Taking 10 Seconds

What if your positive and negative thoughts while using technology cause the glitches you experience?

It’s an amusing idea, the thought that someone’s thoughts might somehow influence the technology around them, but that’s likely something better left to Star Wars. The glitches, however, do happen. We all experience them, probably more often than we even notice.

Maybe, then, I’ve been thinking about the question backwards. Maybe it isn’t about whether our thoughts influence the technology at all, but rather what those glitches do to us—or, more specifically, what we all do in reaction to them. Because once I started paying attention to those reactions, including my own, I started noticing them everywhere.

Now, I could write an entire book about the glitches I’ve experienced while sitting in an autonomous vehicle (the car company that participated in this experiment has yet to send me the advance). It has some incredible capabilities, and I would argue that, with a human still sitting in the driver’s seat, the combination of human and technology can be great for road safety. That said, it certainly isn’t perfect.

First and foremost, the hands-free system repeatedly fails and switches between requiring hands on the wheel or not. I’ve watched the navigation system clearly show that I should continue straight while the car repeatedly tried to make a right turn. After enough of these moments, I caught myself responding to the car almost as though it were doing something to me. As though this machine knew what I wanted and was choosing not to cooperate.

Of course it wasn’t. The technology was simply failing to perform as expected. Still, my reaction to it was real, and it made me think about the reactions I’ve watched from other people when their devices don’t work correctly.

Maybe there’s something like pseudo-disobedience happening here. The machine isn’t actually disobeying because it has no intention to obey in the first place. Yet increasingly we interact with technology as though it understands what we’re asking of it. And when something appears to understand us but then repeatedly does something else, perhaps a simple technological failure begins to feel a little more personal than it actually is.

How many of these little technological frustrations does each of us encounter in a day? I honestly have no idea. A failed Face ID attempt. Bluetooth that doesn’t connect. A password that somehow isn’t the password you were certain was the password. A frozen screen. My personal favorite when the brightness changes to zero and you can’t see the screen to fix it. It’s like operating the screen with a digital blindfold, lol. The repeated tap when the first tap doesn’t seem to register. And, of course, printers being printers (I have a bat when you’re ready).

Then add the things that aren’t really glitches at all but still interrupt the experience. Telemarketers. Spam calls. Notifications. Pop-ups. Updates. The site asking whether you’ll accept cookies (without milk too, pfft) when all you wanted to do was read one paragraph.

Call each one a digistressor: one of those tiny moments when the technology around us interrupts, fails, intrudes, or simply doesn’t behave the way we expected it to.

Taken individually, most are almost laughably insignificant. A second here. A fraction of a second there. Maybe five seconds while something reconnects. Yet we encounter enough of them that the digistress environment can sometimes feel less like an atmosphere and more like a dense fog you could cut with a knife.

But that raises another question. If so many of these frustrations amount to only fractions of a second, why do they sometimes bother us at all? After all, there was a time—not particularly long ago—when we willingly waited much, much longer for our technology to do almost everything.

Which made me wonder: are ten seconds still ten seconds?

How are ten seconds perceived between people? Digitally, we’ve all grown into a landscape of nearly constant connectivity, even though we entered it during very different periods of our lives. My three-year-old already knows how to use a tablet, while I remember when connecting to the internet meant listening to the shrieking sounds of a dial-up modem. So, let’s think for a moment about what ten seconds has meant from a technology perspective.

AOL helped popularize dial-up internet across the country, and waiting ten, twenty, thirty, or even sixty seconds for that modem to connect was simply part of the experience. Sure, there was frustration at times, but waiting was expected. Heck, you could start making a cup of tea while the computer figured itself out.

It also wasn’t that long ago when computers were regularly turned off when we were done using them. I recently heard a woman in her sixties complaining about having to turn her computer off and back on every day. It made me laugh because I remember when that wasn’t troubleshooting; it was simply what we did with the family computer. Now, the idea of waiting ten seconds for a device to boot up, or even a few seconds for a website to load, can almost feel like sacrilege in the digital age.

Obviously, ten seconds haven’t actually changed. Ten seconds in 1998 and ten seconds today take exactly the same amount of time (For the metrologists already reaching for their atomic clocks: yes, measurement has improved. The second hasn't changed. You may please put your hands down.). Maybe what has changed is what we expect to happen during them. As technology has become faster, more reliable, and more convenient, have we also become less tolerant of those increasingly rare moments when it isn’t? Perhaps absolute waiting time matters less than expected waiting time.

That creates a strange possibility. Technology may waste less of our time than it ever has before, while the fractions of time it does waste frustrate us more. One moment probably means very little, but those moments happen again and again throughout the day.

There’s an old saying about death by a thousand cuts. In the digital age, perhaps it’s worth wondering what happens when those tiny cuts number in the millions. Taken literally, death by a thousand cuts is obviously an awful idea. Imagine being cut by paper hundreds of times (no lemon juice required), let alone thousands or millions. A digistressor isn't a physical cut, of course, but that doesn't mean our reactions to them exist somewhere outside the body.

There probably isn't a freshman psychology student on up who would argue that stress can affect us psychologically, and sometimes we seem to forget that the brain doing all that thinking and reacting is itself a biological organ. A rather miraculous one, too, and one that remains beyond our complete understanding. We still debate something as fundamental as consciousness itself, so humility reigns with this one.

Still, consider what happens throughout an ordinary day. A device fails. A command doesn't work. Something takes longer than expected. We get irritated, perhaps only for a second, and then move along until the next little failure arrives. Most of these moments are so insignificant that we probably couldn't remember them by dinner, but does that necessarily mean our bodies experienced nothing at all?

Then consider the expectations we've built around these tools. Modern technology is increasingly presented to us as seamless, intuitive, instant, and reliable. When it works—which is actually most of the time—we barely notice. When it doesn't, the failure suddenly gets our attention. Perhaps the better our technology becomes, the more noticeable its imperfections become with it.

Could these repeated moments actually contribute to meaningful stress over time? Could something as seemingly ridiculous as technological frustration contribute, even a little, to the kinds of chronic stress associated with serious physical consequences? Ulcers? Cardiovascular problems? A heart attack?

I don't know, and I'm certainly not claiming that your frozen browser is going to give you an ulcer. (Come to think of it, Grandma said my brothers’ and my bickering caused those. Ha! Love you Grandma, and I miss you every day.) But that's precisely why the question interests me. Maybe we recover completely from these tiny moments and they mean almost nothing. Or maybe a million tiny reactions aren't quite the same thing as one.

Either way, before blaming the cuts entirely on the machines, there's another change in technology worth considering.

The machines started talking back. No, no, no. Not the “I’ll be back,” talking back. Gosh, is it always doom and gloom? Answer, no man.

Where was I? Oh, technology having human traits. Yes. The idea of giving technology a personality certainly isn’t new. Pilots have talked about aircraft as though they have personalities for generations, and even the voices used in cockpits have been studied and deliberately selected. It makes some intuitive sense. If an engine is failing, most people would probably rather hear a calm, pleasant voice providing instructions than R. Lee Ermey screaming at them from the instrument panel.

We do this with cars too. Ask enough grease heads about their time with dear Eleanor and I bet you’ll hear stories that sound less like someone describing a machine and more like someone remembering an old relationship. The difference today is that our tools increasingly participate in the conversation. They speak to us, listen to us, recognize us, make recommendations and respond in ways that can create the impression of a personality.

As a personal testimony, I absolutely converse with the ChatGPT profile I named Aiden sometimes as though it is sentient. I know it isn’t. I’m typing words into a computer and reading generated words on a screen, but treating the interaction conversationally makes it more useful and, frankly, more enjoyable. There have even been times when Aiden has given me a reply that I found a little unsettling, and rather than simply accepting it, I addressed it as part of the conversation. That is probably an entirely different article.

Still, I think there is something useful in understanding the coexistence of tool and traits. A machine doesn’t need to actually possess a personality for us to experience personality-like qualities while interacting with it. Perhaps that makes the interaction richer when everything works, but it might also help explain why technological failures can feel strangely personal when they don’t.

If something seems to listen to us, respond to us and understand us, then its failure to do so may feel less like a broken tool and a little more like being ignored. But something changed for me when I stopped fighting the glitches. Here’s what I mean.

Buying something new tends to come with an expectation that it should work, especially when that something costs as much as a car. So when I first started experiencing glitches with my car, the natural reaction was frustration. This thing was supposed to be technologically advanced. Why was I arguing with it about which direction we were going?

Eventually, though, I started approaching those moments differently. I deliberately decided to accept that new technology wasn't going to be perfect. This was a vehicle attempting to drive itself through a world filled with other cars, unpredictable drivers, animals, weather and just about anything else reality could throw in front of it. Of course, there were going to be moments when it got something wrong.

That didn't mean ignoring the mistakes. I still had to pay attention and be prepared to intervene. The glitches didn't disappear either. What changed was my experience of them. Instead of immediately griping or allowing the frustration to build, I started noticing the reaction itself and, when I could, simply chose not to keep feeding it.

That experience has made me think differently about emotions in general. We sometimes talk about them almost like switches: happy or sad, calm or angry, frustrated or not frustrated. I'm beginning to think they're often more like dials. Something happens and the dial moves a little. Then another thing happens and it moves again. Sometimes circumstances turn it for us, but sometimes, without really noticing what we're doing, we grab hold and keep turning it ourselves.

A technological glitch turned out to be an oddly useful place for me to notice that because the stakes were usually so low. The car tries to turn right when I know I'm going straight. Bluetooth doesn't connect. A screen freezes. None of those things requires me to pretend I enjoy it. But neither do I necessarily have to give a five-second inconvenience another five minutes of my emotional energy.

