Status Updates From El valor de la atención: Po...

"Once I knew [about flow], I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been."

Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.

"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"

"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."

Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.

Chapter 6

Tech algorithms serve you up content to keep you looking. They want you on the platform for as long as possible

Chapter 5: “James Williams the former Google strategist that I Met addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question ‘How many Of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand “