The morning ritual
Until rather recently, I had a morning ritual that doesn’t really deserve the name ritual, because a ritual carries intention and meaning, and this had neither — and I’m certainly not alone in what I was doing, too.
Every morning, after leaving the caring embrace of Morpheus, I’d wake and reach for the phone like it was an inhaler. Reddit first, then Twitter. I fooled myself into thinking I was checking for civic reasons, checking the news stories, fingers crossed in my mind that wars had ended, or at least, some heinous world leader had popped his clogs, all the time telling myself that I wasn’t drifting into the great modern sin of being uninformed.
I told myself this was vigilance, a moral duty in an age run by oligarchs and men who confuse power with destiny.
To make the lie easier to swallow, I dressed it in humor.
I would half-joke that I was only checking in the hope that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Viktor Orbán had died in some grotesque group sex calamity involving copious amounts of cocaine and sexbots, where they became sentient and brought swift ends to their lives in retribution for their collective sins against humanity.
Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.
I don’t really want those men dead, well, honestly, I’d do a jig for Putin, as I did when Thatcher died, the lads in my Polish IT office thought I’d lost the plot. Still, anyway, if Donald Trump vanished tomorrow, JD Vance (real name: James Donald Bowman) would likely step forward, smoother, younger, even more in Peter Thiel’s pocket, and no less dangerous for the polish.
I don’t actually want their deaths. I want restraint. I want the damage they’re doing slowed, then stopped, then answered for, and then thrown in jail to rot.
My social media addiction revolved really around wanting relief.
The worth trap
The title is a line attributed to Jett Franzen, a YouTuber I know nothing about. Have you already forgotten the title? Such is our brain-rotted world, eh? “Only a slave measures their worth by their productivity.”
The sentence stings like a hundred hungry hornets because it’s as blunt as a rusty tire level coming down on your forehead, and because it names the condition of the world as it actually is.
Friedrich Nietzsche said it more coldly and with less mercy. He once wrote, “Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave.”
No airy metaphors with auld Freddie.
For him, it was simply arithmetic. The real quarrel here isn’t technology in the abstract. It’s time. The portion of your life that belongs to you, and how easily it’s bartered away to the algorithms designed to keep us on the platforms.
We have lived now for decades inside a story that pretends to be common sense. Your worth is your output. Your output is your worth.
If you produce enough, you are remunerated for it. Then you use that money to buy things you don’t need that are advertised to you on TV/radio/billboards/social media and rest is what you do until you go to bed to repeat it again tomorrow.
Work used to end for our parents and grandparents. Now it leaks like three-day-old Pampers on a neglected child.
Work emails ping on our phones late at night and before the crack of dawn from the boss or his battalion of booklickers. Slack dares to interrupt our weekends with things that would definitely have waited.
Performance reviews, for those of us unlucky to have to go through them, turn human complexity into bullet points for HR workers to get all uppity about to justify their pointless jobs.
Leisure has become preparatory for a huge number of us. A walk becomes content to post on TikTok to a pathetic number of followers who don’t care. A hobby has to become a side hustle because we’re underpaid and it’s our last hope of getting off the hamster wheel of capitalism.
Alone time feels like guilty inefficiency, and how dare you read a book when you could be creating?
The feed as a factory
Social media didn’t invent this logic. It was an ideology forced on the boomers, but it has perfected it. Our devices aren’t tools to help us work more efficiently. They’ve been engineered to keep us interested. We’ve Pavlov’s dogs but with less drool.
The attention economy runs on a simple premise: your attention can be monetized, and your time is the raw material.
The mechanisms of social media algorithms were stolen directly from gambling. You receive a cue, a vibration in your pocket, a red bubble on an app, a notification that asks for nothing except your glance, and you respond.
Sometimes you get a reward, a message, a laugh, a small sense of being noticed. Sometimes you get nothing except the dreaded left on read. That uncertainty is the hook. The nervous system learns quickly and learns to check again and then again and then again.
The crafty Silicon Valley sellouts who designed this god-awful websites designed them to remove any potential mstopping points. Infinite scroll erases endings. Autoplay erases choice. Pull to refresh mimics the lever of a slot machine. Time blurs. Hours slip by without resistance.
It’s profitable, and so it persists. Your mental health is a rounding error.
