My thumb is hovering over a notification for a newsletter I haven’t read in 18 months. I don’t actually want to read it. The subject line is something about ‘optimizing your morning flow,’ which feels like a personal insult considering I am currently standing in a stagnant line at a government office where the air smells faintly of wet wool and ozone. There are 28 people ahead of me. I know this because I have counted them eight times. Each time I reach the front of the count, I start over, hoping that through some glitch in the matrix, the number will have dropped to 18 or perhaps even 8. It never does.

I look around, and the scene is identical for every person in this bureaucratic purgatory. We are all performing. We are hunched over our glowing rectangles, thumbs flicking with a rhythmic, desperate intensity. Not a single person is looking at the ceiling, or out the window, or-heaven forbid-at each other. We are collectively engaged in a silent, high-stakes theater piece. We are pretending to be vital. We are pretending that this 58-minute delay in our lives is being mitigated by the fact that we are ‘clearing out the inbox.’ It is a lie. We are not being productive. We are simply too terrified to acknowledge the crushing weight of our own powerlessness in the face of a slow system.

As a financial literacy educator, I, Simon L., usually spend my days explaining the compounding power of assets. But here, in the wild, I am watching the compounding power of wasted human capital. If you take these 48 people and multiply their average hourly worth-let’s say a conservative $38 an hour-this room is currently hemorrhaging $1824 every sixty minutes. And yet, the system that keeps us here treats our time as a renewable resource with zero cost. This is the fundamental friction of the modern world. We have been taught that our time is the most valuable thing we own, yet we are constantly forced into spaces where that value is set to exactly zero.

The Cognitive Dissonance of Doing Nothing

To cope with this cognitive dissonance, we scroll. We perform ‘busyness’ because the alternative is to sit with the reality that we are being disrespected. If I am looking at a spreadsheet on my phone, I am a professional who is currently ‘remote working’ while waiting. If I am just staring at the back of the guy in front of me, I am just a man who has lost control of his Tuesday. We have internalized the idea that empty time is a moral failing. We’ve forgotten how to simply be. I caught myself earlier trying to end a conversation with a woman near the water cooler for 28 minutes. I didn’t even want to be there, but I couldn’t find the ‘exit’ button in real life. I was so conditioned to ‘do’ something that I couldn’t just say, ‘I am done talking now,’ and walk away. I just kept nodding until my neck hurt.

This is a symptom of a culture that has replaced stillness with noise. We think that if we are not processing information, we are decaying. It’s why we check our phones at red lights that last only 18 seconds. It’s why we can’t sit through a 58-minute dinner without someone glancing at a sports score. We are terrified of the gap. The gap is where the uncomfortable questions live. The gap is where you realize you might not actually like your job, or that your shoes are too tight, or that you’ve been standing in a line for 38 minutes for a permit you don’t even really need.

Agency Over Performance

I remember a time, perhaps 28 years ago, when waiting was a recognized part of the human experience. You sat on a bench. You watched a bird. You noticed the way the light hit the dust motes in the air. You were bored, yes, but boredom was a fertile ground for observation. Now, boredom is seen as a technical glitch. We have ‘cured’ boredom with the infinite scroll, but in doing so, we’ve also killed our ability to observe the world around us. We are so busy pretending to be busy that we miss the actual mechanics of our lives.

This performance is most visible in the travel industry. You spend 88 minutes in a security line, 28 minutes waiting to board, and then 48 minutes waiting for the plane to push back from the gate. In every one of those windows, humans are frantically clicking. We are trying to prove to the universe that we are not just cattle in a metal tube; we are ‘executives’ and ‘creatives’ and ‘influencers.’ We use the screen to signal status. But true status, the kind I try to teach people about when we talk about financial freedom, isn’t about looking busy. It’s about having the agency to not be in the line in the first place.

Complicity and Control

I often think about the 1008 different ways we justify our own delays. We tell ourselves it’s just ‘how things are.’ We tell ourselves that everyone else is waiting, so it’s fine. But it isn’t fine. Every minute you spend in a queue is a minute you aren’t building a business, or hugging your kids, or even just staring at the ocean. It’s a minute stolen. And when we mask that theft with our phones, we are complicit in it. We are making it easy for the people who run these systems to keep them slow. If everyone in this room put their phones away and just looked at the clerks with a steady, expectant gaze, the energy in the room would change. The ‘busyness’ performance provides a layer of insulation for the bureaucracy. It keeps us quiet. It keeps us docile.

I’ll admit, I’m not immune. I just caught myself checking my bank balance for the eighth time today. Why? I know exactly how much is in there. I checked it at 8:08 AM. It hasn’t changed. But the act of checking gives me a sense of control. It’s a financial literacy teacher’s version of a fidget spinner. I am performing the role of the ‘Diligent Asset Manager’ so I don’t have to feel like the ‘Man Waiting for Paperwork.’

Demanding Better Value

We need to start demanding more from the systems we interact with. We need to stop rewarding companies that treat our time like trash. In my classes, I tell my students that if a bank makes you wait 48 minutes to talk to a human, they are effectively charging you an ‘inconvenience tax’ that never shows up on your statement. You should move your money. The same applies to every other facet of life. If a restaurant, a rental agency, or a doctor’s office doesn’t value your time, they don’t value you. They only value your transaction.

I’m looking at the clock on the wall. It’s an old analog thing, and the second hand is twitching every 0.8 seconds. It feels like it’s mocking us. To my right, a teenager is playing a game that involves crushing candies. He has been doing this for 38 minutes. His eyes are glazed. He is in the ‘wait-state’ flow. He has been conditioned from birth to accept that the world will make him wait, and that the only solution is to find a digital dopamine hit to bridge the gap. It makes me sad. Not because I hate video games-I actually quite like them-but because he is missing the specific texture of this moment. Even a bad moment has a texture. The way the light reflects off the linoleum, the specific pitch of the woman’s voice three chairs over, the way the air feels against your skin. When we perform busyness, we flatten the world. We turn 3D reality into a 2D scroll.

The Sunlight Walkout

I finally reach the front of the line. It took 68 minutes. The clerk doesn’t look up. She’s busy performing her own version of busyness, shuffling papers that don’t seem to need shuffling. We are two actors in a play with no audience. I hand her my form. She stamps it. The entire interaction takes 48 seconds. I walk out into the sunlight, and for a brief moment, I don’t pull out my phone. I just stand on the sidewalk. I breathe. I feel the 88-degree heat. I realize that I have been holding my breath for most of the last hour.

We are a society of performers. We perform for our bosses, our followers, and most damagingly, for ourselves. We pretend that our constant connectivity is a sign of our importance, when in reality, it is often a sign of our chains. The next time you find yourself in a queue, try something radical. Put the phone in your pocket. Feel the discomfort. Feel the anger of your time being wasted. Don’t mask it. Don’t hide behind a ‘productive’ email. Look at the system for what it is. And then, the next time you have a choice, choose the option that doesn’t make you wait. Choose the service that treats you like a person with a life, not a body in a line. Because at the end of the day, your portfolio can grow, your bank balance can rise to $888,888, but you will never, ever be able to buy back those 68 minutes you spent staring at a newsletter about morning flows.