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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of focusing our attention on what truly matters in life.
Tristan Harris highlights that in both personal and collective contexts, the challenges we face necessitate a conscious choice of where we direct our attention. Ultimately, our attention and time are our most valuable resources, shaping our experiences and the legacy we leave behind.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about prioritizing goals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.
We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.
In the present circumstances, no one can afford to assume that someone else _x000D_ will solve their problems. Every individual has a responsibility to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes are not sufficient; we must become actively engaged.
Those who wait for God are pilgrim souls that have no tie that will hold them when the definite command is issued; no prejudices that will paralyze their effort when in some strange coming of the light they are commanded to take a pathway entirely different to that which was theirs before; having no interests either temporal or eternal, either material or mental or spiritual, that will conflict with the will of God when that will is made known.
The more you know about Christ, the less you will be satisfied with superficial views of Him.
Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table...Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke...let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things.
Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow so that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.
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