Yesterday, while I waited for my take away coffee, I watched a lady apologise for taking three hours to reply to a message.

Not three days or three weeks.

Three hours.

It made me wonder when we started believing that being reachable meant we needed to be constantly available. You might recognise it in yourself. You see a message come through while you're doing something else and immediately feel that little pull to respond. You notice an email sitting unanswered and mentally add it to the list. You finally get a quiet moment and, almost automatically, reach for your phone.

We have never had more technology designed to save us time, yet somehow most of us feel as though we have less of it.

You can order your groceries without going to the supermarket, pay bills without visiting a bank, have dinner delivered without cooking it and communicate with someone on the other side of the world instantly. Now AI can write an email, summarise a meeting, research a question and complete in seconds things that once took considerably longer.

All of this should be giving you more time.

But is it?

Or have you simply found more things to fill it with?

Think about the small pockets of nothing that used to exist throughout a normal day. Standing in a queue, waiting for someone to arrive, sitting in a doctor's waiting room, having five minutes before an appointment or drinking a coffee without doing anything else at the same time. Those tiny pauses haven't disappeared. We've just become very good at filling them.

You probably don't consciously decide to do it either. Your hand reaches for your phone before you've even thought about why. You check the message, then the email, then something else catches your attention and five minutes later you can't quite remember what you picked your phone up for in the first place.

It's easy to blame technology for this, but I don't think technology is really the problem. I think it reveals something much bigger about the way many of us are living.

We have become incredibly good at filling our lives.

Your day can be full before it has even begun. There are people who need you, things that need doing, work that needs finishing, appointments to remember, messages to answer and responsibilities that don't disappear simply because you're tired. You get through today while already thinking about tomorrow, and because you are capable, you keep making it all work.

From the outside, you may even have a very good life. A family you love. Work you've worked hard for. A home. Friends. Holidays. Opportunities previous generations could only have imagined.

And yet you can have all of that and still occasionally wonder, why don't I feel the way I thought I would?

This is something I have become fascinated by, both through my work with clients and while writing Being Human in a Robotic World.

I don't think most of us intentionally decided to become this busy or distracted. We didn't sit down one day and decide that every empty moment should be occupied or that responding quickly was more important than being present. It happened gradually as the world became faster and we adapted to keep up with it.

That's what human beings do. We adapt.

The danger is that eventually the adaptation becomes normal.

You stop noticing how often your attention is somewhere other than where you are. You become accustomed to eating while looking at a screen, thinking about work while you're with your family, checking your phone while someone is talking to you or mentally running through tomorrow while you're supposed to be enjoying today.

You can become so efficient at managing your life that you stop experiencing parts of it.

And I wonder whether this is one of the reasons so many people can have a life that looks good from the outside yet feel strangely disconnected within it.

Because the moments we've removed weren't necessarily wasted time.

They were thinking time. Noticing time. Processing time. Boredom. Imagination. Daydreaming. Conversation. Looking out the window. Sitting with an uncomfortable feeling long enough to understand what it was trying to tell you.

They were moments when you could actually hear yourself.

If every gap is filled with information, entertainment, communication or productivity, when do you get to notice what's happening inside you?

When do you ask whether you're happy with where you're heading? Whether the things you're spending your days doing still matter to you? Whether you're saying yes because you want to or because you've always said yes? Whether the life you've become so good at managing is actually the life you want to be living?

Those questions don't usually arrive as notifications.

They tend to emerge when there is enough space to hear them.

Perhaps that's why the question I've kept coming back to while writing Being Human in a Robotic World isn't how we keep up with a world that's becoming faster. It's how we remain human within it.

I'm not against technology. I use it every day, and I'm fascinated by what AI is going to make possible. But I think the more efficient our world becomes, the more intentional we may need to become about protecting the parts of ourselves that efficiency can't replace.

Presence. Curiosity. Intuition. Connection. Creativity. Feeling. Our senses. The ability to sit with ourselves without needing to fill the silence.

Maybe technology was never supposed to help us fit more into our lives. Maybe it was supposed to give us more of our lives back.

So this week, notice the spaces you’ve become accustomed to filling. Drink the coffee without your phone. Let the message wait. Look out the window while you’re waiting for someone. Give yourself five minutes that don’t need to be productive.

And ask yourself:

What am I saving all this time for?

This is one of the questions at the heart of my new book, Being Human in a Robotic World: The Way Back to You. It’s about what happens when we become so busy keeping up with life that we slowly lose touch with ourselves within it — and why understanding ourselves may matter more than ever in the world we’re creating.

If you’ve ever looked at your life and thought, I have so much to be grateful for, so why does something still feel like it’s missing? — I wrote this book for you.

Preorder Being Human in a Robotic World: The Way Back to You → [PREORDER LINK]​

Until next time,

Michelle x