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Why time feels less free

This is the mystery:

We have more hours at our disposal than any humans in history. Few of us toil for the six 12-hour shifts that constituted our grandfathers’ working week. Many of us also enjoy flexible employment arrangements. According to current estimates, lucky citizens of the developed world may enjoy around 1,000 months on this planet. The average man’s life expectancy is 80 and is increasing by six hours a day. Women’s rate of improvement lags behind slightly at four hours per day, but given that their average lifespan is 83, they can afford to take it slower.

Better yet, what we can do with our time transcends anything yet seen on earth. Our present has been transformed by astonishing powers of telepresence. Own a smartphone and you can operate in multiple time zones, see, learn or buy pretty much anything, interact with almost anyone, whenever you wish, with a swipe of a finger, without leaving bed. Never have we been able to accomplish so much, so fast, with so little effort.

Yet despite these everyday miracles, many of us feel time poor. Why?

The short answer is that we are living in a new sort of time, and it is creating a new sort of us. Our instinctive response is to speed up, but we would gain far more from these glorious freedoms if we slowed down and concentrated.

This is not always welcome news. ‘I am fed up with being told to be “in the moment”,’ said my friend, when she heard I was writing about time. ‘Please do something about it.’

I feel her pain. I associate this advice with a certain kind of lifestyle guru – the wealthy, ex-film star kind, who has never ironed a shirt without a stylist or a camera crew to immortalize this act of humility. But although this phrase sounds like twaddle from certain lips, it is harder to dismiss if you recognize it as the echo of wisdom that reverberates across continents and centuries.

‘What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there,’ said the Buddha, two and a half millennia ago. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who beat a solitary retreat to Walden Woods, Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1845 to ‘live deliberately’ for two years, riffed on the same theme:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains … You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Anyone too busy to take off to a log cabin in search of enlightenment might be annoyed by Thoreau’s lovely words, since they imply we may be missing out on the times of our life. But that is a philosopher’s job, to ask the nagging question, how to live well. And there are signs that it is increasingly urgent.

The architecture of time in our lives is being dismantled at an astonishing rate, in an astonishing variety of ways. Previously, days were paced by work schedules, TV schedules, meal times, home time – with breaks built in; moments to rest, reflect, plan. These rhythms managed time for us. Now these boundaries are crumbling. Linear time coexists with flexitime, its disruptive pulse the irregular chirrup of smartphones. It is a social and technological revolution, with profound, personal consequences that we have been tardy to recognize.

This is the situation: as the steady and sequential are displaced by the instant and unpredictable, our time can be freer than ever. The complication is that this brings pressures and responsibilities. We need to manage time more actively or else we can feel we are falling apart.

Using time effectively is not an innate gift. It is a skill, though one sadly not taught in schools. We acquire it – some of us better than others – through interaction and experience. But nobody has inherited the cultural knowhow required for this new sort of time; our parents could not teach us, it is all too new. And managing time is itself a pressure that can make us feel we have less to spare.

You need not be Stephen Hawking to understand that time is a dimension. But, each waking moment, we also create our own sense of it. And when that sense alters, we behave differently too. Of course everybody’s relationship with time is always changing – we are all getting older; however, today’s changes are redefining the quality of experience. With small, practical steps, we can use it to improve our quality of life. Or alternatively, we can trip into the hurry trap.

Long ago, our ancestors depended on moving fast to survive. The fight-or-flight response was an emergency gear designed to speed them out of trouble. Today our tools and toys can do the fast for us. This is the great gift of our new sort of time, if we use it. We can custom fit our hours to suit us. If we really want, we can do what nine-to-fivers have always dreamt of and live like guitarist Keith Richards, Lazarus of the Rolling Stones, who for years slept twice a week – ‘I’ve been conscious for at least three lifetimes,’ he boasted – and, mystifyingly, grew old. (Note: the hazards of such a lifestyle include being crushed by a library, plummeting headlong from a palm tree and mistakenly snorting a line of your father’s ashes.)

This chapter explores why, rather than seize the freedom to set our own pace, instead we are speeding up – and how this is a problem.

1. Why time sped up

The twentieth century was the age of acceleration. Obsession with speed summoned planes, trains, automobiles and rockets, culminating in the design of a mighty particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, the construction of which began at Cern in 1998. Breaching human limits was of equal fascination.

