The Power Of Now, Here, Us And What We're Doing

Our tech promotes people’s full presence on location, enjoying the company and live activities being done together

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now is based on a simple principle that we should respect the mind’s limited capacity for thought, sensation or sentiment at any moment in time. Attention is singular, most effectively engaged when focus is on current circumstance instead of rehashing the past, or worrying about about the future, or being distracted by what’s going on elsewhere. We contend that ‘elsewhere’ can include the screen in a person’s hand, as opposed to the setting where they find themselves and who’s there and what’s going on.

There’s been a decades long progression of more time looking at screens ever since TVs entered homes, soon progressing from black & white to color (and ultimately HD and flat and interactive / on-demand), followed by PCs running apps getting welcomed in, which became more useful with mouses and graphical interfaces, and then Internet connections, which became broadband, while smartphones arrived, and then a pandemic sparked more video conferencing, and now there are the watches and the rings, meanwhile instead of people on the other side of our conversations, we increasingly consult with artificial personas through large language models.

More electronic engagement does in turn spark rising interest in offsetting that by getting out to places to be with people and do things together. But the screens remain at hand, and what's on those screens is generally designed to draw attention even deeper with panoplies of features, links and notifications. I frequently pick up my phone for some specific purpose and a little while later try to remember what that purpose was after tapping around various modestly entertaining or interesting diversions the device immediately presents to me.

Our company is called There.App because our goal is optimizing experiences of people being in special places, away from their day-to-day settings, and ideally not in front of screens (well, almost never). It could be for work, or for fun, or even to address some emergency. In any of those situations, we contend people’s attention should maximally be there and not considering some other place, time or topic.

Technology obviously has its utility and even when people are somewhere special participating in rich activities, it’s occasionally important or beneficial to momentarily direct attention to a screen for some relevant information, connection or function in support of the real-world goings on. That’s what our app is for, but we obsessively refine what we present to just what’s most essential  right now, highlighting a few considerations and actions that may be relevant, in a streamlined interface that encourages quickly getting done with devices and screens and getting back to what’s live that’s happening there.