We are indeed living a little longer, but what are we doing with our time, or rather, what is being done with the time of our lives? “Run, man, run”, is what we are told. If you run fast enough, you will outrun the others, which means you will be “successful”. And yes, it ends, and they will tell us how free we were, in a life we spent being pushed around.

If we look at it honestly, man does not need much to live.

(Olga Tokarczuk, Ksiegi Jakubowe 1)

The economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.

(John Maynard Keynes, 19302)

This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of nonsequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen.

(Tim Wu, quoting Mark Manson.)

It is not so long, after all. If you live till 90, that’s roughly 33,000 days, and don’t they trickle away fast! But it is the life capital you are born with, and you are supposed to make the best of it. It is our most precious good, the time of our lives, our basic asset. Mostly, we are too busy to think about it. But do not worry, others are taking care of it. It was supposed to be our life!

John Maynard Keynes, almost a century ago, had a good view of the time structure for his grandchildren: if we were wise enough, due to technical progress, 15 hours of work a week would be sufficient to ensure we had what we needed. However much quoted it has been, allow me the pleasure of repeating this idea: “The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Technical progress sped up well beyond his imagination, yet we are stuck. What we produce is amply sufficient to ensure everyone has access to a comfortable and flourishing life. In India, they are working 56 hours; in Brazil 39; in the US 38; in France, Italy, and Spain 35; and in the Netherlands 293. This recent reduction in working hours is confined basically to Western Europe, and progress is slow. In countries like India, the figure is shocking, and in Brazil, it is underestimating extended hours and second jobs. Do we really need this?

Stating that it is necessary to produce the goods and services we need, a basic condition for the expansion of GDP, is just nonsense. If we take the Brazilian example, for an adult population of roughly 140 million, we have only 45 million formal private jobs, and 13 million public jobs, a total of 58 million. But we have 40 million in the informal sector, with half the earnings of the formal sector, and low productivity. Add seven million unemployed and six million who gave up looking for jobs, and we reach over 40 million underutilized working capacity. Thus a part of the population is overworked, and the other underemployed. In other countries, and particularly in Africa, the figures are much worse, with the informal sector reaching 70% of the workforce for example in Algeria.

Why do we have such a stupid and inefficient organization of our productive activities? Basically, we are depending on neoliberalism, and waiting for “the markets” and its invisible hand to solve the problem. And if we use public policies to generate useful activities, we face outcries from the corporate world, as if we were stripping them of their righteous monopoly on economic activities. This is plain stupid, but expanding. Welcome to Trumpism and the oligopoly of high-tech jerks. Time to get back down to earth—and traveling to Mars is definitely not the solution. This is not dreaming: the French travailler moins pour travailler tous [working less so that we all work] discussion means rational planning of the distribution of productive activities is within our reach.

India’s Employment Guarantee Act, ensuring every adult can have 100 days of paid work a year, initially a rural measure that was later expanded, is leading to more growth and better distributed economic activities. China makes sure every local administration has a team in charge of identifying productive inclusion opportunities in the territory, much beyond the Bolsa Família in Brazil, basically income transfer, which is essential but not sufficient. And let us not forget the free work women give us, taking care of homes, children, and elders, a contribution equivalent to 9% of world GDP if it was paid average wages. We certainly need a shake-up of the whole structure—waiting for the invisible hand is childish.

How to start moving? Certainly by reducing formal work hours, and generating more public initiatives. It is ridiculous to have, in every locality, so many useful things to be done, and so many idle hands. And certainly, we must proceed to basic income initiatives, so the poor do not have to accept lousy jobs: it will raise the overall level, reduce inequality, and promote useful changes. More people contributing to useful activities, and more time for everyone.

But a new generation of challenges in the organization of our time—stressing that it is the key asset of our lives—is in the manipulation and appropriation of it, through what has been called attention industry4. According to Tim Wu, “if the attention merchants were once primitive, one-man operations, the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy. I use the crop metaphor because attention has been widely recognized as a commodity, like wheat, pork bellies, or crude oil...How we spend the brutally limited resources of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”

It is much more than gobbling our attention time of course. “One developer wrote that web advertising and behavioral tracking are out of control. They’re unacceptably creepy, bloated, annoying, and insecure, and they’re getting worse at an alarming pace.” It is the erosion of private life’s perimeter. “Over the coming century, the most vital resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space.”

