Millennials think they have conquered time. They are dangerously deluded

Time is discipline. One of the few things I remember about studying that mad philosopher Michel Foucault is his idea that timetables create slaves out of our bodies. Believe it or not, your dutiful following of the established pattern of life – awake at six, lunch at one, news at 10, bed by midnight – is evidence of the subjugation of your soul to the oppressive diktats of the system, like a monk in a medieval monastery.

In which case, you must be feeling a new wind of freedom. We are being liberated from the strictures of time. The nation no longer works nine-tofive, returning home to watch the same TV shows at the same time, instead working flexibly and using catch-up services. Radio is still popular, but is being superseded among the young by personalised music streaming and podcasts that can be listened to whenever you fancy it. Increasing irreligiosity has robbed an entire day – Sunday – of the structure it once enjoyed.

Combined with the proliferation of time-saving services – online shopping, instant access to news – this is good news, of sorts. But the great irony is that the freeing up of time has been accompanied by increasing disrespect towards it, particularly by millennials.

Do we think we have all the time in the world? We are marrying ever later, and postponing having children, too. Research last week found millennials failing to achieve their expected career ambitions by their 30th birthdays: partly, yes, as a consequence of them being unrealistic, but also because many seem to think that there is time enough to find a more realistic career as they will be working much longer, a dubious assumption given life expectancy rises have petered out.

It is not all the millennials’ fault: they are taking longer to buy property because homes are more expensive than they used to be. This is not laziness, either: we fill up our days with work and leisure as never before.

Nevertheless, I fear a great many people are heading for a great deal of disappointment unless they realise that time is not as in our control as we might complacently think. It is increasingly subject to the algorithms of technologists, for example: by making their apps so addictive, they are wasting our time. Perversely, people spend far more of it using apps that make them miserable, research has found – social media, dating services – than on useful applications that make them happy.

Meanwhile, flexible working and “work-life balance” – the spread of the idea that we have a right to free time when we choose, an extension of the loose timetables of university life to the real world – might look rather foolish if they are taken for granted and lead your employer to prioritise you for redundancy come the next recession. Older generations who lived through the Three Day Week will have a better understanding of the fragility of our control of time than youthful Corbynistas who wish to naively vote us back to those days.

So perhaps Foucault had a point. Time does discipline; just not for the system’s benefit but our own.

‘Do we think we have all the time in the world? We are marrying ever later, and postponing having children, too’