 I thought we'd talk about the relentless now. This is a topic that's really interesting or interests me a lot. Like a lot of people, I've read Present Shock by Douglas Shrushkoff, if you haven't read it, check it out. But he has these five tenets that really define living in the digital age. But the whole concept is we're living in this Present Shock. I just got done watching a special on digital amnesia. And one of the terms they used was the relentless now. And then I've been doing a lot of reading on the Long Now Foundation's website. So for me, talking to other people and exploring how they see time, so how do you see time, and then why do you feel busy? And when you feel bored, what are the circumstances around it? And just really time in general. So how are we all experiencing time? In a lot of ways, I'll just open it up with, I think time is collapsed like a star. And we're living in a relentless now. So we'll just open it up to anyone who wants to talk about their experience with time or any of those topics. I think that time is, personally, it's fleeting. There's never enough of it. But you probably heard the quote, God gave the same amount of time to Galileo and Da Vinci and Einstein. Look at all they accomplished. But I always have something to do. Or somebody has something for me to do that needs to be done like yesterday. And I can't break myself of that cycle. It's hard. Maybe I'm doing it right. Nice. I always feel like there has to be something productive being done, or else my time is being wasted here. That's kind of what I'm feeling. You said you had some things that you helped yourself to kind of break up that type of. Yeah, I've got a lot of little time digital habits. We'll talk about it if you want. But can anyone else share their experience with time or how they feel about time? I mean, I think this is like right up there with death, like this topic. I try not to think about either. But I think one thing I've been thinking about is that we experience time differently depending on what activity we're involved in. And I think that's always been true. But the amount of diversity between the different activities that we're doing, I think, is probably far greater than any other time in human history. I mean, the gap between gardening and reading a book may not have been that large. But the difference between gardening, reading a book, driving, and playing a real time strategy game is just so vast that I don't know that I really have a consistent experience of time. I think it just varies wildly. And one day, I might have a totally different time profile from another day. So you don't have to answer. But if I can ask how old you are, or if you don't mind telling me when you're. Yeah, so I'm 25. 25. OK. I guess when we introduce ourselves, if you could just say how old you are, so I can get a concept of where time's coming from. So at 25, you're saying throughout the day you have wildly different perspective. So at 20, did you feel that way five years ago? I think so. OK. Has it been that way your whole life? I think it's gotten more like that over time. I think there's also just different. For instance, when I'm wasting time, if I'm just screwing around on the internet, that time feels different. Because I'm every so often checking it with myself and being like, you shouldn't be doing this. Go do something else. And then I somehow continue to waste time. And so there's a meta time narrative about how much time I'm spending. Whereas if I'm in a zone reading. Everyone I've talked to who talks about time, when they say they're wasting time, they say the internet. But yet so much of what we do is on the internet. So what activity is on the internet that's wasting time? For me, I just read articles. OK, so that's wasting time reading. Yeah, I learn things. No judgment. I'm just a terrible waste. I'm just thinking about how I look at my time. I guess for me, it's learning about topics I already know a lot about. We're a very high percentage of what I'm reading. Reinforcing? Confirming what I already know. So confirmation bias. Active confirmation bias is wasting time. Yes. That's actually a highly evolved way of looking at it. Thanks. That's like really enlightened. Perhaps it's on CNN. It's like, why do we care about Britney Spears personal life? That type of stuff. I don't read those articles per se, but articles I wouldn't normally read if I'm a person before. And like you were saying, time is all. It's different for every person. If you're enjoying something, obviously time goes faster. If you're not enjoying something, obviously it goes slower. But I'm a small business owner and I work on the internet. So there's always work to be done. That's why I'm always in the relentless now. Because if I'm enjoying something like reading a book, I feel like I can't read a book now because there's work that could be done that I don't have to do tomorrow if I did it tonight. And that's the loop I'm stuck in. One question for you. You said you're 34. Have you always had this relationship with time? Or do you think it's getting worse? It's only been here. So my event horizon for this paradox that I'm seeing is about eight years max. So I'd say it's about smartphone time. I started seeing time collapse. Yeah, OK. Any time? Wait, what did you mean by eight year something? Eight year event horizon. So for me, time started collapsing about eight years ago. So literally about the same time I started really getting into smartphones. I'm not sure why. If I look at anything before 2007, 2006, time seemed pretty much consistent. There were some times in my life that seemed definitely busier. There were some times in my life that definitely seemed slower. But I do feel in 2014 and probably definitely in 2015, I am suffering from a relentless now where there is always something to be done, built, or constructed. And I never felt that way before. There's always something new to be read, learned, or consumed. There's always something new to be created, manifested, changed, augmented, participated with. There's this relentlessness to my time. I don't know how else to say it. So for me, personally, I've had to construct a lot of, I'd say, airbags for time. So when I hit a time wall, I have a safety. OK, I'm not going to just literally hit 88 miles per hour and just bend myself. Because we were talking before the group officially started. There's been twice in the past three years where I ended up in the hospital because I was exhausted. And it's because I was just working, working, working, working. And then the very first time it happened, I didn't know what had happened. I just knew I was freaking out. And I think my body was shaking. And my doctor at that time, my physician, told me, well, you're exhausted. And I said, yeah, I've been working. But I'm on vacation. I should be able to relax. I don't know how I ended up in the hospital. He said, your body actually is an instrument. And it actually needs energy to slow down. And if you expend the last bit of that, you won't. You just die of exhaustion. People die of exhaustion all the time. But that state where mild forms of this where you lay in bed at night ruminating, that's kind of the first sign that you're kind of living in this relentless now. So for me, really, this is about a safe group where I can talk about the things I do or the things we do. And just for me, literally, when I leave here, I have to do things that involve slowing down. Sometimes I'll literally take big steps when I'm walking. I'll move my phone alone. I'll move my hand real slow. So I've got lots of little things I do. But we can talk about my little antidotes later. But I was just wondering, I've talked to lots of people. Everybody seems to know what I'm talking about. But no one really wants to have a discussion. So I thought maybe cyborg camp would be the place to have the temporal, busy discussion. So this is interesting to me, because I have less of this than almost anyone I know. And the way of the constant now. And I also have a baby new business. So I'm starting to experience some of what you're talking about. And the way I've been managing it for the last few years is my phones are either on and I'm hyper-connected. Or everything gets turned off. But when my brain needs a break, it can stay turned off for three days. And that's not great. So the thing I'm struggling with is more soft transition. So it's not everything's on or everything's off. And also the internet, the light skimming of confirmation bias. I have books this big that I actually want to get into. But as long as I'm skimming the articles, I'm not reading the stuff that's hard. And I would like to figure out how to do more of that. Was very little judgment about value, just self-hacking. OK. I like what you said earlier. Earlier, as she mentioned, what's your name? Jane. I'm sorry? Jane? Oh, Jay. Jay was talking earlier about airplane mode. And it's so comforting to put my phone in airplane. I think I'm in airplane mode right now. My fault. Yeah. So turn it off, put it in airplane mode. I hate turning it off because the time to wait for it to come back on actually seems about longer than like a whole day to watch the Apple light up and then sit at the screen. And then you have to wait then for the internet connection. It hurts so much. The airplane mode's much faster. But I don't know if you guys fly a lot, but flying is really amazing for me because airplane mode is really cool. And it's interesting that Apple, I was thinking about this the other day, how Apple's even messing with time. In 2012, all MacBooks got something called PowerNap so that when your Apple was sleeping, it would still update. And if you start to look at what Apple's just doing with how they mess with time. I mean, even their watch, they said, was a fitness tracker, an intimate way to communicate, and a precision time piece. So there's very weird things that are starting to happen with time and how we buy and sell and commoditize time. I don't know. So you would consider the Apple Watch to be some symptom of collapsing time because it does three things. I'm sure it is. So that's one definition of collapsed time is that now we're doing multiple things at once whereas before we had time between the things. Yeah, I think a buffer between things really helps you at least narrative. It gives you narrative because you go flow to things or rhythm. But now you're looking at the time and you can also see your heartbeat. So you're doing some help. Well, yeah. So you're correlating two pieces of information, right? And then you've got text and email. So there's more pieces of information. More and more and more. What's really interesting about the Apple Watch is if you look at it, you've got stand, sit, and then move. And then it's tied to time, whereas all your other fitness trackers are just how much move. It's not move over time, sit over time. But when they announced the iPhone, he said, I have three things I'm announcing today. A new browser, a touchscreen, iPod, and a phone. A new browser, iPhone, when they announced the watch, he said, I have three things I'm announcing today. A fitness tracker, an intimate way to communicate, and a precision timepiece. So the browser became an application platform. The telephone became anything but. And the touchscreen iPod