the future, it could be because our present is so drenched. It has never been harder to live in the moment, never mind see beyond it.
2. The great time heist
‘If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time,’ wrote architect Norman Juster in 1961. Sadly humanity’s artistry at dreaming up new essentials on which to spend money is exceeded only by our ingenuity at confecting fresh tosh on which to waste time.
In the decades since Juster made his joke, the industry of easy and useless grew exponentially. As it did, his joke turned into a prediction. Free time is increasingly a thing of the past.
I have nothing against wasting time. It is a joy, a right and a duty, and an aid to creativity. This is why we have so many plum terms for it: bimbling, dallying, dawdling, dillydallying, dissipating, frittering, idling, lazing, loitering, lollygagging, mooching, moseying, pootling, pottering, slacking, squandering, tarrying, tootling. I am grateful to the nameless men and women who bumbled away their hours conjuring these delicious words. ‘Forget your cares,’ they seem to say. ‘Savour us.’
If there is poetry in distraction it is because diverting people is an art, and poets are prodigality’s special envoys. In his 106th sonnet, William Shakespeare summed up literature as ‘the chronicle of wasted time’. Luckily he had enough of a work ethic to write down his musings; he was, above all, a businessman, and made his fortune by writing plays distracting enough to entice Londoners to sail the Thames for the stinking stews of Southwark, not to be waylaid by dancing bears, taverns or brothels, but to spend time, and cash, in his theatre.
Business has always sought to capture attention. But arguably, attention grabbing is today’s leading enterprise. We were promised the age of information, but stand back and it looks closer to the age of inattention. Although information may appear to be free (provided you have Wi-Fi), in reality it is a greedy, tireless consumer of an infinitely valuable resource: attention. That is, your time.
The greatest stunt that digital media pulls off is to persuade us it saves time, whilst encouraging us to overstuff it. Many theoretically time-sparing tools are time thieves in practice – each smartphone a portable shopping mall, the kind where somebody is always tugging your sleeve to spritz you with perfume. Things were bad enough with the invention of television, since the advent of which we sleep on average two fewer hours per night (not forgetting the average nine years Britons devote to that pastime). Heaven knows what the cumulative lifelong impact of Facebook and Tinder will be. But a 2011 study calculated that in a typical company of over a thousand employees, the cost of time diverted by digital distractions amounted to more than $10 million a year.
Love it or hate it, virtual reality threads experience so completely, it is our new sixth sense – and it is filling the space formerly occupied by the original one, our conscious, reflecting self.
To give an idea of how nimbly the great time heist is proceeding, when in 1999 the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed over 2,000 eight- to eighteen-year-olds, it found that young adults were using media for 6 hours 20 minutes a day. The report’s authors concluded they were close to ‘saturation’. A 2004 survey seemed to confirm this, with media use up only two minutes per day. Yet five years later it had leapt to 7 hours 40 minutes – or if multiple devices were separated, to 10 hours 45 minutes a day (for leisure alone, and excluding work or study). Doubtless these figures underestimate current norms, since they were recorded before Snapchat hoovered up what was left of teenagers’ social lives. As commentator Tom Chatfield has observed, this is not saturation: it is integration. ‘Time away from digital media is … no longer our default state.’
Saying no to technology is fast becoming the greatest time pressure in our lives. With constant access to shopping, newsfeeds and social networks, how not to overdose? Even if you log on with a specific purpose, how not to get waylaid by the ever-expanding brain buffet on offer? How to choose what to buy, who to trust? Do you rely on habit, Google, or diligently research all your options, gorging yourself daft on the boggling banquet of choice? And for each thing you choose to do with your time there is far more to refuse – magnifying scope for regrets.
In a situation without precedent in history, time alone with our own thoughts, time fully present within the moment or exclusively with another person, is something we must actively cultivate. Top-flight attention thief, the film director Steven Spielberg, hardly a technophobe, lamented this, calling technology potentially the ‘biggest party-pooper of our lives … [it] interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.’ Essentially, we are participating in an unfolding experiment in a new way to be. There is no opt-out for anybody participating in the economy or a social life. If every second is colonized, the notion of free time is itself a misnomer.
Why did Apple mastermind Steve Jobs ban his offspring from using Apple’s iPad? I suspect, like Spielberg, he feared the death of daydreams. I do. It is impossible to imagine today’s teen spending hours lying on a bed, watching shadows tickle the ceiling, grubbing up thoughts, as I once did, not unless a mindfulness app explains how.
Our technologies are full of useful potential. But only if used as tools. What Jobs will have known, and is increasingly widely understood, is that digital media are addictive. Pierre Laurent, formerly of Microsoft and Intel, who also forbade his children computers or smartphones until the age of twelve, explained why one glance into the wormhole of Facebook can easily turn into a lost afternoon:
Media products are designed to keep people’s attention. In the late 1990s, when I was working at Intel and my first child was born, we had what was called the ‘war of the eyeballs’. People don’t want you to wander and start playing with another product, so it has a hooking effect … And there’s a risk to attention. It’s not scientifically proven yet, but there’s an idea that attention is like a muscle that we build. It’s about being able to tune out all the distraction and focus on one thing. When you engage with these devices, you don’t build that capacity. It’s computer-aided attention; you’re not learning to do it.
What Laurent is suggesting is that not only are media products designed to have a hypnotic appeal, but their strength might weaken our apparatus for concentrating. For evidence to support this theory, how about the 2015 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Students, Computers and Learning? It concluded that ‘most countries that invested heavily in education related IT equipment’ witnessed no appreciable improvement in student attainment over ten years. OECD education director Andreas Schleicher added: ‘Students who use tablets and computers very often tend to do worse than those who use them moderately.’ Moderate use requires self-restraint – but this is not something digital media encourages. If you never feel the slave of a smartphone, congratulations; however, it may only be a matter of time.
Theoretically our horizons are broader, our intellectual reach enhanced by computers’ memory, pace and data, yet our engagement is often shallow, compressed. We cram thoughts into ever slighter packets of time and space (140 characters or less). Our powers of concentration are also depleted if our time is monopolized by what writer Linda Stone described as ‘continuous partial attention’, grazing multiple media instead of zoning in and focusing – the old and still optimal way to get things done.
Snapchat demonstrates how slyly digital media evoke compelling time pressures. Users exchange messages that self-destruct in seconds, eradicating potentially embarrassing backlogs. This should make time feel freer (unlike email silt, which haunts our inbox). But Snapchat does not offer the deeper social satisfactions of face-to-face contact: it scratches the social itch rather than satisfying it. Each time a message vanishes it creates a void – and the compulsion to fill it.
No gadget or app yet – not even by Apple – has added a millisecond to our day. Arguably, technology shortens it, since our distracting toys rip gigantic holes in the space-time continuum because our brain cannot compute frictionless, virtual time; we evolved to grasp it through memorable experience. The stimuli delivered by this technology locks us into dopamine loops, often triggering fight-or-flight