1: “In the 1960s futurists all over the world—from sci-fi writers to political theorists—thought that by now we’d all be working way fewer hours,” John Mark Comer writes in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World.
“One famous Senate subcommittee in 1967 was told that by 1985, the average American would work only twenty-two hours a week for twenty-seven weeks a year,” John Mark writes.
“Everybody thought the main problem in the future would be too much leisure.”
Yes, that happened. Why were people thinking that? Because technology was making life much more livable.
Think about it. A hundred years before that Senate subcommittee meeting, if it was winter and we wanted to be warm, we had one option.
We could “go out into the forest,” John Mark writes, “risk being eaten alive by a wild animal, chop a tree down with an ax using our bare hands, drag the tree back to our cabin, chop it into pieces, and then make a fire, again with our bare hands.”
What do we do now? “Walk over to the thermostat on the wall (or, if we have a smart home, on our phone) and push the up arrow,” he observes.
“Voila. Warm air magically appears.”
There are hundreds of other examples: “We used to walk everywhere; now we have cars to get from place to place in a hurry,” he writes. “We used to make all our food from scratch; now we have takeout. We used to write letters by hand; now we have email and of course, our new best friend, AI.
“Yet in spite of our smartphones and programmable coffeepots and dishwashers and laundry machines and toasters,” John Mark observes, most of us feel like we have less time, not more.”
2: So what exactly is happening? Where did all the time go?
“Answer: We spent it on other things,” he notes.
Fifty years ago, leisure was a sign of wealth. “People with more money,” John Mark notes, “spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club.”
No longer. “Now busyness is a sign of wealth. We see this cultural shift in advertising,” he writes.
“Commercials and magazine ads for luxury items like a Maserati or a Rolex used to show the rich sitting by a pool in the south of France. Now they are more likely to show the wealthy in New York or downtown LA leading a meeting from a high-rise office, going out for late-night drinks at a trendy club, or traveling the world.
“A century ago, the less you worked, the more status you had.
“Now it’s flipped,” John Mark observes, “the more you sit around and relax, the less status you have.”
How exactly did this happen? Gradually. And then quickly.
One date of importance? The year 2007. Which marked the start of what we now call “The Digital Age.”
“When the history books are written,” he writes, “they will point to ’07 as an inflection point on par with 1440.”
“1440 was the year Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press,” John Mark writes, “which set the stage for the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, which together transformed Europe and the world.
“And 2007? Drumroll… The year Steve Jobs released the iPhone into the wild.
“Note: it was also a few months after Facebook opened up to anybody with an email address,” John Mark explains, “the year a microblogging app called Twitter became its own platform, year one of the cloud, along with the App Store, the year Intel switched from silicon to metal chips to keep Moore’s law on a roll, and a list of other technological breakthroughs—all right around 2007, the official start date of the digital age.”
Not long ago, no one had a smartphone or access to Wi-Fi.
“Now we can’t imagine living without something that didn’t even exist when my first child was born,” he writes. “The Internet alone has changed the world, and not just for the better. Depending on who you talk to, it’s decreasing our IQs or at least our capacity to pay attention.”
John Mark references Nicholas Carr‘s Pulitzer Prize–nominated book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: In a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surfaces like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
A recent study showed that “just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off),” he writes,” ‘will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.’
“Translation: they make us dumber,” he observes.
Other research indicates that the average iPhone user touches their phone 2,617 times a day. What?
“Each user is on his or her phone for two and a half hours over seventy-six sessions,” he notes. “And that’s for all smartphone users. Another study on millennials put the number at twice that. . .
These statistics are for smart phone use only. They don’t include other Internet use. “Much less the fire-breathing dragon of Netflix,” John Mark notes.
The scary part is “in every study I read, most people surveyed had no clue how much time they actually lost to their phones,” he surmises.
3: What makes more money? Slot machines, the film industry, or professional baseball?
It’s not even close, writes Silicon Valley insider Tristan Harris. Called by the Atlantic as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” he shares that slot machines make more money than the film industry and baseball combined.
How so? “Because the slot machine is addictive,” John Mark notes. “And those small amounts of money feel inconsequential in the moment. It’s just a few quarters, right? Or five bucks, or twenty. But over time, they add up.
“In the same way, the phone is addictive,” he observes. “And small moments—a text here, a scroll through Instgram there, a quick email scan, dinking around online—it all adds up to an extraordinary amount of time.”
Tristan worked as a design ethicist and product philosopher for Google. But he “grew disenfranchised with the tech industry,” John Mark shares. “He left and started a nonprofit with the sole goal of advocating for a Hippocratic oath for software designers, because right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction. Because that’s where the money is.”
He’s not the only tech executive sounding the alarm. Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook (played by Justin Timberlake in the movie), now refers to himself as a “conscientious objector” to social media.
In an interview with Axios, Sean said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains. The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,…was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’
“And that means,” Sean believes, “that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get us to contribute more content, and that’s going to get us…more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because we’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
But wait, there’s more. “Stories are leaking out of Silicon Valley of tech executives paying through the roof for a device-free private school for little Jonny,” John Mark writes, “the epitome of Biggie Smalls’s maxim: ‘Never get high on your own supply.'”
“Reminder,” John Mark explains, “Our phones don’t actually work for us. We pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for us. We’re not the customer; we’re the product. It’s our attention that’s for sale, along with our peace of mind.”
Economists refer to this new era as the “attention economy” or “digital capitalism.”
Tristan Harris refers to it as an “arms race for people’s attention.” The companies can only get our money if they get our attention.
James Williams calls the tech industry “the largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history.”
Our challenge is that even if we acknowledge that we have a digital addiction, it’s an addiction.
“Our willpower doesn’t stand a chance against the Like button,” John Mark predicts. “And that’s if we even admit we have a problem; most of us won’t. Psychologists make the point that the vast majority of Americans’ relationship to their phones falls at least under the category of ‘compulsion’—we have to check that the last text, click on Instagram, open that email, etc. But most of us are past that to full-on addiction.”
Author Tony Schwartz says, “Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.”
As in, everyone.
“My point here,” John Mark writes, “isn’t to advocate for a Luddite return to some mythical pre-digital utopia. The idea of farming for a few decades and then dying of gout sounds, well, horrible. And can you imagine life without Maps? Terrifying. No Apple Music? I shudder.
“All I’m saying is that we talk constantly about the pros of the modern digital age—and there are many—but we rarely say anything about the cons. Is it even a net positive?”
Our assumption is that the pace of our lives is “normal.”
“It’s not,” John Mark writes. “The ‘time famine’ we grew up in is relatively recent. We’re still testing it out as a species. And the early results are terrifying. To summarize: after millennia of slow, gradual acceleration, in recent decades the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch.
“My question is simple,” he says. “What is all this distraction, addiction, and pace of life doing to our souls?”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I truly in control of my time and attention—or am I letting technology and the “attention economy” shape the pace and priorities of my life?
Action: Take inventory of my daily digital habits and experiment with setting simple boundaries—creating pockets of device-free time to reclaim my focus and peace of mind.
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