As a writer, I rarely need to leave home. All 18 of my books were written in my room, door shut, silence absolute. But on the occasions I do venture out, onto a metro, into the city’s hum, I become a shameless harvester. I watch people. I eavesdrop. I wonder about their lives. Public spaces have always been a fertile field of ideas: a woman’s laugh, a man’s faraway eyes, an overheard argument. Character. Story. Humanity in motion.
Which is why what I have been witnessing lately troubles me more than I can easily explain.
The last few times I took the metro, the harvest was barren. Every single person was hunched over a phone. Not one was reading, daydreaming or even talking to each other. They were scrolling. Their attention span lasted all of three seconds. Their glazed, slack expressions mirrored each other, defining a face of our times.
On public transport, we clutch our wallets, worrying about pickpockets. But the real theft happening in those carriages, our living rooms, and even in our bedrooms is far more audacious. Social media doesn’t take your money. It takes your attention and time. And attention, as it turns out, is the only currency that cannot be replenished.
Oliver Burkeman’s book 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals puts a number to this. Four thousand weeks is what is roughly, an entire human life. If you are in your 40s, more than half of those weeks are already spent. Each one surrendered to mindless scrolling is gone with the same finality as the ones you spent living fully. The phone doesn’t know the difference. The algorithm certainly doesn’t care.
I had startling proof of this a few weeks ago, when I served on the jury of a literary award. I read 23 books in 30 days, six hours a day, phone entirely set aside. I was astonished. Not by the books, though, they were fine. By the time. There was so much of it. The days seemed to expand. Without the constant nibbling of notifications and reels, whole hours reappeared, as if from behind a curtain I hadn’t known was there.
This brings me to something the psychologists call the Fun Scale, a way of categorising experience by its rewards. Type 1 fun is pleasurable in the moment. Type 2 is uncomfortable in the moment but deeply satisfying in retrospect: running a marathon, learning something hard. Type 3 is neither fun during nor after, yet has a way of becoming the story you tell for years. Type 4, the cautionary category, feels wonderful immediately but leaves you hollowed out afterward.
Mindless scrolling is the purest Type 4 fun ever invented. It delivers a dopamine hit with every swipe and leaves behind brain rot. There’s no memory, no growth.
The question worth sitting with is not whether to use social media, but whether you are choosing it or it is hijacking your life. Are you spending your 4,000 weeks, or are they being spent for you, one reel at a time?
We don’t need to become ascetics. We need to become deliberate. Read. Move your body. Make something with your hands. Talk to a stranger on the metro.
The harvest is still out there. You just have to look up.