became a complete digitization of everything we turned into a subscription economy. So a life lead, fitness, time, and intimate way to communicate is going to change everything. But that's not time collapse. That's how they're exploiting time collapse. So I think maybe the difference is not even whether or not you wear it. It's intentionality. It's whether or not you retrieve your email or if your email gets pushed to you. Because I think that the place where the time collapses is when your phone or whatever device you're using dictates when you get your update. Well, to me, the motto watch, I mean, I hate to turn this into they have a watch conversation. What was so amazing was the fact you draw to send something to someone, the fact you can tap to send something. I can tap to you. You can feel it. Or I can actually send you my heartbeat. So I can send you something I manifest. I can send you something that I actually force to happen. So something I do myself, something I force to happen. Or I can send you something biological. And they're all tracked over time on your side. Because you can go back and browse our interactions, our haptic interactions over time. So it's as if you were to make Facebook physical. And I think that's really profound. And then you tie that into just behavior, activity tracking, edgy. Edgy, I think a lot of people are giving it credit for. But they waited for a reason. I mean, do you have any feelings about time? So I would have been much, I had a really good nine months and wrote a book. So before that, I was a journalist doing the five posts a week or more kind of thing. And so the difficulty was an inability to distinguish between wasting time on the internet and doing my job. So they're the same thing. And it's still, there's some degree to that in terms of I still have trouble. And I don't actually think of knowing the difference between when I'm wasting time. Because often, then like six months later, that thing turns out to be the thing that solves a problem. So there's that. But having to write a book forced a lot of clarity in terms of and breaking habits. Because in order to write a book, I needed to not do other things. And so I am not as deeply experienced. And it has to do with a lot of turning off all the notifications, finding tools, software hacks that allow. Basically, offloading that brain thing that I'm on the internet, but I know I should be doing something else problem. So that's like there's this cognitive load of like, should I be doing what I'm doing right now? And so finding ways to take that decision away and to have made that decision and then just live with it for a chunk of time. Kindness or a certain amount of discipline. A sort of firm kindness. Yeah, can help a lot. But that was nine months you did this. Yeah, so in order to finish the book. So I was like, what a privilege to be able to take on a fellowship where I was in the states with a visa that made it illegal for me to earn money. So there was nothing for me to do but attend things and write my book. There's a pretty radical way of making a break with a previous set of habits. I don't necessarily recommend it to anybody, but it was good. It was good for me. Yeah, yeah, I'm just starting. Good, I have, I mean, two days ago I took my Twitter app off my home screen just to break the habit of reaching for the same spot on the screen. Like it's still on my, I didn't even delete it. It's on my iPad still. It's just on a second screen. Eventually I'm sure I'll develop a habit of swipe tap and then I'll have to move it again to hide whatever. But yeah, I'm doing less things and saying no to more things because it was really nice to have a book. And I would like to do more projects that take a longer amount of time, which means I have to not do a lot of other projects that I might do. And that has helped push off the relentless by just being more honest with other people about what I can commit to. I'll try and keep it super quick. But I have so many responses. So one thing is, as you mentioned, for people in creative class jobs where the unpredictability is so high, it is very hard to know when what you're doing is productive or not because the causation is never clear. Also, I think it's really important to talk about the role of capitalism. We've run out of ways to expand geographically. The only place really to expand the economy is into people's time and attention. And so I think it's not just our lack of self-discipline. It's being actively pushed on us. And then the last thing I wanted to say is just I think you really hit on it with the need now for self-discipline to foreclose options, to give your router to someone else for the weekend so that you can't use it. And I read a really great article talking about in countries where it used to be that the lights would just go out at 8 p.m. because there was not enough electricity and then you just couldn't do things. And there's, you know, like you said, you as a business owner or me and whatever weird stuff I'm up to, like I can do literally anything at any time. And so there is no, it's only- There is no time if you can do anything at any time. Yeah. It was weird, I was talking to a friend the other day if you want to tie corporatism, that's the word I like to use, with time. And she said the only way she knows it's fall is when she can get pumpkin spice at Starbucks. And she actually now identifies the seasons through what Starbucks sells her and not the weather. There is an article about how the existence of pumpkin spice is a proof of Baudrillard's hyper real, some advanced social theory that I still don't understand, but pumpkin spice is not made