Try this experiment. The next time your phone beeps you with a text message don’t answer it for five minutes. I bet you can’t do it. I bet you can’t look at ‘message received’ and not press ‘view’. I bet like me you get a tight feeling in your chest after just ten seconds. After 30 seconds you will suffer shooting pains down your left arm and after one minute, if you manage one minute, you will become lightheaded, see stars and very possibly black out.
This is because you have been conditioned to the tyranny of the instant response. You are condemned to being endlessly available to absolutely anyone who happens to know 11 digits that may as well be the code to your soul.
I don’t know why we accept this as the status quo when clearly there was a time when people had to arrange to speak to each other face to face at appointed hours of the day, and when the evening might be the only time one was expected to answer a telephone.
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