Илья Марголин – The First Quarter Of My Century (страница 2)

Social pressure demands constant alertness. Fatigue is treated as personal failure. If you are not energized, you are ineffective. This belief is subtly reinforced by corporate culture, influencers, advertising, and even popular psychology. The alert person is successful; the tired one has lost. In this race for artificial vitality, energy products become not just commodities, but social instruments. This is also biopolitics: power exercised through control of physiology. It is easier to govern exhausted yet stimulated people than free and rested ones.

A particularly alarming aspect is the focus on younger audiences. New-generation energy products are no longer just drinks. They are ice cream, gummies, chewing gum, lozenges. Their packaging mimics comics, video games, TikTok memes. Their advertising targets teenage communities. The consumer is shaped from childhood – a person who does not know that alertness is a state, not a product; who becomes accustomed to seeking resources externally rather than internally.

The consequences of this culture are immense. Physiological consequences range from cardiovascular problems to anxiety disorders and insomnia. Psychological consequences include dependence on stimulation, panic attacks, and disrupted sleep. Social consequences involve the formation of a society of perpetual consumers, incapable of sustained, patient effort without external stimulation – people who live from dose to dose, from spike to spike.

Most troubling is how this culture redefines health itself. Health is no longer about inner balance, sleep, nutrition, or physical activity. It is about drive, «charge,» and the ability to work beyond one’s limits. Energy products have become symbols of this new model of health. Whoever is alert is healthy. That this alertness is purchased through stimulants is of little concern.

The price of instant alertness is high. It is not only the health of individuals, but the future of an entire generation – a generation that does not know how to rest, does not recognize natural fatigue, and fears slowing down; a generation taught from childhood that its energy is a commodity and its alertness a service. If energy products were to disappear one day, this society would experience withdrawal, unable to function without external stimulation.

Can anything be changed? Possibly. But doing so would require dismantling the core belief of our time: «everything, immediately.» Restoring the value of delayed results. Learning to acknowledge fatigue. Abandoning the glorification of overwork. Recognizing that the human being is not a perpetual-motion machine. And understanding that genuine alertness is not purchased – it emerges from proper rest, physical movement, intellectual effort, from life itself, not from a can.

When the culture of instant effect ceases to be the norm, energy chewing gum and caffeinated ice cream will disappear as well. Because the social demand for perpetual alertness will vanish. As long as that demand exists, the market for instant alertness will thrive – selling people not energy, but its phantom.

The Society of Fragmented Tasks

A critical reflection on contemporary approaches to time management, with particular attention to the popular Pomodoro method. A symptom of a deeper cultural transformation in which the fragmentation of time replaces natural rhythms of work, substituting freedom with the illusion of efficiency. An essay on the exhaustion of attention, the loss of the capacity for deep concentration, and the transformation of time into a controllable resource.

There is something darkly ironic in the fact that the human being of the twenty-first century – a creature that has proclaimed its liberation from the shackles of history, religion, and ideology – voluntarily binds itself to a timer. A small digital tomato blinking on a laptop screen determines when one is allowed to work and when one may take a breath. The Pomodoro method, conceived at the end of the last century as a tool to combat procrastination, has today become a symbol of a new culture of time: fragmented, discontinuous, and, in essence, profoundly anti-human.

Before the age of machines and factories, work was an organic continuation of life. People hunted, plowed, wove, healed, wrote books – without measuring effort in minutes. Working time was governed by the rhythms of nature, the body, and necessity. Even the medieval craftsman experienced work as a sequence of meditative, continuous processes. The Industrial Revolution was the first to sever human beings from the organic experience of time. From that moment on, the day was divided into shifts, hours, breaks, quotas.

At first, this appeared efficient. But the effect proved deceptive: along with productivity came anxiety. The world split into «work» and «life after work.» Time became a commodity.

The digital age has only intensified this condition. We live in a constant stream of notifications, urgent emails, messages, and tasks. Our attention is scattered. Fear of missing out (FOMO) and the habit of instant response have destroyed the ability to concentrate on a single task for more than a few minutes.

The paradox is striking: the more technologies we create to save time, the less of it we seem to have. We jump from task to task, from notification to notification, like someone who has broken free from chains that he himself forges anew. The Pomodoro method is not a cure for this fever, but a symptom of the disease. Twenty-five minutes of work followed by five minutes of rest appear to be a solution. In reality, this is a crutch for an exhausted, fragmented consciousness. People seek control over time because they have lost it. The timer on the screen replaces personal will. It is no longer you who decides when to work, but a digital signal.

Employers, marketers, and social media algorithms are all interested in our fragmentation. A person incapable of deep immersion is easy to manage. He remains in a state of constant mild busyness, yet never truly engages. This is the ideal consumer and employee. He does not demand conditions for long-term projects. He can be loaded with small tasks, his efficiency measured by the number of Pomodoro intervals per day, bonuses distributed according to the timer.

Pomodoro sells the illusion of freedom – as if you were the master of your time simply because you can measure and organize it. In reality, this is yet another form of external control. A person relinquishes the right to natural fatigue, to sudden inspiration, to monotony, to days when work simply does not happen. Everything is subordinated to the stopwatch.

We lose the capacity for prolonged immersion. Deep work becomes an anomaly. Culture fills with increasingly superficial projects: texts written in three Pomodoros, designs completed in five, decisions made in two. The fatigue produced by fragmented labor is subtle. It does not resemble the tiredness that follows physical work. It is a slow, viscous exhaustion that accumulates over months. We lose wholeness – the ability to work for long stretches with full immersion, the ability to lose track of time while writing, programming, building.

Life turns into a sequence of twenty-five-minute segments. Work becomes a simulation of productivity. Time becomes a commodity.

How can we reclaim time?

The first step is to acknowledge that Pomodoro is not a universal good, that the fragmentation of time is a symptom of a culture of anxiety rather than an instrument of freedom.

The second is to reclaim at least fragments of deep work: to work for hours without a timer, to lose the sense of time, to engage in tasks that do not fit into twenty-five minutes.

In our attempt to control time, we have lost it entirely. The Pomodoro method is a digital overseer that promises freedom but sells dependence. The culture of fragmented tasks is not progress; it is a symptom of a society that has forgotten how to work naturally.

Either we learn to master time again, or we will become its slaves completely.

Emotional Dictatorship

In this essay, I decided to examine one seemingly insignificant detail of our digital lives: instant reactions on Telegram. I have always believed that any opinion has the right to exist until it is drowned in either the approval or the hatred of the majority. And it is precisely here that the most interesting thing begins: a person is capable of changing their attitude toward a thought without ever reflecting on it, simply by seeing a sufficient number of hearts or angry emojis beside it.

I conducted an experiment to test how easily we are governed by those we never see – a crowd without faces, without voices, but with a rapid click. This essay is about a new form of emotional dictatorship that requires neither violence nor commands. It lives in likes. And the most troubling part is that we submit to it voluntarily.

There is in human nature an eternal desire to be part of the crowd, and an equally persistent desire to resist it. In the age of digital media, however, this struggle has taken on new contours. There is no longer a public square where one can shout an opinion. There is no living face to confront. There is only a screen and the signs you see before you encounter the thought itself. This is why ideas today have ceased to be self-sufficient. They exist only within the context of immediate reaction. A like, a flame, a heart – or, conversely, anger, displeasure, a «dislike.» These miniature markers have become a new form of power, a new metaphysics of digital existence.