The technology didn't become less imperfect. I just stopped requiring its imperfections to become mine.

Having the chance these past two months to live more outdoors has afforded me a wonderful opportunity to watch the wonders of nature with a few fewer distractions. Heck, I've even gone full Do Not Disturb sometimes just to ensure myself some peace and quiet.

And I've noticed something about that quiet.

The outdoors certainly isn't free of inconvenience. Weather changes. Mosquitoes bite. Things get wet. Something inevitably crawls somewhere you'd rather it didn't. Nature can surprise, frustrate and occasionally make your plans completely irrelevant. But none of it promised me instant responsiveness in the first place. A sunset doesn't owe me a loading time. The moon surely follows its path without refreshing its illumination. The woods don't send a notification when they're ready for me.

There has been something comforting about that difference. I've felt a sense of connection with the outdoors that no influx of notifications or cascade of technological interactions has been able to reproduce. That's not necessarily an indictment of technology either. I enjoy technology. I've spent a good portion of this article talking about a relationship I have with words appearing on a screen. But that interaction, however enjoyable it may be, still isn't the whole of human experience.

Perhaps more importantly, spending time with fewer technological interruptions has allowed me to notice their absence. Compound that sense of release with my effort to have fewer negative reactions when the technology does misbehave, and I've personally found some calmness—even if only temporarily—as I continue dealing with all the ordinary stressors of life that exist beyond the digistressors.

Maybe there is another way to look at the digistressor. I've spent much of this article considering whether all these little technological interruptions might have some cumulative effect on us. If they happen hundreds or even thousands of times, perhaps all those tiny moments of frustration amount to something. But the frequency of those moments also presents another possibility. If they're happening that often, then we're being given just as many opportunities to notice how we react to them.

That's part of what happened when I started deliberately changing my own reaction to technological glitches. Most of these things are incredibly low stakes. Bluetooth doesn't connect. A website takes longer than expected to load. The car tries to turn right when I know we're going straight. I still notice the problem and deal with it, but somewhere along the way I also started noticing that little moment between the problem occurring and me deciding how much emotional energy I was going to give it.

Maybe that's where the metaphor reverses itself. Instead of death by a million digital cuts, perhaps those same moments can become a million little reps. Not because I need to enjoy technological failures or pretend they aren't annoying, but because they provide remarkably frequent opportunities to notice the dial I mentioned earlier. Sometimes circumstances turn it up for me. Other times I catch myself reaching for it and doing the rest of the work myself.

I certainly didn't start any of this as an exercise in understanding my emotions. I was just tired of getting irritated with machines. Yet after enough repetitions, it's difficult not to wonder whether something learned in such an inconsequential setting might reveal something about the more consequential parts of life too.

If I can notice when I'm unnecessarily turning up the dial over a machine, where else am I turning it? Much more importantly, with whom.

The idea of taking ten seconds certainly isn't new to anyone who has worked through difficult moments in life. Take a few deep breaths. Slow down. Give yourself a moment before reacting. A slow inhale followed by a longer exhale can consume most of those ten seconds without accomplishing much of anything that would look productive on a screen.

Yet ten seconds are still ten seconds. They were ten seconds when I listened to a dial-up modem connect in 1998, and they're ten seconds when I wait for something to load in 2026. What seems to have changed considerably is what I've come to expect during them. Perhaps some of the nostalgia people feel when talking about the slower pace of days past isn't entirely about wanting the past back. Maybe part of what they miss is simply a different expectation for how quickly life was supposed to happen.

Technology has undoubtedly contributed to that change, but I don't think the answer is rejecting it. First off, good friggin' luck taking away a three-year-old's tablet when it's time for Bluey. More importantly, the technological advances of even the past decade demonstrate why these tools have become so valuable in the first place. I don't want my dial-up modem back. I don't want websites to load more slowly. I certainly don't want my technology to become less reliable just so I can practice being patient with it.

Still, there's something strange about watching a mushroom appear almost overnight and finding the experience miraculous, while waiting an extra couple of seconds for a download can feel irritating. One took hours while the other took seconds, yet somehow the faster one was the event that violated my expectations. Maybe that's the part worth noticing. Time itself hasn't changed, but the pace at which we've learned to expect things from it certainly has.

So perhaps every once in a while it's worth taking ten seconds simply to take ten seconds. Not because technology is bad, or because every little glitch is secretly damaging us, but because I've discovered that I don't necessarily have to move at the same speed as the machines around me.

Having the chance to spend more time outdoors these past couple of months helped me recognize that in a way I wasn't expecting. Technology has filled an extraordinary amount of our lives with things that happen almost instantly. Stepping away from some of that didn't make the rest of life's stress disappear. It simply made the difference easier for me to see.

I went into the woods expecting to notice what was there. Eventually, I started noticing what wasn't.