Who does not want to go faster? In the 1950s a young neurologist decided to learn how. In particular, he wanted to find out why overdoing physical activity leaves us breathless. It was widely held that as muscles burn energy, lactate alters the blood’s acidity, increasing the nerve impulses to the brain – in effect saying ‘Breathe harder! Oxygen required!’ But he suspected something more: that when we push ourselves beyond a certain point our lungs cannot deliver enough oxygen, stopping us in our tracks. Sampling arterial blood could confirm his theory; however, opening an artery mid-workout was not safe. Instead he took the indirect route, recruiting a team of athletes, a treadmill and a stopwatch.

Each runner sprinted to exhaustion. After giving them a period to recover the neurologist called them back, strapping on facemasks that delivered oxygen in concentrations of 33 per cent, 66 per cent and 100 per cent (20 per cent is a normal concentration in air). Those who received 66 per cent saw a drastic improvement in their performance. Most went twice the previous distance. One finally quit out of boredom, another to catch a train. The hypothesis was correct. Stamina was a matter of both resources and willpower.

A few years later, distinguished exercise expert Professor Tim Noakes interviewed the neurologist. What was the most important limiting factor in exhaustion? The young man did not hesitate. ‘Of course, it is the brain, which determines how hard the exercise systems can be pushed.’

His answer is to be trusted. He too was an athlete. His name was Roger Bannister, and he well understood the mind’s power to overmaster time.

On the morning of 6 May 1954 Bannister was due to attempt to run the mile in under four minutes, which would make him the first man to do so. But he awoke to blustery winds, and these would add one second to each lap. His best practice time for a lap to date was 59 seconds, so triumph would require him to run faster than his sunny day’s best. He did not want to try, dreading failure, having already been vilified by the press for previous disappointing races.

He travelled alone on the train from London to Oxford, brooding on his dilemma. Apparently by chance, although surely by design, his coach, Franz Stampfl, was in the same carriage. Stampfl pointed out that Bannister’s rivals were due to race in the coming weeks. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘if there is only a half-good chance … If you pass it up today, you may never forgive yourself for the rest of your life. You will feel pain, but what is it? It’s just pain.’

Bannister arrived at the Iffley race track determined to run for his life. Later that day, three hundred yards from the finish, his pace lagged, his body exhausted.

There was a moment of mixed excitement when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew me compellingly forward. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. Time seemed to stand still, or did not exist. The only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality, even extinction perhaps …

With five yards to go, the finishing line seemed almost to recede. Those last few seconds seemed an eternity. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me only if I reached the tape without slackening my speed. If I faltered now, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would seem a cold, forbidding place. I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last desperate spring to save himself.

In 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, Bannister had changed history. But he would be prouder of his later achievements, becoming a leading authority on the autonomic system – the hidden clock that controls the most vital beats in your life and mine, our heart and breathing rate.

The lessons of Bannister’s early breathing experiments are transferrable. We can increase our pace, mental or physical, given the right resources. But our mind is in charge. Unless it has the means to remain in control, speed wears us out, fast. Yet we can test the limits, and even feel, as he did in Iffley, that time no longer exists. Controlling time makes us powerful if we take choices.

So what do you want to do today?

Perhaps this seems a frivolous question. Perhaps you are fully occupied by what you need to do. Before you answer, it is worth reflecting that your ability to ask it is a privilege unique to our species.

‘We all have our time machines, don’t we,’ wrote H.G. Wells in The Time Machine. ‘Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward, are dreams.’

Being aware that one day we must die is the cruellest term of the human condition. But to compensate, we also have the capacity to appreciate that since this is a one-way ticket, why not embrace the adventure?

Our powers of mental time travel make this possible. They endow us with the riches of culture and knowledge, not to mention aeroplanes that (in theory) run on time, as well as computers, virtual worlds and machines to roam outer space. And how wondrous it is to be able to walk outside after a hard day and – if you are lucky, if the night sky is not cloudy or gelded orange by city lights – turn your eyes heavenward, as I just did, spot a white smudge hovering above the shoulder of Pegasus, and appreciate that there is Andromeda, our nearest major galaxy, one trillion stars and 2.5 million light years away – a vision that began travelling to earth around the time that your immediate ancestor, Homo habilis, ‘handy man’, first picked up a tool, 2.3 million years before a mind like yours or mine existed.

And here we are. Here is your hospitable consciousness, meeting mine, leaping through time, long after I flung these words into a laptop, late one summer’s day. It is impressive, given that we started out as apes and, rather longer before that, as stardust.

Time travel – the ability to understand and organize our actions – is a commonplace marvel. It matters because each conscious instant of our life presents a decision: where to allocate our time and attention. Consciousness enables this, not only by performing the feat of simulating our outside environment inside our head, but also furnishing us with an inner reality. Our every moment is infused by previous moments, anticipated moments – giving life depth and perspective, and us our sense of self.

