Stop Giving Your Fucking Life to Your Phone
I recently deleted Facebook for good. There was no farewell post, no emotional announcement and no photograph of me staring thoughtfully towards the horizon while explaining that I was beginning a new chapter. I pressed delete and fucked off. Somehow civilisation survived. Facebook didn't lower its flags. Mark Zuckerberg didn't send flowers. Within minutes the great digital sewage pipe had carried on flowing without me, delivering photographs of people's dinners, political arguments between plumbers and motivational quotes written over sunsets to everybody who remained.
Anton Kreil's seventh secret to financial success is to learn to value your time properly. I think this is one of the most important things he talks about because people are obsessed with the value of money while treating their time like loose change found behind the sofa. They'll argue over £5, drive across town to save £10 and spend twenty minutes comparing the price of fucking washing powder, then hand three hours of their evening to a phone without giving it a second thought. Money has numbers printed on it, so people understand when it's disappearing. Time leaves quietly, which is probably why people are so spectacularly careless with it.
I've never used Instagram or TikTok. They always looked like idiots' playgrounds to me. I'm sure there are useful things buried in there somewhere, just as there are probably several nutritious chips at the bottom of a wheelie bin, but I've never felt much desire to climb inside and investigate. The basic proposition doesn't appeal to me. Give a technology company hours of my life and in return it'll show me an endless conveyor belt of strangers dancing, arguing, eating, exercising, pointing at captions and pretending their ordinary lives are television programmes. That's a fucking terrible exchange rate.
I've watched ex girlfriends spend their mornings photographing breakfast and I've never understood it. Two fried eggs arrive and suddenly we're shooting the cover of Vogue. The plate gets moved towards the window. The coffee gets repositioned. One photograph isn't right, so another gets taken, then another, because apparently the lighting isn't doing justice to the beans. Eventually the masterpiece goes online and the waiting begins. Look everybody, fried eggs. Fucking marvellous. Alert Reuters. Get Vogue on the phone. Somebody wake up the fucking King. A woman has successfully operated a frying pan.
And then comes the really insane part. Other people respond. Lovely babe. Looks amazing. Yum. Fire emoji. Heart emoji. Somebody in fucking Essex approves of the egg. Thank Christ for that. We can all get on with our day.
It's easy to laugh at this stuff because it's fucking ridiculous, but underneath it is a transaction people rarely think about. The photograph takes five minutes. Choosing it takes another five. Posting it takes a minute. Checking who liked it takes ten. Then while you're there you scroll through everybody else's breakfasts, dogs, children, holidays, arses, gym sessions and inspirational quotations from people who apparently became philosophers after discovering Canva. Half an hour disappears before you've finished your coffee.
Do that every day and the numbers become obscene.
That's the part of Secret Seven that interests me. If Facebook charged £50 every time you spent an hour scrolling through it, people would be outside its headquarters with pitchforks. Instead it takes an hour of their life and they call it free. What a fucking business model. Imagine walking into somebody's house, stealing part of their life and leaving them a video of a cat falling off a wardrobe as payment. You'd be arrested.
Social media companies have managed to convince billions of people to volunteer for the burglary.
The phone itself isn't the problem. I use one. I'm not sitting in Vietnam communicating with Britain by carrier pigeon. I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with my family back home and it's brilliant for that. Somebody sends me a message, I reply, job done. The technology performs a useful function and then I put the fucking thing down. I don't need to spend the next forty minutes discovering what a man in Ohio thinks about immigration while watching a woman I've never met reorganise her kitchen cupboards.
That's the distinction for me. Technology can save time or consume it. I like the first version.
What amazes me now is watching people who seem physically incapable of existing for thirty seconds without touching their phones. Lift doors close and out comes the phone. Sit down on a train and out comes the phone. Queue for coffee, phone. Wait for food, phone. Go for a shit, phone. Walk down the street, phone. Sit opposite another human being who has presumably made the effort to come and see them, phone.
We've managed to produce adults who apparently need electronic sedation while waiting for a cappuccino.
Look around a restaurant and you'll sometimes see a table full of people who have paid money to sit together while each of them stares into a separate piece of glass. It's like a séance where everybody is trying to contact a different dead relative.
And what are they consuming.
Mostly slop.
Industrial quantities of fucking slop.
Tiny videos engineered to keep the thumb moving. Outrage, tits, celebrities, football, arguments, adverts disguised as entertainment, entertainment disguised as advice, people pretending to be rich, rich people pretending to be ordinary, ordinary people pretending anybody gives a shit what they had for lunch. Then another video appears before the brain has had time to process the previous one.
Swipe.
Swipe.
Swipe.
It's a slot machine for attention where the jackpot is another slot machine.
Spend enough hours doing that and I can't believe it does anything good to your head. Your brain gets trained to expect a fresh pellet every few seconds like a laboratory rat that's somehow managed to buy an iPhone. Anything requiring concentration starts feeling difficult because there isn't a dancing woman appearing every twelve seconds to reset your attention.
Read a book. Too slow.
Have a conversation. Where are the captions.
Sit quietly. Fucking unbearable.
Think about something for twenty minutes. Somebody call an ambulance.
That's what I find depressing about the whole thing. Not in some old bloke shouting at technology way. Technology is fantastic. I run huge parts of my life through technology. What bothers me is seeing people take one of the most extraordinary tools humans have ever invented and use it primarily as a portable machine for turning their remaining lifespan into advertising revenue.
Anton talks about valuing your time properly, and this is where I think people get the calculation completely backwards. They think valuing time means calculating an hourly rate. Fine, that's useful, but there's another layer underneath it. Some hours shouldn't have a price because you shouldn't be fucking selling them in the first place.
An hour drinking coffee and doing nothing isn't wasted if I enjoyed the hour. An hour talking to somebody I care about isn't wasted. Walking isn't wasted. Sitting beside the sea isn't wasted. Reading something interesting isn't wasted. Even staring out of a window can be a perfectly respectable use of time. Not every minute needs to produce money. That's another disease entirely, usually spread by productivity gurus who wake up at 4.37 in the morning and apparently need a spreadsheet to brush their teeth.
The question is whether I'm choosing where the time goes.
That's what matters.
There's a difference between spending two hours watching a film I wanted to watch and opening Facebook for five minutes before discovering that two hours have vanished into a digital skip. One is spending time. The other is getting mugged.
And social media is a fucking excellent mugger. It doesn't even need a knife. It gets you to unlock the door yourself.
I've seen people worry endlessly about whether they'll have enough money for retirement while throwing thousands of hours of their actual life into this stuff every year. That's extraordinary. They're protecting the money they'll need when they're old while setting fire to the time they have while they're young.
Imagine somebody giving you a suitcase containing the remaining hours of your life. You don't know how many are inside. Nobody does. Every morning you reach in and take some out, and once they're gone you can't put them back. Then imagine TikTok standing beside you with a bucket saying, give us a few hundred and we'll show you a bloke you've never met pouring melted cheese over a hamburger.
That's basically the deal.
And people are queuing up.
I suppose this is why I become more protective of my time as I get older. I don't mean that in some solemn mortality speech where I stare into the middle distance while a violin starts playing. I just don't want to waste large chunks of my day consuming shit I don't care about.
Facebook stopped being useful to me, so I shut it down.
Instagram has never interested me.
TikTok has never interested me.
WhatsApp does something I value, so I use it.
That's about as complicated as my digital philosophy gets.
I don't need strangers to know what I'm eating. I don't need to know what they're eating either. I'm perfectly happy for millions of breakfasts to take place every morning without photographic documentation. Humanity managed this for quite a long time and civilisation still produced Shakespeare, penicillin and the jet engine.
Anton calls Secret Seven learning to value your time properly. For me, part of that means understanding that attention is time in tiny denominations. Give somebody your attention for an hour and you've given them an hour of your life. There's no refund and no replacement stock in the warehouse.
So when I see somebody walking down the street staring into TikTok while an algorithm pours another bucket of warm brain slop through their eyes, I don't think they're using a free app.
I think they're paying through the fucking nose.
Anyway, I'm having breakfast.
There are eggs.
Nobody else needs to know.