The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat it as if it’s of no importance at all. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies pilfer our time.
One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have for years been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — and yet they do this in such a devious manner that we rarely realise what we’ve lost.
Every social media user has had their time pickpocketed. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps such as TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’ve spent on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.
This is no accident. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Unsurprisingly, Parker himself doesn’t use social media, saying it’s “too much of a time sink”.
To understand how Big Tech steals our time, we must first get our heads around time perception, or chronoception. Time doesn’t always feel like it’s moving at a constant pace. The weightier an experience is, the slower time will often feel. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes, accidents, or any other scary situation.
Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; rather, our sense of time tends to be retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.
Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example of this is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re overwhelmed by new experiences. But in retrospect your vacation feels longer, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past. Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, constantly checking the clock, your hyperawareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of it, and thus, in retrospect, it seems brief.
The sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your perception of time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.
Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.
But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.
There are other, more cunning ways that social media impairs awareness and memory. The use of “attention engineers” is one of them. These are people employed specifically to design interfaces to capture as much of your time and attention as possible.
To understand how attention engineers deliberately warp your time, we must look to the history of casino floor design. In the Seventies, a man named Bill Friedman turned from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him — and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas in several books, which would become bibles of casino design.
Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the store, so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.
Friedman proposes a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to the toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would distract people from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.
Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.
The pathways in Friedman’s mazes had as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness by forcing a change of direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about whether it’s time to leave. For this reason, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot. The intention behind this hugely successful design was to keep people unaware by maximising immersion, distraction, and disorientation.
Friedman’s ideas revolutionised casinos around the world. And many of his tactics would later resurface in social media design, where they proved even more successful at hindering awareness. For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function — features which, we now know, impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.
Meanwhile, social media platforms have become increasingly labyrinthine, with the aim of trapping people in them. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong: search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them.
What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time. The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and such collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorising information when it’s presented in narrative form.
The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.
Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, randomly switching between scenes, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.
Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.
Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. In this way, attention engineers reduce the likelihood that you’ll regret the time you waste online.
Even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers of excited players without allowing you to see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, social media push notifications periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so you can never fully settle in either.
This creates problems of its own. When attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. By constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can therefore impair your awareness and shorten your days even when you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.
Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to actively slow down how we experience time. One way is to quit social media — or at least restrict your usage. Research suggests that abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, a study of 35,000 people found that quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.
However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media. Take chatbots, for instance. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they often ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.
Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now Meta plans to train its chatbots to message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.
The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in ways that enrich our lives rather than impoverish them.
We now know the ways social media platforms speed up time. If we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time. What the human brain needs to make strong memories are salient stimuli — surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it is actually their killer. Instead, we must seek out each of these in the real world.
One way of doing this is to always choose the life experience that’s most likely to lead to a good story: reading books instead of scrolling social media; going on adventures instead of staying at home. Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savour experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. A review of 47 research articles found that well-practiced mindfulness is associated with slowed subjective time.
The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember, and the longer it will feel. So make a habit of resisting habit, and instead, choose a life of choices. Whenever you find yourself doing something — for instance, habitually checking your phone — ask yourself why you’re doing it, and whether there are better alternatives. If there are, or if you don’t know why you’re doing it, do something else.
This brings us to perhaps the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age: as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives. The power of new experiences to stick out to us would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the “oddball effect”, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting that novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.
So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral. Above all, don’t let online algorithms set the pace of your life, as they’re not operating in your interests.
Seneca once said: “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximising the days in your life, but also the life in your days. This moment is one your future selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.
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Author: Gurwinder Bhogal
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