Tired after another long day, somewhere between last coffee and first irritation, I realised that I live inside a machine that never sleeps. Not a grand cosmic engine from Asimov’s Foundation, not even a gritty Morgan-style biotech nightmare. No, much worse: my own smartphone. A small rectangle that vibrates like a needy cat and occasionally shouts at me with a sound specifically engineered to activate the ancient lizard part of my brain. I did not invite it to become my overlord, but here we are.
People like to say that humanity didn’t notice when we entered this “always on” age. I think this is wrong. We noticed—only we kept telling ourselves polite excuses, like: “It’s just for emergencies,” or “It’s useful,” or “What kind of caveman are you without smartphone?” And so, step by step, like a very slow zombie apocalypse, the connected world simply crawled into our pockets, our beds, our kitchens, our weekends, and the last surviving corner: our skulls.
I am not anti-technology. If anything, I admire it. Our species was always curious, always building tools, always extending our reach. But sometimes we create a tool that extends so much that it loops back and grabs us by the throat.
And then pings.
A lot.
You know, there was a time when reaching a person required actual effort. You called the office… and if they were not there, too bad. You called the home… and if they were not there, also too bad. Silence was not an attack; delay was not a moral failure. If someone didn’t answer, it meant they were doing something else—working, walking, eating, living. Radical concept in 2025.
Then came the mobile phone. Supposed to be a little miracle: “Now you can be reachable anywhere!” This should have been our first warning sign. Being reachable anywhere also means being reachable everywhere. And reachable everywhere quickly became reachable always. The device got smarter. It learned to nag. It learned to present incoming messages like urgent diplomatic cables. And then, perhaps out of some cruel joke of human psychology, we gave it read receipts and online statuses—as if we wanted to be monitored by tiny personal surveillance satellites.
Somebody in Silicon Valley probably thought this was great progress. And in many ways it is. But it also created a new behaviour pattern: if I see your message and do not respond instantly, suddenly I am ignoring you. If you write me at 23:45 and I don’t reply, maybe I am rude. Or cold. Or dead. And honestly, in such moment I already feel half-dead, but that is another topic.
The borders of time collapsed. Work hours expanded like some monstrous cosmic dust cloud. “Flexibility” became a polite euphemism for “constant availability.” Your boss doesn’t need to say anything; the culture does the job. Quick responders are “committed.” Slow responders are “complicated.” Those who turn off notifications become suspicious creatures who must be hiding something—maybe a secret civilisation of people who sleep eight hours per night.
And then of course friends, family, neighbours, random acquaintances—everyone learned this new rule of play. If the system says I am online, why I am not answering? If I answered somebody else first, why did I not answer them? Suddenly we live in a world where the simple act of not tapping a screen becomes a minor diplomatic crisis.
There is something very bizarre about this. Humanity survived plagues, wars, frozen winters, incompetent emperors, global recessions. But now we panic because a message shows “delivered” but not “read.” A great civilisation indeed.
The worst part is how deeply this penetrated our internal life. Privacy is no longer just physical space or data protection regulation. Privacy now means the right to be unreachable without justification. And that right is evaporating like morning fog.
Try to disappear for a few hours—people worry, people complain, people interpret. Your silence becomes a story. We lost the ability to be quiet without sending a notification about being quiet. Technology blurred the line between contact and control.
I am not saying we should throw our devices into the Danube and retreat to the forest to become hermits with poor Wi-Fi. I am saying that constant connection comes with subtle costs: attention fragmentation, social anxiety, the slow erosion of patience, and the strange idea that being alone is suspicious. Sometimes progress works too well and becomes a parody of itself.
But let us be fair. This is not some evil conspiracy. It is a combination of human social instincts, convenience, commercial incentives, and small design choices that slowly nudged us toward a state of permanent alertness. Like boiling a frog—although I have never boiled a frog and hopefully never will, but the metaphor works.
The task now is not to stop progress. The task is to civilise it.
We need cultural norms that recognise unavailability as normal. We need to stop treating instant reply as a proof of loyalty. We need to remember that attention is not an infinite natural resource like stupidity. We need to reclaim a little piece of personal time that is ours alone, free from pings, vibrations, and question marks.
Because if we don’t, we risk creating a society where every silence must be explained, where every pause looks like rejection, and where everyone is permanently reachable but increasingly unreachable inside.
The age of constant ping did not steal our privacy overnight. It just convinced us that we don’t need it.
And that, if you ask me, is the most dangerous illusion of all.
