By Laura BennettMonday 12 Feb 2024UNDISTRACTEDPodcastsReading Time: 3 minutes
We all do it: you’re lying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep and you pull out your phone for one last scroll. Be it the news, social media, emails or checking tomorrow’s weather we become enveloped in our screens and suddenly we’re sleeping an hour later than we planned.
Add to that the time we spend watching shows, the work we do on a screen, and you realise so much our lives are lived connected to devices. They’re not inherently bad, using them is convenient, but what are we losing when our incidental time is taking up by them?
David Talbot is the founder of Glowface, an organisation that helps improve our relationship to technology and reflect on our allegiance to digital progress. His book of the same name is a guide to reclaiming your purpose and restoring humanity in the digital era.
“Attention is the world’s most valuable commodity right now,” David told Hope 103.2’s UNDISTRACTED podcast.
“In the last 20 years we’ve built attention-based economies, and the top performing companies are the ones who can capture people’s attention, or they produce devices that capture people’s attention.
“Attention is the world’s most valuable commodity right now,” David told Hope 103.2
“We have to realise though that where you spend your attention is where you spend your time, and where you spend your time is how you spend your life.”
For David his mission isn’t for us all to do a “digital detox”, but to recognise the deeper loss afoot when we give so much time, talent and mental resource away to devices.
“There’s nothing wrong with a device, it’s more about who’s in control,” David said.
“Are you in control or is the device in control? Is the device in control of your kids’ time? Or is it your kid in control of how they use their time with their device?”
Reflecting on a youth spent mastering the latest video games, David said it was “hard to write” about how many hours he gave to games instead of fostering a natural talent in mathematics.
“Clearly I had an issue with addiction and computer games,” David said in Glowface.
“It’s quite a hard reality to confront, the idea of what could have been.
“But it wasn’t as if I was given a choice when I was younger to trade my future for present online gaming glory.”
To counteract our propensity to “stumble into” a loss of time and talent, David believes we need to embrace the benefits of solitude and “steal hours” back from comfort.
“I think when you are in solitude, you get the chance to process your thoughts,” David said.
“You come up with new ideas, you get to be creative in new ways.
“When we get back in touch with the core aspects of humanity, then we [can] discover, ‘what am I here to do? What am I here to bring? What’s God put me on this earth to do?’”
Listen to the full episode of UNDISTRCATED with guest David Talbot in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
David’s book Glowface is out now.
Want more from UNDISTRCATED? Subscribe here.