Eleven years ago I was twenty. After university, temporary precarious jobs and the joy of age, an afternoon could be spent for me doing activities such as:
- Manually tag my music library at an obsessive level of detail
- Compare rates of the incipient OMVs to see which combinative spell was cheaper for me
- Sort and label my photo library to even indicate whose faces, one by one, appeared in each photo (at that time there was no Artificial Intelligence that could detect them all after two or three confirmations)
In other words, it was the self-imposed job of a late-teenager with plenty of free time, because the real obligations, the ones that consume 90% of the day, hadn’t arrived yet. She enjoyed it.
Eleven years later, I don’t want to not hear about all that work. It is the magic of having entered the labor market and starting to comb gray hair, which one wonders where the hell has his free time gone.
Buy time, earn life
And so the paradigm has changed. The music library, best delegated to Spotify, which for ten euros offers a fantastic service that leaves us with the sole task of listening to music, very little else. Nothing to complicate our lives wasting hours filling in metadata and looking for 5 megapixel covers.
Mobile fees? A simple one, please. It doesn’t matter if another operator arrives with something groundbreaking in price, as a wise man said, “peace of mind is what is most sought after.” I pay you 50 euros a month in exchange for a few reasonable gigabytes and the promise that you won’t bother me or mess with the bill. With someone like that, who gives us peace, from a certain stage of life, many of us go to the end of the world and to any war. That liberating peace of mind that is worth much more than saving three euros a month on another operator by juggling from time to time.
Actually, it doesn’t just have to do with the time available, because if I do the math, I don’t understand how at twenty you could fit university, work, friends, a partner and party time with an absorbing principle of obsession with digital order. It also has to do with cognitive load. Something that is intensifying in the liberal professions with an infinite level of resources to absorb, learn, process and provide utility. Thank you so much, Internet.
Being constantly at the top and never seeing a clear horizon for our occupations helps us to desperately look for formulas to reduce those little torments. That by themselves are not worrying, but when they accumulate they lead to loss of concentration and frustration. Even if it is killing the worry of whether we are paying too much for fiber. As long as it goes well and they don’t make me dizzy, gentleman…
Not only work is the culprit that we go with the CPU to the limit, it is also this perverse social scene which in many cases has been built around the online presence. It turns out that in addition to delivering reports to a grumpy boss and pretending we’re only working the required eight hours, we also have to maintain a reputation on social media that makes us aspirational, that lets us be in the popular club. And be productive. And recycle ourselves continuously. The fault, for the record, belongs to those of us who fall into this spiral.
At some point we started, in some cases, to value work as something instrumental, take a walk to Instagram and to stop prioritizing money in the professional career to start asking about the rest of the conditions. Hey, but what time do you leave here?
And so, paying for services that do what we no longer want to do if we can get rid of it; or paying certain premiums in exchange for not having to go looking for bargains, or simply giving up more money in exchange for allowing us a couple of hours of leisure on Friday, we are changing the rules as the years go by. Less time in futile efforts, less energy consumed giving up what really makes us happy.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism