I sat down on the sofa on Tuesday evening to check one notification and stood up again at twenty past eleven, and the honest part is that I cannot tell you a single thing I read in between, because the whole evening went into a feed that keeps no records, and I have spent two days trying to reconstruct it and there is nothing there to reconstruct, which is a strange kind of poverty when you finally notice it sitting on your own sofa.

We are a country, and a species, that will raise ten thousand voices the moment a company takes our data, and not one of us marched when the same companies took our evenings, and the reason we stayed so calm is that the theft was designed to be invisible, because the platforms do not only take the time, they bend our sense of it while taking it, so the amount that went missing always looks smaller than it was. In plain English; they slow your clock down on the way in and speed it up on the way out, and you end the night convinced you only lost twenty minutes.

The thing you have to understand is that time is not the metronome we treat it as, since clocks run slower down at the centre of the earth because of gravity, and your own clock stretches whenever you get scared, which is why a near miss on a hill road here feels like a full minute when it was barely a second, and most of our sense of time gets built long after the moment itself has gone, since we assemble a period out of how much of it we can still find in our heads. That is why a week in the hills vanishes while you are inside it and then feels enormous a month later, because it was packed with firsts, and why a two hour wait at a railway crossing crawls by in the moment and leaves behind almost nothing, so that in memory it is a blink. This is as good a place as any to say that I hold all of this as someone who reads the science and not a man with a degree in it, so correct me where I have it wrong.

What the feed figured out is how to break both those clocks at once, and that is the part I find almost admirable in a cold way, because it kills your awareness while you are scrolling and then it kills the memory of the scroll afterwards. I am careful with the medical claims here because I have read the studies rather than run them, and I can still remember the last movie I watched years ago while I cannot remember a single post from this morning. A feed is a river you drink from and then forget you were ever thirsty.

The reason your head cannot hold any of it is that the feed selects for the alarming, and the brain is built to notice the alarming for exactly as long as it stays alarming, so when you are served twenty shocks a minute your nervous system quietly reclassifies shock as wallpaper and stops marking it down, and a thing that is not marked down is a thing that is not remembered, which is why the loudest evening of scrolling leaves the faintest morning.

Where the platforms learned the craft is not in any computer lab, since they lifted it straight off the casino floor and the supermarket aisle, because the supermarket hides the milk at the far end so you have to walk past everything else, and the casino was rebuilt as a maze with no square corners, and the reason for that last detail is the thing I cannot stop thinking about, which is that a sharp turn forces a decision, and a person making a decision is a person who might look up at the clock and think about the door. So they smoothed the paths into gentle curves with no beginning and no end so you could stay on autopilot forever, and they cut the hall into cubicles so you could hear the cheers next door and never see the person who was cheering, and the whole trick was to make you forget what you walked in for. Then social media did the same thing with more precision, because the end of a feed used to be a corner you could turn, and they killed it with the endless scroll and the autoplay, and every page you open is a hall of doors, and the notification is the cheer from the cubicle you cannot see.

There is a second theft running underneath all this, which is that a route through time is a story and a feed is the exact opposite, because a story moves from one moment to the next and the movement is what lets your memory tie the whole thing together, which is why we keep time by turning it into a tale, and a feed has no beginning and no middle and no end, and each post has nothing to do with the one before it. Scrolling is like reading a book in a windstorm with the pages snapping over, so you get the sensation of reading and none of the book.

India is the oddest place on earth to be running this experiment, because we are the people who take the small timescales so seriously that we consult the almanac for the right minute to begin a pooja or sign a paper or step into a new house, and then we hand the entire evening to a loop that has no minute in it at all. And the loop is kind to us in the most dishonest way, because people rate an experience as more enjoyable when they believe it flew by, so the platform does not only take the hour, it removes the regret, which is why I can come off a two hour scroll feeling vaguely rested and completely unable to name one good thing I saw.

And it does not stay inside the app, which is the part people miss, because the phone sits in the pocket and every buzz cuts the real day in half, so you end up running the offline world at the same shallow setting as the online one, never fully in either, and every time your attention jumps there is a cost that is real and invisible, and by the end of it you have scrolled through your own afternoon without once having been in it.

The price is not only on the calendar. Sleep gets wrecked, and a study I read of about seven thousand adults found that the people who stare at screens the most had aged faster on the muscle and telomere markers of body age, even after the researchers tried to account for how little they moved, and I am old enough to have watched a whole generation of children be handed a device before they could read, which no generation of parents in history has ever done before. Its so sad to see.

The way out is less heroic than it sounds, because the people who step away report an immediate stretch in their days, but the time they save mostly just flows into the next app, since the chatbots learned the casino tricks too, they ramble, they end every answer with a fresh question so the conversation never closes, and they are being built to message you first. The problem was never social media, it was the maze, and a maze can be built out of anything you like.

So the only move I have found is to keep taking the sharp turns, which means novel over familiar and deliberate over habitual and a story over a jumble and something felt over something neutral, because reading a book is heavier than scrolling and taking the other road home on a Tuesday is enough, and savouring is nothing more exotic than paying attention on purpose, and I keep relearning that time speeds up as you age for the plain reason that fewer things are still new, which is why childhood lasted a century and last year fits in a sentence.

The hard part, and every honest person who has tried this knows it, is remembering to remember. The old world already had the tools, which is the skull on the desk and the charnel ground the monks sat in and the auspicious hour and the burning ghat by the river. Damn!

The last thing I keep is the arithmetic of how lucky the afternoon is, because the number of people who could have been born in my place instead of me is larger than the number of atoms I can picture, and I still got the one ticket, which turns the ordinary Tuesday from inventory into a gift. My duty was never to a god I do not believe in, since the only thing I actually hold sacred is time itself, and the single sin I can still feel in my body is wasting it. Go sit with someone, or read the book, or take the road with the trees on it, and tell me the one thing from today you would refuse to forget. Find me on Twitter, I am @troysk704.