I have been someone who tends to observe and analyse things that happen around me. An event happens, a conversation takes place, a memory resurfaces, and sooner or later, the thought process begins. Perhaps, that’s why in hindsight, I can say that I named my blog space as ‘Thoughts and After-thoughts’. Lately, I have been thinking about how quickly the time seems to be passing.
It has been 10 years since I graduated from the College, but seems as if it’s a thing of yesterday. It has been more than 06 years already when the world witnessed the catastrophic CoVID-19, but it feels as if there are hardly any noticeable events justifying this long span of 06 years. Everything else in between feels like a long dreamy night.
I am quite sure that I won’t be the only one thinking and feeling on these lines.
We often hear people say this as they grow older. A year that once seemed endless now appears to have disappeared almost overnight. The months seem to follow one another with astonishing speed.
Thinking of the possible reasons, I observed that this is also the time overlapping with the data revolution - the age of fast internet, smartphones, social media and an increasingly connected world - wherein everything seems to have replicated itself and even grown to disproportionate scales on the Web, far beyond its physical existence.
And then there is us. Most of us seem to be catering to at least two existences - one physical and another virtual. More so, many of us are almost always online. We wake up to notifications, work through screens, communicate through screens, entertain ourselves through screens and, sometimes, fall asleep with the same screens beside us. Perhaps, I thought, this is why time seems to be flying.
But, wouldn't that be too simplistic an explanation overlooking other aspects ? So, lets try to dig deeper.
There is a substantial body of research concerning our perception and experience of time. Psychologists and neuroscientists have long known that the 60 minutes measured by a clock and the 60 minutes experienced by a human being are not necessarily the same thing. There is clock time, and then there is psychological time.
The clock does not care whether we are bored, excited, anxious, happy or engrossed. Sixty minutes remain sixty minutes. Our mind, however, is not a clock.
When we are waiting for an appointment, every passing minute may become an object of our attention. We look at the clock, estimate how much time has passed and wonder how much remains. Attention is directed towards time itself. The minutes therefore seem to stretch.
But when we are engrossed in an interesting conversation, reading a fascinating book, playing a sport, travelling somewhere unfamiliar or working on something we genuinely enjoy, our attention is directed towards the activity rather than towards time. And suddenly an hour has gone.
Our retrospective experience of time is closely related to the memories and events that populate that period. A period filled with novelty, change and distinct experiences creates numerous mental landmarks. A highly repetitive period may become compressed in retrospect. That's where our present lives being engrossed in our screens throughout the day cause chronologically extended but repetitive (and thus) compressed time without real memories and notice of time.
Also, there is a popular explanation that each year becomes progressively smaller as a proportion of the life already lived. For a five-year-old, one year is 20 percent of the child's entire existence while for a fifty-year-old, another year is only 2 percent.
But, perhaps the adult does not merely have less time but also less unclaimed attention, as multiple aspects demanding our attention simultaneously and sequentially. This has only been compounded with the data revolution and smartphones. Sadly, this is also increasingly becoming true for the children and teenagers who are glued to the screens throughout the day.
The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary expansion in the amount of information that can reach an individual within a single day. A newspaper once arrived once a day. Now, news arrives continuously.
A letter took days while a message takes seconds and a WhatsApp chat is almost real-time. A photograph was once an object stored in an album. Now hundreds can be taken, shared, viewed and forgotten in a matter of minutes. The physical world has not merely become connected to the digital world. Increasingly, it has been duplicated by it.
Our friendships have digital counterparts. Our professional identities have digital counterparts. Our memories have digital counterparts. Our experiences are photographed before they are fully experienced. Our conversations are interrupted by conversations happening elsewhere. And our attention has become a scarce commodity.
This may be one of the defining characteristics of the digital age that we have not merely increased the amount of information available to us. We have increased the number of things competing for our attention. AND ATTENTION IS FINITE.
I say this not as an outsider observing a strange new generation. I am as much a participant in this digital world as anyone else. In fact, I am often both the culprit and the victim of the very habit I am about to describe.
When we have some free time, perhaps after work or before going to bed, we may pick up our phones without any particular purpose just to have a quick look. Instagram comes first. A few Reels. A few Stories. Then, somehow, we are on Facebook, surfing through an entirely different world of news portals, posts, photographs and videos. From there, perhaps a quick visit to X (or Twitter) to see what people are saying, what is trending and what arguments are currently occupying the internet. Then we notice people asking Grok the strangest questions and seeking explanations for almost everything. Why not look at a few of those too?
Then comes WhatsApp. No new message? Never mind. Let us see the Statuses. And before we know it, another notification from YouTube appears, almost as if it has been waiting patiently for its turn to demand our attention. And in no time, we are caught up in the loop until we consciously remind ourselves of the time lapsed or some external agency causes the disruption.
The strange thing is that during all this, we have hardly moved. We may have been lying comfortably on our bed or sitting on a chair, holding the smartphone in one hand. Physically, almost nothing has happened. Yet, after an hour or so, we put the phone down and realise that we are strangely drained of energy.
Perhaps that is because what we were doing was not really nothing. We were continuously subjecting our attention to a succession of new things.
When we remember our lives, we do not remember them minute by minute. We remember events, people, places, conversations, journeys, celebrations, disappointments, achievements and those little unexpected moments that somehow remain with us. A day filled with distinct experiences gives the memory something to hold on to. A day spent moving from one piece of digital content to another can be intensely stimulating while we are living it, yet surprisingly indistinct when we look back.
Perhaps, therefore, there is a difference between time that passes and time that becomes experience.
Let me be clear, this is not an argument against technology. That would be both unrealistic and unfair. Our smartphones have made communication effortless, put information at our fingertips, transformed the way we work, helped us navigate unfamiliar places, enabled us to learn almost anything and allowed us to remain connected to people who may be thousands of kilometres away. Social media can entertain us, educate us and even preserve precious memories.
The problem, perhaps, is not the technology itself. It is what happens when we stop using it deliberately and start responding to it automatically. I may consciously pick up my phone for a particular task. That is one thing. But picking up the phone without knowing why, and then allowing one application to lead me to another, one notification to another and one piece of content to another, is something quite different. Another scenario, where we precisely know what we picked up the phone for but later end up lost in the vast ocean of content, is even more scary.
That is why I sometimes find myself asking a few rather uncomfortable questions. And here I would like the reader to also ask the same set of questions to them:
When was the last time I consciously went to a park or a place simply to enjoy a walk, without feeling an urge to photograph it, post it or share my location?
When was the last time I stood beneath a beautiful full moon and simply looked at it, without wondering how it would appear as an Instagram Story or WhatsApp Status?
Our digital imprints may remain long after we have forgotten when or where they were created. They may even outlive us. But they exist only because, at some point, there was a physical human being present there.
The digital world can preserve, amplify and beautifully reconnect us with those moments. But it cannot create the physical presence that made those moments possible in the first place. And that physical presence is finite and so is our time.
Thus, the real danger is not that technology is stealing our time.The subtler danger is that we may be allowing technology to decide, moment by moment, what deserves our attention during those hours.
And when we eventually look back at an entire year and wonder, Where did the time go?, perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not where the time went, but:
Where were we while it was passing?
P.S.- Looking forward to an engaging discussion with the readers on this thread. Please, feel free to share your own perspective.
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