There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Tristan HarrisRead
The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don't speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It's because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the necessity of addressing complex problems with the appropriate depth and attention, rather than simplifying them into oversimplified messages.
Tristan Harris points out that the significant challenges in our world are intricate and demand thorough understanding and engagement. However, society often tends to avoid this complexity, opting instead for simplified, bite-sized pieces of information. This preference could stem from a conditioning of our minds to favor quick, digestible content over detailed exploration, which has implications for how we engage with important issues and the depth of our discussions.
Themes
ComplexityAttentionProblemsSocietyInformation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on climate change, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for nuanced solutions rather than superficial fixes.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes →Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.
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You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
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Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
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I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
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If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
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