Time theft wears no mask. It announces itself in meeting invites that colonize lunch hours, in documents that arrive Friday afternoon demanding Monday morning responses, in the expectation that “working from home” means working all hours. Unlike other workplace violations that hide in shadows and whispers, temporal abuse operates in broad daylight. It even celebrates itself as “dedication” and “commitment.”
We’ve built a world where being “always on” is a virtue and boundaries are weakness. It’s no surprise when we place “life” and “work” on opposite sides of the same scale, as if they should carry equal weight. The promise that technology would liberate us from drudgery has instead created a peculiar form of servitude: we carry our offices in our pockets, our workdays bleed into nights, our weekends become mere pauses between emails and meetings.
the architecture of temporal violation
In the contemporary workplace, power often expresses itself through time. The executive who schedules meetings at 6pm demonstrates dominance not through explicit commands but through the assumption that others’ time is theirs to command. The manager who sends “urgent” requests on Friday evenings exercises a subtle violence, creating weekend anxiety that masquerades as professional communication.
This isn’t new (after all, isn’t a work contract a trade between time and salary?), but technology has amplified it beyond recognition. Where once leaving the office meant leaving work, now our devices ensure perpetual availability. The binary language of ones and zeros that promised objectivity and control has instead created new forms of subjugation. We’ve become addicted to speed and quantity, mistaking information for knowledge, response time for competence.
The pandemic didn’t liberate us from these patterns; it intensified them. “You’re already at home” became the rationale for meetings without breaks, for extended hours, for the complete dissolution of boundaries. I’ve heard from friends and clients who work more hours now than they ever did in offices, trapped in a peculiar paradox where physical freedom led to temporal imprisonment.
The ability to pause and resume reality reveals something profound about our changed relationship with time and problem-solving. Today I witness my children arguing over who will press “pause” when one needs to use the bathroom during cartoons. This scenario differs dramatically from when such control wasn’t possible.
In my childhood, I have no memory of making such demands. Not from resignation, but from necessity: we developed patience and the understanding that the world doesn’t exist for our convenience.1 When technical limitations forced us to choose between missing part of a show and addressing physical needs, we learned to weigh priorities internally. Was immediate relief more important than seeing the entire episode? This internal negotiation built what psychologists call “delay of gratification,” the capacity to tolerate temporary discomfort for future benefit.
Now, because technology can solve this conflict externally, the burden of choice has been eliminated. What we gain in convenience we lose in the practice of self-reflection and internal conflict resolution. We begin to expect immediate satisfaction of desires at the cost of patience, temperance, and fortitude. This technological solution to a temporal problem exemplifies how external fixes can atrophy internal capacities.
The same dynamic appears in workplaces where every inefficiency must be immediately optimized, every delay eliminated. We’ve lost tolerance for the natural rhythms that once forced us to develop internal resources. In our relentless pursuit of frictionless experience, we’ve inadvertently created friction-intolerant humans. I believe this may be one reason for our growing polarization of thought and ideas, which may well be a primary source of other forms of polarization, including political.
the deeper prison: beyond office walls
Since 2020, the themes of “return to office,” “remote work,” and “hybrid work” have filled countless headlines. Like a television series (soap operas having gone out of fashion), the debate shifts weekly. One moment defending that “home is where we work well”; the next suspecting or accusing those who prefer not to work in the office of laziness. Organizations find themselves caught between the fear of losing people and efforts to lure them back to expensive “offices of the future.”
But we’re having the wrong conversation. Consider this scenario: a couple who’ve lived together long enough to accumulate a vast collection of shared experiences feel distant and decide to make more effort to connect. One partner buys roses as a gesture of closeness. At the door, flowers hidden behind their back, they ring the bell instead of using their key. When the door opens, they reveal the roses, only to watch surprise transform into sadness, expectation into disappointment.
“What’s that face?” asks the flower-bearer.
“This is more proof you don’t listen to me,” comes the reply.
“How so? We agreed to do more to get closer. I know you love flowers, so I bought roses like I haven’t in years.”
“Yes, I love flowers, but I hate red roses.”2
This is parallel communication: two people discussing the same topic with apparently aligned intentions but different understandings, feelings, and conclusions. The return-to-office debate suffers from the same dynamic. On the surface, it appears to be a dispute between “control” and “freedom.” But something deeper lurks beneath.
The need for control collides with the desire for freedom, recalling Michel Foucault’s “docile bodies,” his concept of how institutions shape individuals into compliant, productive subjects through subtle forms of discipline and surveillance. Today’s workplace seeks docile minds more than bodies, though bodies must still be present for those endless, sequential meetings that demand physical presence despite emotional distance. It’s a form of control over bodies and minds, mediated by technology, even when that’s not the conscious intention.
The panopticon and factory floors found their corporate equivalents in cubicles, then open-plan offices, and now these “offices of the future,” designed for “chance encounters and creative collaborative environments” (euphemisms at best). Research by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2018) found that open offices actually decreased face-to-face interaction by 70%, contradicting their stated purpose.3
Even at home, we’re imprisoned by technology, as Byung-Chul Han warns in his books and John Berger notes in “Meanwhile.”
