On a collective level, the stakes are higher. Look back in memory and consider … how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you you will perceive that you are dying before your season! It sounds all too much like someone waking from the stupor of an hour on Facebook: Seneca, in “On the Shortness of Life,” describes the horror of looking back to see that life has slipped between our fingers. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.Īlready in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a “symptom of deficient vitality,” and observed “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.” And, after all, we only go around once.
Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands.
In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.
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