An analog watch shows time on a circular plane. In order to understand the time, your eye has to navigate a circle. Time becomes the circle, scaled to the size of the circle. If you have a digital watch, you can try this out by setting your watch to an analog face. You scan the circle to find the time — for example, 10:15 pm. Or is it 10:16? Hard to say with an analog watch, sometimes. Now consider a watch that represents time as numerals, such as 10:17:33. You look at the watch: Bam! Instant pattern recognition. Notice the feeling is different. Your eye doesn’t have to navigate space, and there is no question what time it is. How convenient! But what did you lose?
In short: you lost space. On an analog watch, if there are 15 minutes left in an hour, you really feel those 15 minutes — that’s a quarter of the circle! You feel halves of an hour, quarters of an hour, and so on, because a circle creates resistance the eye has to navigate. But a digital watch, by representing time as symbols, abandons the felt sense of time as space in exchange for speed. The numerical representation of time collapses the spatial representation into a single moment, a precise now, which, at the moment I write this, is 10:45 pm. Basic math tells me that 15 minutes remain until 11 pm. I can’t feel it in the same way, though: the feeling of 15 minutes is gone.
We’re going to pursue this lost 15 minutes until we unravel the wound at the heart of modern human experience: a world without space, flooded with speed.
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The trail starts with convenience.
Take tonight, for example. I’m looking at my watch because we’re out of soy milk. As I mentioned, the time is 10:45 pm. The closest store closes at 11, and walking there takes 20 minutes. I can’t make it by 11, so I’m not going to the store. What will I do instead? Well, I’m not walking 30 minutes to the next-closest store, even if it stays open later, that’s for sure: I wouldn’t be back home until midnight! But my wife and I own a car. The closest store is a five-minute drive: if I leave now, I can make it. I can also stop at the gas station because the car is running low. I can be back by midnight!
Wait, what just happened? The car collapsed space. The distance to the store — as measured by my subjective experience of time — shortened because I can travel faster in a car than on foot. That’s convenient! But wait, convenient for whom? I added a second task to my plan because the car saved time, which caused me to spend more time using the car to do more tasks than I would have doing fewer tasks on foot.
Unfortunately, I spent so much time thinking about driving versus walking that now I don’t have time to drive. However, I could pay someone who’s already near the store to pick up my soy milk and deliver it to me. I just need to fill out some forms in an app. Ok! With that sorted — wait, the shopper can’t find soy milk? How is that possible? — with that almost sorted, I can get back to catching up on work. I’m so behind!
Speaking of work, I don’t go to an office — the internet has made driving to an office unnecessary. While many people continue to drive to offices, sometimes far away from their homes, I’ve worked from home for nearly 15 years. That means I have the freedom — the luxury — to work on my bed at 11 pm while a man delivers milk to my door. The internet has collapsed space even further than my car. In the end, I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to get that milk. How convenient!
Speaking of convenience, my wife is downstairs, and I need to let her know that I sorted out the milk problem, so she doesn’t also hire someone to drive to the grocery store on our behalf. I send her a message on my phone. I try not to think too much about how this works, because if I did, I would imagine the vast distances involved. Such as, my message traveling thousands of miles only to return to my house: first over the air as a wireless signal, probably passing through her literal body, then out over wired and terrestrial networks, through the public internet, to a messaging app’s servers, and back again to her phone. Still, I didn’t even have to get up to talk to her, or, more importantly, stop working.
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When I work over the internet, order groceries and home goods for delivery, and drive or fly to get to places, I save a lot of time. Curiously, I never feel I’ve gained anything — no spaciousness arises from all these liberated hours and days. In fact, much the opposite. The faster I can accomplish tasks, the more tasks I try to accomplish. And here’s another oddity. With the ability to travel and communicate over vast distances, I often expect a sense of dizzying wonder to arrive. Instead, everything feels smaller. The world shrinks because space collapses: if I can fly to an out-of-state city in two hours, the city is closer in subjective time, and what is distance other than time? Instead of wonder, the effect tends to be claustrophobic.
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The office is widely reviled, and yet the thing people seem to miss the most in remote work is socializing, the richness of spatial and human variety in a physical place separate from our homes. Why would a place that is often a zone of control prove so meaningful once lost?
The lack of shared office space isn’t directly responsible for bad meetings or the profound distraction that is Slack. But messaging products’ failures to represent missing physical space certainly is. Imagine if, during in-person meetings, everyone sat directly across from everyone else in a tight circle, and by social convention, we all stared directly into each other’s eyes. It would feel like a video chat, right? Or picture 20 people standing around your desk, oblivious to each other’s presence, all trying to have a conversation with you at the same time. Why would anyone build a product that worked like that?
Clearly, if people could create shared spaces to replace offices, they would. But we don’t know how. Not physically or digitally. And our over-reliance on offices to give us those shared spaces means we become desperate for such spaces the moment we’re free of offices. Most people in Western cultures today don’t frequent places of worship, and publicly-owned common space is vanishingly small, preserved in the last husks of the commonwealth — libraries — for now, anyway. So we go to libraries, coffee shops, or we just stay home, working in our “home offices.”
