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
If one app or news site or friend gets your attention, that means something or someone else loses it. It comes out of our sleep, our time with family or our reflective time with ourselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the trade-offs in our attention due to digital distractions.
Tristan Harris emphasizes that every moment spent engaging with an app, news site, or even a friend comes at a cost, detracting from more meaningful interactions and self-reflection. This observation points to the significant impact of technology on our daily lives, urging us to reconsider how we allocate our attention in a world full of distractions.
Themes
AttentionDistractionTechnologyReflectionRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about the effects of technology on family time, you could quote this to highlight the importance of mindful attention.
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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