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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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.
Tristan HarrisRead
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?
Tristan HarrisRead
Similar quotes
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.
Le CorbusierRead
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Paul TherouxRead
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
Ayn RandRead
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
Adrienne RichRead
It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress.
John Stuart MillRead
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
Sam HarrisRead