Grace of these riches, our mind’s eye, as if wearing magical spectacles with lenses fashioned from a clairvoyant’s crystal ball, is able to serve as a questing prosthesis for our other five senses: it supercharges the insights they glean from the world around us to let us see beyond where we are into the possible future, supplementing it with information drawn from memory and knowledge to plot a wise and (it is to be hoped) safe course through space and time.

The desire to peer around life’s corners is surely the evolutionary mechanism that summoned consciousness. Certainly, it distinguishes humanity from other animals, freeing us to control our path. These faculties enable you to remember birthdays, plan a surprise for somebody you love, cook a meal without burning down the house, force yourself to study for exams, judge exactly how long it is safe to loiter in Starbucks before running to catch that plane, know you will never like liquorice, watch Dirty Dancing, sing along and have the time of your life. Time is the foundation of your sense of self. Your sixth sense.

Strangely, although everyone agrees that time is scarce and precious, it is remarkable how readily we give it away. Statistics suggest that whilst we wonder where the time goes, in truth we have plenty to spare. In 2013 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey found that on average men aged 15 and over had 5.9 daily hours of leisure. Women had 5.2 hours, and employed workers an average of 4.5 hours – a sizeable chunk of the waking day.

This does not tally with how busy we feel. Are we deluded?

What these numbers do not reveal is the form this leisure comes in: whether those free minutes are scattered through the day or available in useful blocks. Time leaks from us in many ways, after all. Count them, however, and you may feel queasy.

In 2014, Ofcom found UK adults spent 8 hours 41 minutes a day on media devices, 20 minutes longer than they spent asleep. Of this tally, four hours went on TV – the same for children. (On average, Britons donate nine irreplaceable years to box-goggling.) Across the Atlantic, in 2014 the average US citizen watched six hours of TV per day, spent an hour on a computer, another on a smartphone, and almost three listening to radio. Tot them up. It sounds a lot like leisure.

Yet other information suggests that the pace of life is accelerating. The rate at which we walk is a good indicator. In 1999 sociologist Robert Levine led a study of cities and towns across thirty-one countries and found that urbanites march significantly faster than their less wealthy country cousins. London, one of the world’s richest cities, topped the speed list. A decade later, similar research concluded that the average tempo had risen 10 per cent. Far Eastern cities accelerated the most, with Singapore (up 30 per cent) becoming the new global leader.

Why are we hurrying up? Researchers concluded that several factors increase a country’s pace of life: economic growth, large cities, rising incomes, accurate, plentiful clocks, an individualistic culture and a cool climate. (Asian tiger economies sped up with the spread of air conditioning.) Imagine those lonely hordes, their collars upturned as blistering wind chases them into their skyscrapers to put in another twelve-hour stint.

The picture these statistics paint is confusing: of fast-moving, exhausted individuals, who spend half their existence slumped in armchairs while imagining they are hurtling about at full throttle. This contradictory image begins to add up when you consider the engines behind economic growth: flexible hours (of employment and consumption) and hyperfast communications.

If the steam engine fired the industrial revolution, the driver behind wealth in recent decades has been semiconductors. As they got cheaper and faster, so did computers, enabling us to do more, faster, without moving an inch. The possibilities are endless. What is less obvious is that acceleration has psychological, physiological and practical side effects which are increasing time pressures, with complicated consequences.

Speed has long been both the goal and the index of human progress. The history of civilization hops and skips in innovative leaps that let us do more in less time: from the invention of the wheel, to bank notes that let us transmit funds without trundling about caskets of gold, to machines for washing clothes. Swift communication unleashed scientific discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries via epistolary relationships between the likes of Galileo and Kepler, thus hastening the Enlightenment. In the same way, great cities are superconductors of knowledge, gathering together like-minded people – as in California’s Silicon Valley, where dreams of the future led to where we are now, with the boundaries of space and time defeated, and more or less every idea under the sun available more or less instantly, Wi-Fi server permitting.

It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary today’s fast is. When the Royal Mail relaunched in 1662 after the restoration of Britain’s monarchy, a letter dispatched in London would reach a continental city between three and twenty-five days later. Postmen travelled on foot at a regulated seven miles per hour between March and September, five miles per hour in the winter months. (Horses were not used, since they lacked staying power, while ‘footmen can go where horses cannot’.) Priority was given to letters of state, carried in a separate bag known as the ‘packet’. If the packet went astray, an official letter was easy to recognize by the forbidding motto on its exterior: ‘Haste, Post, haste for thy life’. In case the postboy was illiterate, it was accompanied by a grim sketch: a gallows with a corpse hanging in a noose. Arguably today’s fast should also carry a health warning.

