How the iPhone stole our free time

We have lost the advantages of being unreachable

Everything Everywhere All at Once might make for a catchy movie title, but it’s no way to run our lives.

Before the internet and mobile technology, life was neatly compartmentalized. You worked in an office, factory or store – aptly called your workplace. Your dominant activity there was your job. For anything else, you had to stop working and physically leave the workplace. Terms like nine-to-five and work-life balance marked out the natural boundary between work and home.

Children left for school in the morning, said goodbye to their parents and only saw them again at the end of the day. Once there, they couldn’t do anything else until school was over. Then they walked or took the bus home, and played outside – gasp! – until dinnertime. Their lives were circumscribed by the natural boundaries between home, school and play.

During the day, you were generally unreachable, and therefore uninterruptible. Outside of work or school, people didn’t always know where you were. You went about your business, hung out with friends, read a book or simply did nothing. Downtime, or idle time, was built into everyday life.

Even during the early years of the internet, there was no attention economy as we know it today. Nobody was vying for your attention or your money online. The internet was just a tool you used for a specific task, like online searching or email. You found a computer (at home, in a library or in an internet café) and logged on via a modem. And when you were done, you left and got on with your life.

The arrival of the iPhone in 2007 completely upended this this way of life by putting the internet in our pocket. Suddenly, it was available everywhere, all the time – and so were we. Work and school were now interruptible. Playing outside, socializing and reading soon gave way to social media. We went from living in the present to living in our phones. And the rest is history.

The smartphone broke the distinction between work and play. Distraction and entertainment went from being separate and discrete activities to being integrated into an all-in-one device. No more having to leave the house to go see a movie or play a video game; just reach into your pocket! And once you had been sucked into a digital black hole, good luck in getting out again! Thus was born the attention economy, a vehicle for capturing as much of people’s time as possible for commercial gain.

We receive hundreds of notifications each day. We are mired in a state of permanent interruption, making it virtually impossible to disconnect. We all need downtime to recharge our batteries and reconnect with ourselves; but try turning your phone off for even a few hours and see how popular you’ll be.

There used to be a time and a place for everything. Now, we have everything, everywhere, all at once. As Bruno Patino says in his book, La Civilisation du Poisson Rouge (The Goldfish Civilisation), “Spiritual retreats in monasteries have changed: it used to be that we escaped the real world in order to find God, whereas today we escape electronic stimuli in order to simply find ourselves”.

The smartphone is one of the greatest technological inventions of all time and has simplified our lives enormously – but it has also stolen our free time.

Michael Gentle is the author of Life Before the Internet, a fascinating look back at a slower, simpler time, when Amazon was just a river. For similar articles, click here.

Image by jcomp on Freepik

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