The digital office is everywhere in all timezones, with no spatial or temporal limitations. Yet we yearn for an office that’s a place we go — ideally, one in walking distance — because of the experiences such places create. Such a place is also one we can leave. Could it be that the office produces a more distinct experience of our homes, too? An experience we’ve also lost?
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We’re talking about places, but what are places, exactly?
In the expression “you can never cross the same river twice,” the river is usually assumed to mean the water because it’s moving. However, there is a problem with the analogy. Everything is always moving — not just water. Some things are moving slowly enough you can name them, like the physical matter in your bedroom, house, and street. You draw an invisible line around the slowly-moving things and say a place exists there. For you, that place does exist.
Places extend beyond the usual three dimensions, traveling forward and backward in time. I’m thinking now of the house where I grew up in Yucaipa, CA. Material objects that existed in one position decades ago connect directly to the subjective experience I’m having remembering them in this moment. That experience is physical: it’s a chemical process. The line passes backward through time, but because a line points in both directions, it also travels forward from the past — and those same material objects — into the future. If those objects never existed, I couldn’t imagine them now.
But how is it possible that a place extends through time and space, such that the little house in Yucaipa where I lived a few years as a child can be more real to me than a person standing in front of it today? The answer is that places — the kind I’m talking about — require a human brain. The brain creates places from learned concepts and memories anchored in material space. (To avoid writing “place-experiences” repeatedly, you can assume that’s what I’m talking about when I write “places.”) The brain can simulate places from past times and different material spaces than wherever you are currently at, based on past experiences. And it can produce vastly different experiences from the same sense impressions in the same physical space. Let’s consider this closer.
You are in a kitchen. The year is 1750. In 1750, many things in your kitchen today would not be in a kitchen, and others would be. Let’s call this place, “food-preparation-kitchen.” You consider what food to prepare while in your food-preparation-kitchen, and you make it. But there might be a holy symbol on the wall. While in your food-preparation-kitchen, you might see the holy symbol and have occasional thoughts about other concepts and places connected to that symbol. When those thoughts arise, you are — this is critical to my argument — having a different experience of the same physical space. The new experience is something like temple-father-graveyard-kitchen. Feelings particular to this experience would come up. How long since your last confession?
Meanwhile, you begin laboring to light the wood stove, and the holy symbol falls out of conscious attention. Your thoughts change to matters of cooking at your stove. Maybe the temple-graveyard experience fades and you return to food-preparation-kitchen. But because of what we know about the brain today, we also know a feedback loop involving the holy symbol in your kitchen imprinted on your brain. It primed your brain to produce — through prediction — the temple-father-graveyard-kitchen experience when you are next in the physical space that also produces food-preparation-kitchen. With enough exposure to that holy symbol in the kitchen, assuming it means something to you, you won’t have to see the symbol to have that experience. Other sense impressions that happened at the same time could bring that experience into existence, such as the stove.
A place in this sense is a collection of subjective experiences your brain constructs over time. The same physical space can produce vastly different experiences depending on what you’ve done there before. The question is, which experience will your brain predict the next time you’re in the space?
Modern neuroscience research suggests that what we feel — and crucially, what we think — are predictions, built from learned concepts and everything we’ve experienced before in spaces like this one. Your brain doesn’t wait to see what happens. It runs ahead, preparing your body and mind for what it expects based on yesterday, the day before, and the thousands of days before that. This is why researchers who study sleep disorders tell patients they should only sleep and do other bedtime activities in bed. No work, no adventure novels, no devices. With enough contrary experience, your brain will stop predicting a sleepy bedtime experience; you will instead experience, unbearably often, work-anxiety, or a thirst to check the latest deal on Amazon. In the language of this essay, you will have created a different experience of the same space, a work-sex-shopping experience.
Take down the holy symbol in 1750 and you might succeed in creating a kitchen without the temple and graveyard slipping in.
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But now let’s slingshot you back to 2025. You’re once again in your kitchen. Thank God, right? The dishwasher! But what was that ominous vibration from the tabletop? Oh, it was a message from Amazon that tomorrow is National Stuffed Animal Day. You’re wondering if any good stuffed animals will ship overnight for “free.” If you’re following my argument, you’ll recognize what’s happened: your brain, having learned to associate this kitchen with shopping on your phone, generated the prediction shop now before you consciously decided anything. You feel the pull toward your phone as if it were your own choice. In a sense, it is — a choice your past behavior trained into you.
What’s curious about the phone is it allows two-dimensional places to exist in the foreground of your most intimate three-dimensional spaces, such as the kitchen table where you eat dinner with your family. Yet unlike that dinner table, these two-dimensional phone places are uninhabitable. They are, in fact, very often literally supermarkets, auction houses, and work offices — places that, in three-dimensional space, are designed for you to pass through while completing tasks. And your brain remembers even more powerfully than if you had only seen a holy symbol of Jeff Bezos by the refrigerator, because being in these phone-places involves frequent spikes of alternating fear and reward. Multi-billion-dollar companies pay large teams of engineers and product designers to create dopamine-generating interactions in nearly every app on your phone, creating powerful memories of these places.