Undeniably speed enlarges minds and fortunes. It is an article of faith among management consultants, citing a popular study, that a product that runs 50 per cent over budget will be more profitable than one that strolls in six months late. Fast technology conjures myriad new businesses, some great, some questionable – such as high-frequency stock trading, in which tech-savvy individuals exploit differing lengths in computer cable between exchanges to skim lucrative sales data milliseconds ahead of the pack, thus creaming off millions. We are a long way from this complaint, made to the Royal Mail in the seventeenth century, about a conniving merchant who ‘has had most singular advantages, having had his letters many hours before a general dispatch could be made to all the merchants’.

But the advantages of acceleration and unfettered access via digital media bring new time pressures. Businesses routinely purloin customers’ time, cheekily passing this off as being for our convenience. Is it liberating to have a dehumanizing supermarket experience, swiping produce at the automated till, or to act as data inputters, filling in forms to order something online, then lose ten hours indoors awaiting the delivery, or to go to the shop and wait ages for a runner to disembowel your item from the store? Each unpaid minute we work for the retailers, freeing them to employ fewer of us.

Worse burdens fall on employees. Lengthening working days reach into the home, as companies swallow the creed that staff should be on standby on their portals of perpetual availability, as if each were a branch of the emergency services. Only France has sought to protect employees’ right to disconnect. It is easy to see why we may imagine we are always working – even if we are enjoying those fabled leisure hours that the statisticians claim we have, watching television with half an eye on office emails rather than actually doing anything with them. Then again, is time really free if, like a dog, you are attached to a leash that may at any point be yanked, dragging you back to the cares of the office?

Constantly larding our minds with pending tasks is time theft. It may be self-inflicted, but not entirely, if – given the pressure to hold on to jobs today – monitoring work from dawn until midnight is part of your workplace culture. What it is not is efficient.

The most notable weakness of our superfast world is ourselves: we cannot seem to apply the brakes. A study of 1,500 Dutch people revealed that those who constantly rush feel as if time is also going faster, and this perception encourages them to rush yet more. Humans are wired to mirror the world around us, setting our pace in tune with our environment, a phenomenon known as entrainment. This is why we bustle in a busy city like London but wander in Wyoming. Unfortunately bustling has side effects. Not least that it becomes addictive.

Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines hurry as ‘the dispatch of bunglers’. Although everybody knows this intuitively – doing things at speed requires skill – speed encourages us to overreach ourselves. The more we can do, simultaneously, at the touch of a computer button, the greater the temptation to overdo it. Multitaskers often imagine that they are faster and more efficient, working harder and longer than they are in reality, because busy, distracted hours feel fuller – when in fact they complete tasks 30 per cent more slowly. Really they are servants of fast – trying to match the fluid possibilities of technology. Worse, tackle eighteen tasks at once and the probability that one will go wrong is far higher than doing them sequentially. Screw up and it is the difference between breaking down on a sedate B road and crashing on a motorway. More is the pity, because a smooth tempo is best for mind, body and productivity. In effect, in our alacrity to make the most of our super-fast tools we render ourselves deficient.

There is no sign that we are ready to wean ourselves off speed: on the contrary, we celebrate it. In 2015 Nike, the iconic sports brand, refreshed their legendary anti-procrastination slogan, ‘Just Do It’, with a campaign that urged us to ‘find your fast’. That same year boxes of Tampax were jazzed up by cartoon women on the run, their hair flying, their flailing hands clutching bags and phones. Advertisers select images either to flatter or scare us into buying a product. But the multitasking tampon lady does both. Like a doctor dashing about the emergency room, saving lives, this testament to heroic female dynamism also appears ripe for a heart attack.

Sure enough, statistics also reveal that the citizens of faster countries show higher rates of smoking, coronary-related death and of greater subjective wellbeing. In other words, we imagine that we are happier pursuing a lifestyle that actively harms us. And what makes it deadly? Stress of a particularly pernicious variety: the unpredictable, uncontrollable stress we get when life’s beat is erratic. The type that we overdose on if interruption, hurry and time pressure are our daily diet.

The side effects of busyness help to answer a puzzle that has long preoccupied economists: why, after incomes reach a certain level, does a rise in a country’s wealth have no power to lift its population’s happiness?

