Attention | Tristan Harris

Video - Inspirational Journey

"The first thing about the race for attention is to notice it's never going away there is only so much attention out there and the world is not going to stop competing for attention because our friends need it we need it for ourselves we needed to pursue our goals we needed to do our work news organizations need us to spend our time with them politicians need our attention so there's always going to be a competition for attention

                 But up until now no one ever treated it like a finite resource you know it took us ten years after we went to space for us to see a photo of the earth we're so excited to just get out into space and point telescopes outwards it took us 10 years to point the telescope back to see the finite planet that we live on and that moment was paired with the birth of the environmental movement and the birth of in the United States the Environment Protection Agency because it was only when you could see that there was something finite that there was something to protect.

     So a lot of what we're doing in a world is to live in a humane technology well we have to see that attention is a finite and sacred resource and I don't just mean so you can spend your time where you want to but that it actually alters the fabric of society.

      The more time that kids are spending or their attention is steered towards a distorted version of their self-worth that crowds out other uses of attention that becomes the norm and then when it comes in norm that becomes the what kids talk about is just what we look like and we think of Who I am becomes how I look.

So we have to have a different conversation around instead of extracting human attention and drilling it out of the minds and heads of children and human beings so we can suck it up say how do we conserve it how do we coordinate safely around the regenerative capacity of human attention just like a you know forest has a capacity to regenerate based on how fast you're taking stuff down you don't want to take attention out of a system as much as people need it to regain and we live in a world right now where because there's only so much even the CEO of Netflix said our biggest competitor is sleep.

  So just like I think with you know protecting parks we say there's a National Park here and the government says we protect that Park because we know that we'll lose it forever if we don't protect it we have to say what are the parts of not just our own lives but of the social fabric that we want to not be polluted."

Must watch Ted talk by Tristan Harris