Why would that be a problem, though? You decide whether or not to pick up your phone. Actually, you don’t, not in the way you think. Returning to my point earlier about modern neuroscience research, your brain is a prediction machine. It’s always running ahead in a world of predictions, preparing your body to act. So, in a very real sense, your brain’s predictions effectively create an experience of the place you are in from past experiences in — and concepts you have about — that physical space. When you enter the kitchen, your brain predicts which experience you are entering, and, based on that prediction, primes your body to act. This is the problem. When your brain predicts phone-activity, it prepares your body to act — generating the anticipatory pull you feel as a kind of itch or restlessness. You haven’t decided to check your phone. Your brain has already decided, though, based on what you’ve done in this space before. Instantly, you feel the “ghost phone” in your hand, you recall memories related to phone-shopping-kitchen, including a Pendleton blanket you’ve been meaning to buy, and suddenly, without conscious awareness, you’re off to the races.
This can happen anywhere your brain has repeated experiences of a place. You sit down for dinner with your family. Without wanting to, you enter the wrong experience because your brain predicts impersonal market activity. You’re listening to your wife talk about her day and then you feel the phone in your pocket and immediately remember you need to buy toilet paper. Quickly, you pull out the phone and add toilet paper to your shopping cart. Before you even check out, you’re divorced. Damn!
When you were a child, your kitchen was the site of many place-related experiences as well. It was space-station-kitchen-room, Christmas-dinner-meat-loaf-room, and a variety of other experiences of make-believe, day-dream, and ritual. I believe the difference is that these experiences are the natural activity of dwelling. In the words of Gaston Bachelard, “The house shelters daydreaming.” Children do this so often, you probably have to snap them out of it — at least when they aren’t on devices. I’m guessing you have not been standing in your kitchen day-dreaming much recently — not for long anyway — or inhabiting a kitchen with only your wife or child and their very important life story.
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Returning to my earlier parable of the soy milk: a big part of the problem is convenience. We constantly buy convenience, but technologies of convenience paradoxically fill our time and erode our most personal spaces, polluting the experiences we have in them. What are we supposed to do about this?
One of my ongoing experiments is introducing resistance. As in the electrical property, not the French Resistance. For example, I tried keeping all screens in one room, my home office. Ultimately, this meant I spent even more time in my office, and there was a good chance I would check on work stuff if I entered the room for any purpose. (In the electrical metaphor, maybe I caught fire?) So now the protocol is: my phone stays in the office, but I might bring down my personal laptop to write at a desk in the corner of the living room sometimes. I don’t write at the dinner table or on the couch, or use my phone in the kitchen. At least, not when I’m following the protocol!
And if I find we’re out of eggs while I’m in the kitchen? They go on the shopping list. Because the second I leave my phone within reach in the kitchen, I’m constantly shopping for missing ingredients as soon as I discover them, and so I’m also ignoring my daughter who’s asking if I’ve heard her rendition of Mr. Grinch by Tyler the Creator. In other words, I’m reinforcing the future probability of experiences I don’t want to have when I walk into my kitchen — I don’t want my reaction to be opening shopping apps. Even this amount of resistance is, frankly, a pain in the ass, but it makes the life I want to have more likely to happen, starting with my thoughts. What makes leaving my phone in a different room, even when I sleep, possible is wearing a smart watch. I’ve been using one for several years for exactly this purpose, and it continues to help me stay responsive to texts from my wife and teenage daughter, or at least my wife, without having to use my phone.
I love technology, and at times, convenience. But I want a bigger life than just looking at my phone. To get there, it seems necessary to choose inconvenience, at least sometimes. It’s less convenient to add ingredients to a shopping list and force yourself to walk upstairs later to order them. Or even, God forbid, go to the store. But inconvenience has a funny way of creating space that convenience otherwise erases. A walk can be just a walk if you leave your phone at home. A bed can be just a bed — restful, with no one watching.
Another thing I do is memorize and recite short poems in places or during tasks when I’ve noticed bad predictions. This seems to work by focusing my brain on directed, intentional thought. (In neuroscience terminology, I assume this means I’m kicking my brain into the task-positive network rather than the default mode network.) The idea comes from the Buddhist practice of using gathas, and I use gathas written by the monk Thich Nhat Hanh. These tend to be about mindfulness topics, such as this one I use every day to start meditating:
Sitting here Is like sitting under a Bodhi tree. My body is mindfulness itself, Free from all distraction.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote quite a few of these for many topics, even using the toilet. Do you ever use your phone while on the toilet? A toilet gatha might help. Also, not taking your phone into the bathroom, but sometimes it’s unavoidable!
Summing up, I challenge you to start with an easy experiment: change your watch, go analog. I guarantee you there’s a digital clock you can see every moment of the day already, or else one nearby. Allow your time to occupy space. Take back what is rightfully yours.