The usual explanation is that we exist on a hedonic treadmill. In other words, wealth and the stuff we buy with it makes us happier in the short term, but soon we adjust. Even lottery winners, after the initial ecstasy, revert within months to their former level of contentment. What we are beginning to realize is that hedonic adaptation often occurs because we are poor at investing our surplus time and money in pastimes or objects that enhance our wellbeing or manufacture enduring daily happiness.

According to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher famously associated with pleasure (although his life was pretty ascetic), ‘Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.’ Could you disagree? But speed and wealth interfere with our capacity to delight in our abundance. Yes,

happiness = having choice over how to spend time

and also

wealth = having more choice over how to spend time

But unfortunately

wealth = more complicated choices over how to spend time

No account of happiness is complete unless time is factored in.

Weirdly, acceleration seldom liberates extra hours: more often it creates extra work. 2011’s European Social Survey, studying twenty-three countries, found that people had the least leisure not in the richest places but in those where economic expansion was most rapid. (The pace of development was measured by internet use and car ownership – not, coincidentally, things that make us speedy.) Employers’ demands intensified when salaries rose, driving up the pace. But workers’ choices changed too. The more they could earn, the less time they spent on other activities.

Self-consciousness about time depletes our ability to relax and relish it. Fascinatingly, if you trick someone into feeling richer, studies find that instantly he also feels more time-pressed. Just remind somebody what they earn in an hour and relaxing to music becomes harder for them. Why? An hour feels less disposable the more we are paid for it, increasing the pressure to squeeze out every penny – even if in theory you can better afford to slack off.

No wonder that when time pressure intensifies, we often make rum choices. In a 2008 survey, 57 per cent of respondents who identified themselves as busy cut back on hobbies, 30 per cent on family time, but only 6 per cent on work. Perhaps in an era of credit crunch, then at its nadir, these priorities were understandable. Equally, it is possible that those questioned preferred to see less of their family. In order to thrive, love needs space, yet in an age of Velcro unions and widespread divorce, investing time in love instead of a career can feel risky, and deafening cries for me time suggest that our priorities are less collegiate. Fostering love is even harder if we are distracted and the continuum of relationships is interrupted, whether by business trips or our chirruping smartphone.

When we design our lives, it is easy to underestimate the importance of unhurried time – even those of us who should know better. Such as behavioural psychologist David Halpern, who confessed he is a commuter. ‘We’d probably have been happier in a smaller place with more time at home.’ In his defence, he argued that such trade-offs are common: ‘We buy expensive presents for our kids that they rarely play with, when they – and we – would probably be happier if we had spent the money and the time on doing something with them.’

Opting to go home instead of earning overtime – even if it means missing those you love – is difficult. Love is shown by what we provide, is it not – and if we do not put in the hours, what will it mean for our promotion prospects?

Of all the curiosities of time in our speedy world most striking is that our horizons seem increasingly short-termist. Our huge 1,000-month lifespan gives us a greater stake in the future, yet fewer save for old age than in past generations, and external mechanisms, such as government initiatives to compel us to invest in pensions, are weak or vanishing. ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing,’ remarked economist Avner Offer.

In business too, grab and go is the order of the day. ‘Silicon Valley venture capital firms are starting to seek fantastically short life-cycles for the companies they finance: eighteen months, they hope, from launch to public stock offering. Competition in cycle times has transformed segment after segment of the economy,’ wrote James Gleick in Faster, noting that the turnaround in car manufacturing from design to delivery, traditionally five years, was down to eighteen months by 1997. Everyone wants a fast buck – and they want it faster. Can it be that as a whole we are reluctant to look ahead – to imagine the planet, the climate or the hands that steer the tiller of our global future?

‘There is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote,’ wrote philosopher David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40). Neglecting the joys of the present is no wiser. We need both. But if we are losing sight of 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 stress responses, even as our bodies are perfectly still – stranding us 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 that our timekeeping should go awry too.

The result?

Never enough done. Never enough time.

We need time in all its dimensions in order to live fully and well. Daydreams. Plans for the future. Spontaneity. Time for reveries about nothing. And the ability to think things through, then carry them out in linear, organized stages, not chaotic flexitime.

I will defend unto death your right to fritter away your time, but having it stolen is another matter. Throw it away and we are complicit. Control is the heart of the matter: it is what makes us feel that we are living by our own priorities, or constantly racing to catch up. That way lies the hurry trap.

Fast incites us to speed up, but changing our response changes the situation. The range of choices available to us may be daunting, but slow down and you can exercise them. No need to turn your back on the wonders of this fast-forward world. Transformation is available at the point where you encounter it, the bit that you are in charge of. You.

To survive in a world without limits is simple. Set your own.