Living in the Digitally Addled State of Being

On the difficulties of doing anything in 2025

Earlier this year I visited my town’s library. It was a wet and dreary afternoon, and my toddler needed something to do. The children’s section, complete with musty toys and books that may have been there since the first Gulf War, is a failsafe lever we occasionally pull.

But this isn’t about children’s sections at public libraries. While there, something else caught my eye.

I observed a man sitting in the reading room, engrossed in a magazine. The scene was nothing exceptional. If you asked one of those text-to-image AI’s to depict a typical library setting, it may very well come back with exactly what I saw. A man in his seventies in desperate need of nose strips, spending his Sunday morning soaking up knowledge.

The image of this man stuck with me for the next several weeks. And I knew exactly why.

I observed him in a moment of tranquility. The type of tranquility that I was beginning to realize how much I missed. My daughter was about 16 months old at the time, and I had begun to increasingly fixate on the things that I was no longer able to do.

Things like:

• Drinking a morning cup of coffee in peace

• Going out to dinner with my wife without having to plan several days or weeks in advance

• Doing pretty much anything other than childcare, work, or the administrative requirements of being a person

I was mourning the loss of control of one’s time that comes with having a young child. Now that my daughter was over a year old and the societal grace period of having a newborn had subsided, some of the major life adjustments that I was initially able to withstand through adrenaline or the sheer novelty of becoming a new parent required a different, more sustainable approach.

The fact that I would have such little time solely for myself for the next several years was beginning to really hit home. With our second daughter on the way in a few months, I knew that this issue was only going to become more pronounced. But I also realized that parenting, while an obvious focal point of my attention, wasn’t the only thing preventing me from making progress on projects, recharging, or spending meaningful time with people close to me.

Parenting made all this harder, sure. But there was something else lingering that felt more daunting.

***

When I was about eight or nine years old, I have a particular memory of my dad sitting on a chair in our den, writing checks and analyzing letters. He seemed annoyed about the letters. I asked him what he was doing and he was explaining that he was paying bills.

I don’t quite remember how he explained it beyond that. But I understood that “bills” was something that adults had to do and that he wasn’t having a particularly good time doing it. I also remember thinking should probably never grow up because I was beginning to sense that being an adult was a real racket.

My dad worked all week at his accounting office. Weekends too, if it was tax season. And despite that huge strain on his time, he still had to spend Sundays sitting in a chair doing this bill thing. Or folding laundry. Or driving us around, or mowing the lawn.

I began to understand that his time was rarely his.

I also started to more fully appreciate the sense of lightness he’d take on when he’d have a few hours to read a book in his chair. Or watch a basketball game with us, and tell us why X or Y player was overrated. Or fire up the grill to cook burgers or salmon. He’d sometimes undercook the fish, but we’ll keep that between us.

It was clear that when his time was not owed to the world, it was the most valuable. Even if he’d never admit it.

***

Today, the obligation of paying the bills is way less taxing. You could put them on auto-pilot and mostly forget about them. But the mental load of everything else seems to have risen to absurd levels, and I’m pretty sure our digital infrastructure is to blame.

At this moment, I have several “unread” texts that I will probably spend the next few hours drafting responses in my head. Twenty years ago, these would be calls that would take up much less cognitive space throughout the day. I also have a few emails I have to respond to. One I am excited about responding to, but requires some thought. A few more necessitate simple replies but will likely result in more back and forth so they’ll linger in the back of my mind for days.

I also have dozens more emails that are nonsense, but I’ve looked at them several times anyway because that’s what you do when it’s 2025 and you have a smartphone.

And then, there’s the algorithm. The all-powerful beast that lives rent free in everybody’s heads nearly all the time, essentially controlling thoughts and the content it mainlines through our digital appendages. I spend each day diligently fighting its pull. But this ultimately seems like a futile pursuit.

***

I now have two children. I’ve been writing this piece in 20 minute chunks during my oldest daughter’s nap. I keep my phone upstairs and my wife is nice enough to take our youngest daughter and not bother me. There are about 40 million things we need to do, but I savor this 20 minutes to make progress on a project I find meaningful.

It’s hard enough trying to cultivate a sense of agency over your time without young children, given the constant assaults on our attention. Kids make it sometimes feel impossible, but having two daughters under two has given me a sense of greater clarity over the value of my time, and how important it is to resist this now digitally addled state of being—one in which we let what we consume control us both in a given moment and over the course of the day rather than being in the cognitive driver’s seat ourselves.

It’s not possible to tame this beast entirely. Part of being a person is answering emails and texts, and paying the bills. But I do think there’s a huge difference between approaching your responsibilities and obligations in the sort of analog mode in which my dad paid the bills, and getting fully sucked into the digital landscape through which everything now exists.

In the former, the technology is a vehicle for the task or obligation you are trying to fulfill. In the latter, you are letting yourself be fully inhaled by the algorithm—or if not the algorithm, the sort of pervasive “live on the internet first, in real-life second” hive-mind that slowly eats at your soul, and seems to exist at every turn. Nowadays, you can’t even watch TV without it needing a software update, then directing you to enter a passcode on your phone, download an app, scan a QR code, resetting the password…and on and on and on.

After seeing that man in the library, I started buying print versions of The Atlantic. I rarely have time to read it. But when I have, it’s been pretty nice. No two step verification, no pop-up that takes me down a counterproductive rabbit hole. One of the few things I do nowadays that’s actually what it purports to be.