What Are We Doing With All This Time?

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As a child, Saturday mornings were my favorite time of the week. No school, no alarm clock, just sleeping in, bagels and cartoons… until about 10:30 am when I would inevitably be woken up to the jet engine sound of our home’s central vacuum. That growling demon machine would eventually make its way up the stairs, roaring louder with each step it climbed, ending whatever laziness I had been enjoying.

The vacuum was the shotgun start to Saturday chores; Cleaning the house, yard work (regardless of the season), and the inevitable running of “errands.”

Errands was the catch-all word for any number of individual trips my parents would make to various stores. Grocery shopping, the bank, the deli, all of the small tasks not possible during the week for two working parents.

In the last two decades technology has changed our world so dramatically that today, the idea of weekly errands seems so foreign to me. My adulthood is very different than my parents, mainly in my ability to accomplish so many of my “errands” from my computer.

My fiancé and I do our grocery shopping online and choose a two-hour window during the week to have everything delivered. I rarely go to the bank except to deposit a check. Most every store, from flea market vendors to pizza places, accepts credit cards. I don’t even need to take out cash to pay back a friend for drinks, I can just transfer money to them using my phone.

My father regularly went to the post office to mail the collection of stamped letters sitting on the front counter of our house, most likely bills he was paying. The internet has made paying bills by mail almost entirely unnecessary.

As I think about my lifestyle versus my parents at my age, I have tried to calculate the time I am able to save. It adds up quickly.

Take grocery shopping alone. My mom’s exclamation: “There’s no food in the house” was on a weekly repeat. Of course, there was food in the house. Pasta, canned vegetables, and frozen food, just not the other fresh items we needed. Items from the four food groups, which themselves have changed significantly.

Even by any conservative estimate, my mother spent an hour every week going to the grocery store. A task I can do online in 10 minutes.

That means grocery shopping takes me 46 hours a year less than it took my mother. If you lump in the bank, post office, and all the time saved purchasing things through Amazon, you can say there is another hour saved every week. So, that gives me about 100 extra hours a year my parents did not have. Four full days to do with as I please.

And what I have I done with that time?

I have no idea.

What I can tell you is how the average American spends their time. And I will start with our phones. According to Comscore, the average American spends over 70 hours a month on apps on their phone.

Some of those are important activities like communication, podcasts, and banking. But 70 hours still seems excessive. Does anybody have that much they need to do? It means over the course of a year Americans spend 35 full days just on their phone!

And so I ask, what have we gained from this?

Are we happier, healthier, smarter, more patient or empathic? It certainly doesn’t appear so. But it seems to be the case throughout history that as basic needs are met, and no further work needs to be done, we seek new ways to pass the time, to be entertained or even just stimulated. There is little impetus to work harder, to exert additional effort, to challenge ourselves.

I worry we are all distracting ourselves into a kind of incompetent stupor.

Whenever I leave my city for an unplugged vacation, the return is always jarring to me. Reentering my familiar environment allows me to see my daily life with fresh eyes. No matter where I go or how long I go for, returning home means realizing how much time we all spend distracting ourselves, myself included.

Don’t believe me?

Leave your phone at home for an entire day. Keep track of every person who is on their phone. What is everybody doing? Sending important business emails? Learning French? Talking to their dying grandma? Most likely not. So what then? Or more importantly, why?

Phones are addictive for one. Science has proved this over and over. Our phones are designed to stimulate several different senses at once and convince our brains we need more. The same way a Twinkie does. Or, I’m guessing, heroine.

And just like those substances, nobody comes off a spout of time on their phone feeling good. As soon as we are done we feel under-stimulated, bored, desirous of a new and more exciting input. The digital stimulation void is infinite and it convinces us to venture further and further in with the promise of… what?

Life itself used to be the input, the stimulus, the activity worth engaging in. This is no longer the case.

Which makes me wonder what we could do with all the time we waste. Again, I don’t know. But surely the answer must be… much more than we are doing now. I don’t know anybody who has truly embraced the potential of having an infinite knowledge machine in their pocket. But I do know this:

The people I am most inspired by; the artists, philanthropists and meaning makers, seem to be prolific in their endeavors. They also appear to be wholly uninterested in distraction. And while you can read a million different articles about how to win the day, how to be more productive, or maximize your time. The secret seems to be lying in plain sight.

Stop.

Just stop. Stop distracting yourself. Stop wasting time on mental junk food. In a world where we should all have more time, we are all busier than we have ever been. After being unplugged for a time, I am disappointed when I return and find myself revisiting the same YouTube channels, engaging in the same distractions I have trained my brain to crave.

Our lives will continue to evolve in ways that create new activities we must engage in. We will also replace the tasks of our parents with ones unique to our own lives. But the most interesting thing will be if we can become more aware of how we spend our time. Because as the adage goes; You can never have time if you never make time.

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