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
Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote warns about the negative impact of technology on our mental state, suggesting it can lead to feelings of helplessness due to constant exposure to negativity.
Tristan Harris highlights the detrimental effects of being inundated with negative news facilitated by technology, which can overwhelm our capacity to respond effectively. The constant barrage of information about the world's pain can condition us to feel helpless, as we are presented with knowledge but lack the ability to take meaningful action, leading to a disconnect in our human experience.
Themes
TechnologyNewsHelplessnessAwarenessAgency
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a discussion on mental health in the age of information overload.
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.
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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.
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
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