on a toxic neurochemical plateau, unable to escape it in the way we are designed to (by fighting or fleeing). Meanwhile the hours that are hoovered up by gadgets must be taken from something else – such as daydreams.
I did not sign up to a life divided between a load of junk hours and a few good ones, but this is exactly the deal we risk striking if life becomes a spectator sport. Who will lie on their deathbed fondly remembering their Facebook posts, unnecessary work meetings, or zingers on Twitter? Life gains perspective from experiences – first-hand ones that you can share.
Spend too much time online and you become less yourself. Social media addict Andrew Sullivan grew so unsettled that he could not read a book:
In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: ‘Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?’
He went off on a retreat to relearn how to live in the moment. One day he noticed something beautiful – then was beside himself when he realized that he had no phone to share it with his followers.
The quality of your time – how fast, fun or deadly it feels – depends on the quality of your attention. Our attention is us. It is no coincidence that yoga, meditation, mindfulness apps, and – what must be the definition of voluntary tedium – colouring books for adults, are boom industries amid all these time pressures. Some claim that such trends reflect a thirst for spirituality in a godless world. In fact, what unites them is that they all help us to focus our minds. We turn to these tools to nurture our capacity to pay attention. And well we might. Otherwise someone else will snatch it.
A great battle for our attention rages. Each time you surf the net or saunter into an online store, you participate in tacit tests designed to sniff out smarter ways to detain you in these wonderlands, so they can convert what were once experiences and opinions into crunchable data. Google routinely runs parallel experiments to see which web pages intercept the most pairs of eyes, which shade of blue holds the greatest goggle-appeal. Alas, the trillions of insights aggregated by algorithms from the information we generously donate when we go online exceed the ingenuity of a billion distracting Shakespeares.
Eyeball grabbing is not always subtle. Witness the shouty, freakshow journalism that empurples once-stately broadsheet newspapers, desperate to monetize flighty readers with clickbait (the more people click on an article, the higher the advertising rates). Witness the soap opera storylines: psychopaths, aeroplane crashes and baby theft are standard fare in hitherto staid fictional villages. Witness computer games like Candy Crush, devised to render you a fairground duck, ready to be hooked. In this context, the allure of slow-moving Nordic television serials might appear out of kilter. It is not that thrillers gain gravitas when mumbled in Danish, but that viewers have to read the subtitles or they lose the thread. How delightful and rare to concentrate wholly on one thing, without a gadget.
Think of those intriguing, big-bottomed celebrities or grumpy cats whose mountain of renown is founded on a pea of proficiency – primarily their talent at diverting vast numbers of us from what we should be doing, perhaps for ten seconds, but fast – and long enough for advertisers to pay top dollar to hire eye-space on their YouTube channel. Now ask this: who benefits most from our increasingly waylayable attention? When you consider that advertising is the chief force driving the internet’s development today, the implications are scary. Who wants to end up feeling like a bystander in other, more scintillating, fat-bottomed lives?
‘Several “generations” of children have grown up expecting parents and care takers to be only half-there,’ observed sociologist Sherry Turkle. A dangerous message to send anyone, let alone a child. Paying attention is not just polite and loving but a skill and, like sensible time use, we need to cultivate it. Rare is the soul who likes hearing ‘I’m bored’ or feels relaxed watching children climb trees, yet both such experiences are pathways on the scramble to maturity. The quiescent children we see in cars or cafés, their ears stopped by headphones, their eyes fused to tablets and DVDs, are glazed into silence by technological dummies. They look happy, as do adults ogling smartphones. But whatever our age, let hypnotic media syphon off opportunities to conduct conversation, to notice and engage, and wellbeing suffers. Why do we need to silence children anyway? Are they not interesting – or at least, not quite as interesting as emails?
Being online teaches us to be impatient, to want more and more – right now! That is why computers have spinning daisies: to show us that something is really happening, that the screen has not frozen – to soothe us when we are forced to wait three seconds for data to upload. But we are too ready to imagine that we are not responsible for our impatience – as if rush were some impersonal force, a malignant god whom we must helplessly follow.
‘I do not have time for this’ is the message that we send the world, and the people we profess to love, when bustling about in myopic fugs of busyness. There is a recognized phenomenon of ‘time entitlement’, in which people imagine time moves more slowly because they consider wherever they are or whatever is going on around them to be unworthy of their attention. It suggests an explanation for why we need our time to be so full – and to proclaim as much, burrowing into busyness as if to make ourselves feel more important. Rather like paranoia, all this time-stuffing resembles a self-cure for insignificance. We are one of six billion, after all, so we cannot hope to lay a fingerprint on posterity.
We may have less time to play with in future. Quantified working policies prevail in many companies, with employees’ actions monitored and timed throughout their working day. In 2005, the Ford Motor Company permitted workers a total of forty-eight minutes per shift to go to the bathroom. By 2014, Chicago’s WaterSaver Faucet company felt six minutes a day would suffice for ablutions (presumably saving water). It appeared refreshing in 2016 when Aetna, a US insurer, paid staff a $25 bonus for every twenty nights they managed to sleep seven hours or more rather than stay up late on their gadgets. But how telling that such incentives are necessary.
Manipulating our time, nudging it in a remunerative direction, is where the money will be; it always has been. Already we have Google spectacles to steer us to the nearest coffee shop. Next AI will infiltrate our clothing. When self-driving cars rumble along our streets, it seems inevitable that certain routes and information will be preferred, leading the traveller to certain stores and rest-stops, past certain billboards, which will sponsor the technology provider for the privilege.
‘Quality time’ is the phrase parents and lovers murmur when trying to justify how little they spend with us. It always sounds like a crap excuse. But we desperately need to think about the quality of our time. The greatest beneficiaries of our new sort of time recognize this. Microsoft’s Bill and Melinda Gates are masterly time managers, scheduling meetings to discuss their children’s progress, treating each strand of their lives as a project to be nurtured. Carving out space to let their interests blossom – and to have a date – is their religion.
Custom-fitting time to suit you is a noble goal, but also rather high-maintenance. Personally, I would prefer the rhythm of my life to do the time management, leaving more for me. As Paul Dolan writes in Happiness by Design, ‘It’s worth thinking about how you could find more time without having to plan more time.’
For some, busy will always be a boast. No problem – unless the resulting tradeoffs do not stand up to scrutiny. Fixate on being on it, all the time, in the tense present, and we feel we have no time. Because the Achilles heel of lightning-speed living is us: we cannot keep up with it. Tragically this does not stop us trying.
As boundaries dissolve, distraction breeds distraction, and pressures seem to intensify. It is easy to believe time itself is beyond our control. Or to overpack our days, leaving no slack time, space or pause for thought. This overwhelms us. No wonder procrastination is also rising. If it seems crazy, consider this: what better way to assert that you will do things in your own good time? Now that our relationship with time is dysfunctional, it seems only logical