Daimler has given frazzled employees the opportunity to delete automatically all emails received while they are on holiday. The carmaker’s move underlines what everyone already knows: personal technology can abrade the self.
Finding several thousand unread messages makes one’s first day back at work peculiarly horrible.
This is not the fault of device makers, social networks or mobile data operators. It is a consequence of our determination, fed by professional and personal paranoia, to use all their products and services at once.
The malady’s symptoms are a fractured attention span, insomnia triggered by exposure to blue light and an ever wider, shallower friendship group.
I spotted a typical sufferer last month on a train rolling through Concord, Massachusetts, home of Henry David Thoreau, a nature philosopher who believed that in 1840s America: “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease.”
True to that diagnosis, our contemporary victim was tetchily switching between mobile phones as bandwidth fluctuated. He was also juggling an iPad and a pager. He was organising a business trip to Indianapolis.
He should have alighted at Concord and thrown his devices in Walden Pond, the lake where Thoreau swam after retreating from modern life.
Each technological revolution triggers a reaction against it. Thoreau was in part rebelling against the railway that ran, and still runs, past Walden.
This not only redistributed Americans — some doubtless on business trips to Indianapolis — in a manner he thought unnecessary. It also stimulated written communication in the form of letters.
Thoreau believed most of these were a waste of time. Similarly, when mass production became a spring tide in the 19th century, British polemicists such as William Morris and John Ruskin were there to wave it back.
The reaction to intrusive information technology is inchoate so far. Some Californian cafés ban Google Glass, which they see as spywear masquerading as eyewear. There are sporadic media storms about the proportion of internet content that is pornographic.
No latter-day Thoreau has yet gained popular traction with a philosophy of digital detoxification. There is plainly a gap in the market.
One part of Thoreau’s argument was anti-consumerist and sits in useful counterpoise to the idea that the latest Apple product is sufficient reward for working 50-plus hours a week. Having retreated to the woods, he lived on just over $62 in his first year. This included the cost of building a hut, though not rent.
The British economist, John Maynard Keynes, approaching the work-life balance from a slightly different angle in 1930, argued that rising industrial productivity would result in Britons needing to work only 15 hours a week. His thinking converged with Thoreau’s in imagining that individuals wanted more time to relax in preference to having more goods and services.
Most do not. This is just as well for the staff of Daimler, who would lose their jobs if there was no demand for top-end cars that are functionally little different from cheap runabouts. The debate focuses on a purportedly unfair division of the spoils of economic activity rather than an unjust split of free time.
By this latter measure, a typical banker is scraping by while a struggling actor is rolling in it.
Thoreau believed the mass of men lived lives of quiet desperation. What he had not grasped was that the mass of men do not care if they believe their next door neighbour’s life is marginally more desperate than their own.
I disembarked at Concord while the multitasking businessman whizzed on down the rails. Walden Pond is busy these days, and today Thoreau’s daily swim would probably have ended in a collision with a kayak.
But there is a satisfactorily lonely pool further into the woods, beside which the digital jitterbug can sit and purge the ones and zeros from his system.
Elevated by my temporary rejection of modernity, I returned to a full inbox, 11-hour working days and commuting between home and work PCs with two mobile phones, a BlackBerry and an iPad. A business trip to Indianapolis seems inevitable.
Financial Times