It is important to mention that this is a highly lucrative industry: 98% of the giant fortunes raised through Facebook and other Meta products result from marketing. Every cent of it is included in the prices we pay for products and services since ads are part of the costs of the products. Johnson & Johnson products we buy, for example, include 27% advertising costs. It is a huge industry, it costs our time, interrupts what we are doing, and we pay for it. As presented by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, once your attention has been shifted by some interruption, it takes an average of 15 minutes for your brain to reconcentrate. And it is immensely tiring5.

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With the negotiation power concentrated in just a few platforms, they determine the prices. Google has been brought to justice: “The suit alleges that Google uses its dominance to deliberately overcharge advertisers while keeping at least 30 cents of every dollar that flows to website publishers through its advertising technology. That windfall has resulted in the company earning tens of billions of dollars each year from its advertising technology, making up the bulk of its total revenue.”6

Jonathan Haidt has brought us an important analysis of how this overall invasion of our attention time has hit children and teenagers, particularly with smartphones, with daily attention time ranging from five to eight hours, and frequently more. The kids are just hooked, and manipulated to maximize engagement7.

The impacts are staggering. Cases of severe depression among adolescents, between 2010 and 2020, increased from 145% among girls to 161% among boys. "The increase was similar between both sexes—around 150%. This increase was observed in all races and social classes." This also affects university students. "In a 2023 study of American college students, 37% of respondents reported feeling anxiety 'always' or 'most of the time', while another 31% reported feeling this way 'about half the time'. This means that only a third of college students said they felt anxiety less than half the time or never." Haidt refers to "the current tidal wave of anxiety and depression."8

The book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber mentioned above is all about getting back control over time, the time of our lives. Most of us, and I face this directly as a university professor, are pushed into a frantic search of how to manage conflicting agendas, besides the exhaustive fragmentation of attention when we are supposed to be relaxed and creative. And having to cope with permanent invasions by commercial interests, some of them blinking so as to make attention to the text I am reading more difficult. Well, according to the mass media moguls, this is freedom. For them, obviously, and with our money. If I need something I will get information, not marketing. And I do not need marketing for the things I do not need.

There are more dimensions of course. In the São Paulo periphery, residents spend four to six hours in transportation. Overall, 14 to 15 hours away from home, every day. They have to live where it is cheap, which usually means far from work. Wake up at five, to be at the job at eight, back home late at night, and fall asleep on the sofa, seeing rubbish on TV or the cell phone. Then it is five again. Family life? Culture? Enjoyment? The average marriage lifetime in Brazil is 14 years.

Back to the key issue: our challenges are not economic, in the sense of running faster and producing more, but of social and political organization. No “free market”, invisible hand, or neoliberal discourse will lead us anywhere. We are reaching a point where we have to get organized around the key issues. A society thought from the point of view of family well-being, reduction of inequality, less destruction of our environment, and a decision process centered on these issues. Result-oriented management, it was called, but all they meant was money.

I am a professor. You can imagine I do not earn a fortune. But what I have is enough, and a more flourishing life for me does not mean more money, but more time, because once you have the basic material needs covered, happiness is having time to enjoy your family, friends, and a good book. The billionaires? They got used to taking our money, and they have taken our time, and crept into our brains, our conscious attention, including our kids’. The time issue is as essential as the issue of access to basic material welfare. We can have both.

Notes

1 Olga Tokarczuk – The Books of Jacob: a novel – Riverhead, 2023 – (2018 Nobel Prize in literature). Quoted from page 108 of the Polish original edition, Ksiegi Jakubowe.
2 John Maynard Keynes – The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren– (1930).
3 Kayla Zhu – Countries with the longest work weeks– Visual Capitalist, Dec. 12, 2024.
4 Tim Wu – The attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads – Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016.
5 Maggie Berg e Barbara Seeber – Professor sem Pressa – Matrix, São Paulo, 2024.
6 The Guardian, Sept. 4, 2024 – Google antitrust lawsuit in the US.
7 Visual Capitalist – Social Media usage by teenagers.
8 Jonathan Haidt – A geração ansiosa – Cia das Letras, São Paulo, 2024.