We know that the “free” social media platforms we use aren’t really free, because, as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. Many of us are familiar with the basic contours of this situation. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.Ī ll of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy”, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. But the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. Seneca risks sounding like an uptight pleasure-hater – what’s so bad about a bit of sunbathing? – and, to be honest, I suspect he probably was. This was why Seneca, in On The Shortness Of Life, came down so hard on his fellow Romans for pursuing political careers they didn’t really care about, holding elaborate banquets they didn’t especially enjoy, or just “baking their bodies in the sun”: they didn’t seem to realise that, in succumbing to such diversions, they were squandering the very stuff of existence. When you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute”.Īnd so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilisation since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. When I first made that calculation, I felt queasy but once I’d recovered, I started pestering my friends, asking them to guess – off the top of their heads, without doing any mental arithmetic – how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live. No wonder the rest of reality seems unable to compete

Social media is engineered to constantly adapt to our interests.

But you? Assuming you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5bn years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a watermelon for 40 minutes,” wrote someone else. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook. It’s a safe bet that none of those 3 million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. But it’s a vivid illustration of one central obstacle we encounter when it comes to our efforts to use time well: distraction.Īfter all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things you never wanted to focus on. I’m not mentioning this story to suggest there’s anything especially shameful about spending 44 minutes of your life staring at a watermelon on the internet.

The undistracted philosophy book