out of pumpkin and is not even pretending to represent something real. It is just an entirely figmental thing. And then the last thing I wanted to say, and then I'll shut up, is you talked a little bit about the role of narrative in time. And I think it's the number of articles that I'm reading, I'm consuming dozens of narratives an hour. And if I jump into a Twitter stream that I'm on some narrative in Hong Kong time, and so I think the whiplash, I mean I don't even know if I experienced narratives in a time-based way anymore. Did you watch, that's interesting, did you watch Lost? The first two seasons. But do you ever notice Lost had like four or five timelines simultaneously? And then at the end of the show, they literally mixed time. The last. I read about that several times. But it was really weird because I've been noticing our media is a lot like this. I was talking to someone earlier about it. Like everyone went crazy last year with Game of Thrones was killing off people. But I don't think that was because they were killing, I think that was because people didn't expect time to stop. They just couldn't imagine a character being killed. Why would you do that? Because time doesn't, because you always have the real housewives of Atlanta. You'll always have an American idol. Things don't stop in media. And I think things that are really attention-grabbing and media now stop. So there's this weird to your creative class, great book. If you're talking about the book or just the concept of the creative class, how we're mixing or remixing time. I've watched, and something else if you're really interested in time collapse. There's entire YouTube series where kids have taken entire television shows or entire movies and just re-edited them to be one character's point of view. So you can watch all of Star Wars as Luke. You can watch all of Jurassic Park as the doctor. You can watch all of any TV shows, any one of the characters. Just on YouTube, just look for them. Look for episodic. I can't read the term they use, but just look for shows and then say Luke's point of view. There's so much point of view. And you can watch entire genres that way. And I think that's so interesting that young people or I don't know who's doing this are taking shows and pulling them apart in time and just giving them to one person. So it's that one person's time, not all of our time. It just, I was like, wow, okay. And then I work with someone the other day who said his seven-year-old son when they moved the coffee table out said daddy, but all the memories are in there. And he said, what are you talking? Cause I've talked to my coworker about this a lot and he thinks about time collapse. And he said, what do you mean by that? And he goes, well, everything we've ever done is in the coffee table. And his kid could actually see physical time in objects. So he started asking him what time was in the fork, what time was in newer objects. And as a child, I didn't see time in things, but as a child being raised by people who lived in time collapse, that's all the child could see. So I mean, like if we know young, I always say I want access to children, but then it sounds like Michael Jackson. But if you have access to children, ask them about how they see time in things or ask them about time. It's so interesting. It kind of reminds me of something you said. Like kids, they think differently and kids are always in the now. I mean, when I was a kid, I'd skip dinner to go play outside. But you had mentioned that time is like death in a way. And it really is. It's really the death is the end of time for any one individual, right? And time collapsing basically is death. Well, I mean, if I'm in the room right now because there's things to do or things that could be done, what about the people that are not necessarily afraid of dying, but they're trying to cram in as many possible experiences in their life before they do die? You know, that's another reason why people can be in the relentless now. So yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I mean, there are all sorts of ways of this is being expressed. FOMO is one. Another one is YOLO. Another one is Too Long Don't Read. There are a million ways I'm seeing time, fear of missing out FOMO, sorry. It's weird because I'm seeing it expressed in business in all sorts of ways. I see, in case you missed it, that hashtag. I'm seeing a lot of ways that people are re-expressing time or missing time for people, but they're not calling it that. I remember that one slide I had where I had that one Instagram picture with all those like me in the segue and then the speed and then the photo and then the map. Yeah, it was really good because I wanted to see how much I called it atomic weight of a single photo, but I wanted to see how much atomic time and weight I could bring to a single photo. And it was crazy because it was one of the most popular photos I ever put on Instagram. And it was, I think it was only because I put so much in it and people couldn't flick by it. It was heavier. It was so heavy they had to go slow through it. And if you're gonna create something for people to interact with it, you should slow them down. Maybe, I don't know. Or make it engaging enough. That is something to think about. The other thing I think that's interesting about time collapse, where I'm seeing it expresses in social networks. So the onslaught of throwback Thursday and flashback Friday is I think a direct relationship to the fact that we need to see time again because we don't see it ever. So the fact we throw, we show posts, we show pictures of ourselves at different points of time during certain times of the week to remind ourselves, A, it's that day, it's Thursday. And then B, it's been X number of years. I don't know how much more clear it needs to be that time has collapsed. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. And it's actually slowing. I don't think it's actually speeding up. I think it's slowing down to almost nothing. I think we're about to hit dead time. And I don't know what's gonna happen when we just hit that zero mark. Does everything just stop? Or does everything become so fast that you can't see it? Thoughts about media or social media or other time trends you're seeing? By the way, it's hard to unsee these once I tell them to you. You'll leave here and see time everywhere. I guess I haven't thought about it as much as you have, but I'll say that the one regrettable thing I have with time is that I can't remember what I did last week or two weeks ago or even this past week. Oh, sorry. No, no, I mean, it's just really sad because I think that's just some, I mean, you saw my presentation. Do you remember what you did? I have to think if I wanted to about what I ate for dinner. Yeah, yesterday is pretty easy. I had the problem before technology. Yeah, I wonder if there was this problem before technology, before all of this happened. I don't know on a mass level. I mean, it's not like we pay attention to our meals. So do you miss your memories? I guess I just find it regrettable that I have nothing to show for the last month. It's funny, because in my presentation, I said you go to yourself to be able to search yourself. Yeah, yeah, so you... I just wasn't sure, because you were the first person I ever met and thank you again for the second social braveness today where you actually, you know, I regret the fact I can't remember these things because I don't know, to me, I just... Living this... Yeah, for five years. This onslaught of information with notifications and dings and dongs and on. My phone has four different sounds for all these things. I think our brains are overloaded with the advent of smart technology and we're almost bombarded to a point where we almost... Everyone forgets. And the thing where I get really worried about the next five years is as we move into the internet of things, you know, I read this great article about what they call the personalization of things. So as things actually not only get the internet in them, but they become us, you know, how much more in something do we need to be, you know? I think it really starts to be this kind of talk about time collapse, right? If everything is just constantly responding to you in a personalized way, not organic things, then, you know, what... Why are we afraid of Oculus Rift when we're living in it, right? I mean, we really don't need to be afraid of it. It's already happened. Just Oculus Rift might be our only way back here. So I'm gonna add a little bit to this kind of worms. I'm sure we can't go very far into it, but I'm wondering how much of the time collapse is driven by social comparison, where people get their sense of importance for them, and just what is considered to be enough or sufficient? Those are really good points. Yeah, I often say that the privilege don't suffer from time collapse. They just, the more privileged I know people are, the less they seem to be suffering from the relentless now. Do you know about Bruce Sterling's infamous, unrecorded South by Southwest? Okay, so every time Sterling gives a talk, it gets recorded, but in 2000, I'm gonna say 12, but that could be wrong. He didn't let him record it. And so all we have are these sort of rumors from people who were there of what happened. And it was about disconnection. And the provocative thing he said was poor people love their cell phones. And the idea that cell phones, and the idea that he was arguing what you just said, which is that as you become wealthy, you disconnect, right? To have, we have told ourselves about the internet that a wealth of connections, right? This is the future, is a wealth of connections, new ways, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that true, so if that happens, then, well, connection is like a sign of needing to hustle, right? Of needing to find friends to get help, to get a job, to blah, blah, blah. Whereas if you are wealthy, you can go into the garden and have a walk, and you don't need to worry that you won't be able to cover your bills, right? And so you like that, and it's a reversal of the story that has traditionally been told about what wealthy internet is bringing into our lives. It's funny because reporters always ask me, like, you know, don't you ever want to take a digital detox vacation? Because there's vacations now where you can go to islands and boats and things. And I said, if you can afford to take a digital detox vacation, you don't have too much information, you have too much money. Uh, seriously, because they're a sterling's point, I never knew about this talk, but really I think disconnection is the ultimate privilege. Well, the thing is, I think you're absolutely right, but I want to go a little further with that because it's an illusion. People think they don't need those supports, and then they come out on the other side where they have money and they've disconnected, and then they're disconnected. And then you get to the point where you're scrambling to rebuild community out of nothing. I mean, you've hit so many important points today about what's important, and where do you find importance in your own life? Oh, well, I think we have to wrap up. Thank you, everybody, for being brave and talking about time. Thanks, Erin, Pereki, for managing everything. Be kind to time.