Attention, Children, and the Shaping of Young Minds
If we are going to speak of slavery, we must speak of children, because they have the least power to refuse a system built to capture them early. Attention difficulties are not new, but the environment shaping young nervous systems is unprecedented.
In the United States, over 11 percent of children aged 3 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, meaning approximately one in nine young people has received this diagnosis (CDC).
Research on small screen use (smartphones and tablets — TVs do not show the findings) and later ADHD symptoms found that higher frequency use of modern digital media platforms was significantly associated with the emergence of ADHD symptoms over a two-year follow-up in adolescents.
This does not prove causation, but it does show an association that warrants attention and further research (JAMA Network).
Not all research in this domain yields simple answers, because media use and attention are incredibly complex subjects. A systematic literature review found that associations between digital media and ADHD symptoms do appear in many studies, particularly when problematic use patterns are involved, though the strength of the relationship varies by study and context (PMC).
These findings do not paint a villain-and-victim narrative, nor do they say unequivocally that screens create ADHD out of nothing. What they do suggest is that a developing brain shaped by constant novelty, constant comparison, and constant interruption will struggle with sustained focus more often than one that is not exposed to them.
My own small thralldom
My own addiction didn’t end in some hero’s journey drama. There was no collapse, no intervention, no cinematic moment of clarity. There was only a slow realization that I’d fallen for the bullshit of the algorithms.
I’d wake up and let the worst parts of the world shout into my skull before I’d even taken the first piss of the day.
I convinced myself that I was being informed. I convinced myself that I was watching closely and being prepared. I convinced myself I was doing my duty as a moral citizen of the world.
In all honesty, though, like all addicts, I was feeding the habit. Thankfully, the cost wasn’t anything like harmful drug addictions, but the costs were my mood, my inner quiet, and my ability to begin a new day as myself rather than as a vessel for outrage and noise.
I realized my freedom was with O’Leary in the grave; what I had every morning was bondage with better marketing.
Work culture and social media, one logic
Work culture says we have to prove ourselves through output. Social media says prove your worth through visibility. Both worship nonsense metrics that are designed to make us want to reach for more. Both reduce the human being to a number.
Targets, productivity, performance. Likes, shares, views, watch time. Once the mind accepts metrics as meaning, self-surveillance follows. You feel guilty for resting. You feel guilty for doing nothing. You feel guilty for being unseen.
That is why the language of slavery is not excessive. It’s a diagnosis. If you cannot stop measuring your worth, someone taught you that your worth is not inherent. It must be earned again and again, like rent paid to an invisible landlord.
Taking time back without becoming a monk
The answer isn’t purity, and it’s not heroics. It’s taking back a bit of control, here and there, where you can get away with it. Refusing the architecture when it is within reach. Not smashing the phone with a hammer, just using it against itself, turning feeds into tools, and going in for what you need and leaving before the sirens begin their seductive songs.
Only a slave measures their worth by productivity. The deeper truth is that only a slave forgets that time is life.
Time cannot be earned back. It cannot be optimized. It cannot be scaled. It is spent, and then it is gone.
Freedom starts with small refusals that feel almost rude at first. Leaving the phone alone in the morning, even while it hums at you like a needy child. Letting emails sit there until you are actually being paid to care about them. Ignoring the god awful Slack ping that insists everything is urgent, when nothing actually is.
This doesn’t have to be a rebellion with banners and speeches. It’s choosing not to be dragged by the scruff of the neck into things you don’t actually need to be doing.
I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.
As always,well-crafted takedown of the modern day time traps. After losing everything, & I do mean everything, I chose to live in a small camper van on a minimal amount of money. I answer to no one, except the woods & my husky,Halo. In compensation for my material dearth, I sing, dance, write,take long hikes with Halo, & although I am actively trying to rebuild, especially online where I might make a bit of money, it's never at the expense of my physical, psychological,societal, professional & personal freedom. Hard lost, hard fought & hard won!
After many years of being a small shop owner I decided to cut my hours to 2 partial days a week. It suits me very well but many people are baffled why I am not open the way businesses are meant to be open. Which is at least 5 days a week. Instead of an explanation now I just smile and say, ‘it suits me quite well’. I no longer care if I am everyone’s cup of tea.