Meet the Giant Everything

(aka The Thief of Time, Attention, and Imagination)

The Giant Everything is the name we give to those 11,000 "things" that occupy our days, consume our attention,  deracinate our imagination, and diminish our sense of possibility. 

These things can be great or small. They can be things to do, things not to do, meetings, appointments, parties, things to fix, things to not fix, people to meet, people to avoid, happy events, sad ones, disasters, catastrophies, celebrations, climate change, existential dread, joy, sorrow, things we want to do, things we don't, grocery lists, laundry lists, list of lists, and the list goes on.

The truth is that The Giant Everything has a hard time keeping track of So. Many. Things. Thus, The Giant Everything steals bits of your time and attention.

Have you ever walked into a room and have no idea why you got there? That is likely because The Giant Everything snatched a bit of your attention. Overhwhelmed by world events? Again, The Giant Everything is the likely culprit.  When you find yourself unable to pay attention, that might be why. It is not you. It is just The Giant Everything.

That space, where time, attention, and imagination come together, is where a sense of possibility is born. 

Thus, the challenge is that The Giant Everything steals more than your time, attention, and imagination. It steals your sense of possibility.

It's not just you. Really.

Trying to keep track of The Giant Everything impacts all of us. There are so many things competing for our time and attention.

Want some horrifying stats that might make you feel better?

• Did you know that the average human attention span  has dwindled to  8.25 seconds. 
• Each day on Earth we generate more than 500 million tweets, 347.3 billion, 4 million petabytes of Facebook data, more than 65 billion WhatsApp messages and more than 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube. 
• According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) specifies that there has been a 35% increase in natural disasters since just 1990 and according to the UN, in 2016, more countries experienced violent conflict than at any point in almost 30 years.

• Add to this the content and concerns generated by our own lives: work, family, volunteering, chores, relationships, school, taking care of ourselves and others and just all the work required to maintain our lives.

You might feel like your attention is irrevocably fragmented. You might feel like you can't take the time for things that matter to you. You might find that you don't have the time to help yourself, to help others. And yet, the world needs a lot of help.

You might think, "why bother?" the world is a mess anyway.  In the face of The Giant Everything, it can all feel impossible.

When time is limited, and our attention so compromised, it is no wonder that our collective imagination and sense of possibility suffers.

And this is precisely why The Human Imagination Project was created: to snatch our time and attention back from the gaping maw of The Giant Everything so that we can reclaim our collective imagination and use that to imagine, create, and enact new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and for the world.

We want this to be a space to imagine, to dream, to do, to discover.

We want to help you reclaim your time, attention, and imagination, in order to reconnect to what matters to you. Because, when you are attending to your time and attention, it makes it that much harder for The Great Everything to steal those very things from you.

And we know that it is a big job to pay attention to everything. It takes a lot of time. We know The Great Everything is just trying to help us and protect us. Thus, if we get better at aligning our time and attention with our intention, well it helps.