• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, June 28, 2016

I’m worried about us. And it’s not just because we seem bent on death by ultra-conservative parochialism and xenophobia. I’m worried because I believe we’re spending all our time doing the wrong things. We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Technology is our new drug of choice, and we’re hooked. We’re fascinated by the trivial. We’re dumping huge gobs of time down the drain playing virtual games, updating social statuses, clicking on clickbait and watching videos of epic wardrobe malfunctions.  Humans should be better than this.

It’s okay to spend some time doing nothing. The brain needs some downtime.

But something, somewhere has gone seriously wrong. We are now spending the majority of our lives doing useless things. TV used to be the biggest time suck, but in 2015, for the first time ever, the boob tube was overtaken by time spent with mobile apps. According to a survey conducted by Flurry, in the second quarter of 2015 we spent about 2.8 hours per day watching TV.  And we spent 3.3 hours on mobile apps. That’s a grand total of 6.1 hours per day or one third of the time we spend awake. Yes, both things can happen at the same time, so there is undoubtedly overlap, but still -- that’s a scary-assed statistic!

And it’s getting worse. In a previous Flurry poll conducted in 2013, we spent a total of 298 hours between TV and mobile apps -- versus 366 hours in 2015. That’s a 22.8% increase in just two years. We’re spending way more time doing nothing.  And those totals don’t even include things like time spent in front of a gaming console. For kids, tack on an average of another 10 hours per week, and you can double that for hard-core male gamers. Our addiction to gaming has even led to death in extreme cases.

Even in the wildest stretches of imagination, this can’t qualify as “time well spent.” 

We’re treading on very dangerous and very thin ice here -- and we no longer have history to learn from.  It’s the first time we’ve ever encountered this phenomenon.

Technology is now only one small degree of separation from plugging directly into the pleasure center of our brains. And science has proven that a good shot of self-administered dopamine can supersede everything: water, food, sex. True, these experiments were administered on rats -- primarily because it’s been unethical to go too far on replicating the experiments with humans -- but are you willing to risk the entire future of mankind on the bet that we’re really that much smarter than rats?

My fear is that technology is becoming a slightly more sophisticated lever we push to get that dopamine rush. And developers know exactly what they’re doing. They are making that lever as addictive as possible. They are pushing us toward the brink of death by technological lobotomization. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security by offering us the distraction of viral videos, infinitely scrolling social notification feeds and mobile game apps.  It’s the intellectual equivalent of fast food: quite literally, “brain candy.”

Here the hypocrisy of for-profit interest becomes evident. The corporate response typically rests on individual freedom of choice and the consumer’s ability to exercise will power. “We are just giving them what they’re asking for,” touts the stereotypical PR flack.

But if you have an entire industry with reams of developers and researchers all aiming to hook you on their addictive product and your only defense is the same faulty neurological defense system that has already fallen victim to fast food, porn, Big Tobacco, the alcohol industry and the $350 billion illegal drug trade, where would you be placing your bets?

Technology should be our greatest achievement. It should make us better, not turn us into a bunch of lazy, screen-addicted louts. And it certainly could be this way. What would it mean if technology helped us spend our time well?

This is the hope behind the Time Well Spent Manifesto. Tristan Harris, a design ethicist and product philosopher most recently at Google, is one of the co-directors. Here is an excerpt from the manifesto: We believe in a new kind of design, that lets us connect without getting sucked in. And disconnect, without missing something important....

And we believe in a new kind [of] economy that’s built to help us spend time well, where products compete to help us live by our values.

I believe in the Manifesto. I believe we’re being willingly led down a scary and potentially ruinous path. Worst of all, I believe there is nothing we can -- or will -- do about it. Problems like this are seldom solved by foresight and good intentions. Things only change after we drive off the cliff.  

The problem is that most of us never see it coming -- because we’re too busy watching a video of masturbating monkeys on Youtube.