being peddled on how to optimise your attention span, this book is the chronicle of a slow and deliberate loss of focus. It is also a call to all those who feel fragmented and alone, caught up in the flow of everyday life, too often torn between compulsive scrolling, powerlessness and guilt. Above all, it is an invitation to place the question of our presence in the world and to ourselves at the heart of the debate on the “attention crisis”.

At a time when we are being warned about the dispersion of our attention and the danger of screens that fragment it, this essay in the form of an embodied narrative (written in the first person singular) proposes a radical reversal: what if attention were not a resource to be controlled, but a fundamental impulse towards the world?

Apolline Guillot questions a widely accepted, territorialised, extractivist view of attention and instead rehabilitates dislocation, dissolution and dispersion. Against the myth of a self-controlled, focused and disciplined subject, she explores the idea of an open, fragmented, ever-changing subjectivity. By walking, reading, loving, we scatter ourselves — and this may be our most authentic way of existing.