The Sleepy Crow
My first try at blackout poetry
2025.10.01
...
(original text)
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The most common noun in the English language is "time". We talk obsessively about time because it's the most
important
thing in the universe
.
Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat time as if it's the least important thing. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we've been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out
the greatest heist of
our time in
history
.
One reason for our indifference
is
that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have been stealing our time using a sneaky trick: they've been
speeding up our sense of time
-- effectively shortening our lives-- so we think we had less than we did, and don't notice some of it was pilfered
.
Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you're still on the platform,
unable to account for where the time went
. This phenomenon even has a name: the "30-minute ick factor". It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they're on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they're explicitly told to keep track of time.
To understand how social media warps time
, we
must
understand
time
perception
, or chronoception. Even outside of our heads, time
doesn't move at a constant pace.
It is, for instance, slowed by gravity. This is why the Earth's core is 2.5 years younger than its surface. Just as massive objects can slow objective time, so weighty experiences can slow subjective time. It's why people tend to overestimate the
duration
of earthquakes and accidents (or in fact any scary situation).
Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; the majority of our sense of time
is retrospective.
And our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.