Jargogled Impressions.

On Technology, Time, and the Luxury of Thought

There is a quiet irony in the age of abundance: that we, who dwell in the most materially comfortable period in human history, so rarely feel at ease. The techno-capitalist dream—a vision of abundance fueled by code, chips, and moonshots—promises to liberate us from toil and inconvenience. And in many ways, it has. We can summon groceries to our doorsteps with a tap, converse with distant friends through screens, even launch companies from bedrooms. Ours is a world that would appear fantastical to someone living just a century ago.

And yet, we feel no less hurried, no less encumbered.

Technology, like a benevolent genie, has granted our wish for comfort. But in doing so, it has also offered us something more subtle and burdensome: optionality. More things to do, more places to go, more tasks to complete. Our plates, once cleared by convenience, are now refilled—often to overflowing—with new obligations, entertainments, and ambitions. The vacuum left by necessity has been quickly filled by choice.

The evolution of luxury reflects this shift. Where once it meant leisure—time unstructured, free for contemplation, reflection, and human connection—it now often means accumulation: of objects, experiences, and increasingly, of action. Doing, not being, has become the currency of status. To travel extensively, to scale cliffs in Patagonia, to start multiple companies, to meditate at sunrise and hustle by day and bio-hack by night—these are the markers of the new affluence.

We rarely call it by its name, but in our memetic culture—shaped by social media’s endless projection of curated selves—this doing is valorized as virtue. The algorithm rewards not only accomplishment, but the theater of striving. “Look,” it says, “look at how much I am doing.” And so the once-luxury of stillness is quietly downgraded to idleness, suspect in its lack of visible productivity.

Yet, buried in the undertow of this cultural current is a quieter aspiration: the desire to think long. The true aristocracy of thought, the luxury once afforded only to philosophers and poets and kings, is now reborn among a new elite. Consider Elon Musk—a man of dizzying ambition, whose mind appears to live in a temporal zone untethered from the present. His vision spans space, energy, artificial intelligence, mass transportation, and the shape of human cognition itself. To him, luxury is not leisure, but dominion over time. The ability to bend it forward into visions of the future and then summon the machinery to make them real.

Or Patrick Collison, who co-founded Stripe and then launched the Arc Institute—not to solve a business problem, but to extend the frontier of human understanding. Here, luxury is the capacity not just to ask big questions, but to live inside them. These modern titans practice a kind of speculative aristocracy—where the wealth they wield is temporal and cognitive as much as financial. They have redefined luxury as the power to dwell in abstract, long-range pursuits without being dragged down by the quotidian needs of today.

To think long, to dwell in complexity, to converse about the architecture of society and the trajectory of civilization—these were once the domains of those free from survival’s demands. Today, they are the pursuits of those who can afford to out-source them.

I think about technology and its impact on society often. More than I perhaps should. Not because it is part of my job, or even because I have the time—but because something in me is magnetized toward it. I steal time from the urgent, the practical, the adult. I think when I should be acting. I ponder when I should be filing taxes, calling the contractor, changing the electrical plug.

In this, I sometimes feel like a character from a Saul Bellow novel—mind adrift among philosophical clouds while the world around burns with the heat of unattended responsibilities. My thoughts swirl about the stars, while the stove smokes. I feel ridiculous for it, and yet drawn to it all the same.

There is an allure in thinking big—an almost sacred pull. We are, after all, the descendants of stargazers. Those early humans who looked at the constellations and wondered not just what they were, but who we were in their light. That impulse—to seek context, to explore meaning—is not modern, nor is it a luxury in the superficial sense. It is human. And in that sense, it is essential.

Technology, for all its marvels, cannot answer the question of what to do with the time it saves us. That question, like all the deepest ones, belongs to the domain of philosophy, of art, of reflection. And perhaps it is here that our embarrassment of riches becomes most visible. Not in the volume of things we own, but in the paucity of attention we give to what matters most. In the abundance of means, and the absence of ends.

We are surrounded by tools that can do almost anything. But they cannot tell us why to do it.

Perhaps luxury today should not be measured in travel or toys or even trillion-dollar visions. Perhaps the real luxury is still what it always was: time. Not filled time, but free time. The ability to sit with oneself, to think deeply, to question earnestly, to wonder aloud with friends.

In a world that urges us to do more, be more, post more, win more—perhaps the true rebellion is to pause. To write without an audience, to talk without a purpose, to think without a conclusion.

This, I believe, is the richest thing of all.