Taken from Anitha Beberg’s (TimeKeeper Bank) interview of me, published 2017-10-17.
Welcome to Sentient Future!
I noticed a problem and you have probably noticed it too. Information is now created at a much faster rate than you can consume it, so your time is increasingly valuable to those that benefit from your attention (nearly everyone). With everyone else competing for our attention, little will be left for us to pursue your own goals and dreams. Welcome to the attention economy, where people take advantage of you not calculating the value of your time. With such low advertising prices, others are basically stealing your time. Take for example a $10 CPM price on a 30-second ad: someone is paying the equivalent of $1.20 to waste an hour of your time and you don’t even get the money! Quoting social media pioneer and best-selling author, Gary Vaynerchuk, marketing is about “attention arbitrage” and, as big brands reroute their budgets from TV ads to our favourite social platforms, competition for your attention will become increasingly more fierce, which will drive up the prices they pay.” As a result, even unrelated small businesses will be squeezed out of the market because all businesses need your attention. Large businesses will need to raise prices to salvage margins, which will collide with society’s growing inability to pay (economic disparity) due to rising unemployment from large business’ economies of scale, small business’ decreased viability, and rapid-onset job automation. I believe that “intentional living” is the answer.
Intentional living is the ability to pay attention to the information that is both relevant and actionable in achieving our goals, then acting on it in a disciplined way. It can also be defined as a lifestyle based on an individual or a group’s conscious attempts to live according to one’s values and beliefs.
Seeing the opportunity for intentional living to resolve our attention-scarcity problems, I’ve designed a universal, customizable, and future-proof framework that effectively guarantees fulfilment and eradicates regret in our lives. It’s called the Sentient Worldview and, at a high level, comprises six fundamental life skills (sensing self, sensing context, interpreting with emotion/intuition, interpreting with reason, deciding, acting) and two dimensions (time and space), each with underlying structures. Using these skills like we do every day forces us to learn and adjust. The Sentient Worldview is by definition a growth-oriented and adaptive mindset.
Intentional living, and more specifically the Sentient Worldview, solves the attention scarcity problem by making your attention unavailable and putting you back in control. Think of yourself as a parent resolving your kids’ fight over a toy by taking away the toy. Either you are paying attention to another person’s life, or you are paying attention to your own life. The former is what plagues us; I advocate for the latter. Note that this is actually the opposite from selfishness. The beautiful part of intentional living as a cultural movement is that it not only caters to others’ ever-reliant self-interest, but it actually serves societal interests at the same time.
Imagine a viral cultural shift towards intentional living. What would happen if all of us started filtering out, very quickly, the oversupply of irrelevant information and chose only to focus on finding or executing our own goals and dreams? Our attention would become exclusively ours again and we would be far less patient with that which does not create value for us, our loved ones, or society. Then, by also empathizing with others’ impatience for their time being wasted, our life goals would naturally require that we help others achieve their goals. This future is sustainable because both selfishness and selflessness drive the same behaviours: empathy and the act of giving.
Information overload would simply become information abundance, because we would get to choose when to conduct research, while simultaneously critiquing our findings’ relevance to us. As a final note, the importance behind the ‘virality’ of the cultural shift is that a quick change will disrupt the industries founded upon non-value added distraction before they can react, helping to redistribute power to us as the majority and reverse some of the economic disparity these industries fuel. In short, please live intentionally and encourage those you love to do the same.
Time is our actual currency, not money. My goal is to unlock more time in other people’s lives than I live in mine, so that I may live a net-positive life.
I developed this idea, after deciding that I wanted to start a business that was in-line with my own values and goals, by exploring the intersection between my interests, my skill set, and others’ needs. Rather than through epiphany, this creative output came from connecting previously disparate ideas in a new way. I then iterated through about 250 mottoes before I found the one that best conveyed Sentient Future’s brand message, “Augment Your Intent”. Following that, I spent about 200 hours designing the Sentient Worldview intentional living framework, with unrelenting emphasis on its universality, practicality, and adaptability.
This blog and content on my other social media channels are my way of creating value for others, including you, by encouraging and supporting you in tailored, practical ways to live according to your own values and goals. It also documents my journey and demonstrates my commitment to living intentionally too. I sincerely welcome you to this community and am happy to support you however I can.
Intentionally,
Allen