If we asked some investors what their most valuable asset is,they would probably tell us that it’s money. Someone else might say knowledge, others discipline, patience or the ability to withstand volatility. These are all reasonable answers, but in the opinion of DTI newsletter, none of them is correct. The most valuable resource we have is time, not money, not even wealth or skills. Time.DTI newsletter have been talking about this for a long time on their blog and they like to emphasize it every time.
Money can be recovered, a loss can be offset, a bad investment can be corrected and even a career can be rebuilt after a failure. It’s a cliché, but time, once gone, never comes back. Yet we live in a fancy age in which we have become extremely sensitive about protecting our personal data, passwords, bank accounts and privacy, while we have developed an extraordinary tolerance for systematic theft of our attention.
All eyes on you
Digital platforms have built business models worth trillions of dollars : officially, they sell advertising ; in reality buy and resell human attention. Attention is the raw material and we are unwitting suppliers but so far, there’s nothing particularly original about that. We’ve been hearing about the attention economy for years. But there is a far more disturbing aspect that is rarely discussed : social networks don’t merely consume our time, but modify the way we perceive it. In other words, they don’t just steal hours from our day, even manage to make us forget we ever had them.
Anyone who has used Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X or YouTube knows this feeling all too well : we open the app intending to check a notification or quickly read an update ; a few minutes pass, then ten, twenty, forty ; at some point we look up and discover nearly an hour has gone by and don’t remember exactly what we saw. We don’t even remember why we opened the app ; only know time has vanished.
This experience is so common it has become normal, but just because it is normal doesn’t mean it is harmless. To understand what is happening, we must start with a seemingly simple question : what is time ? The intuitive answer is that time is something objective, a regular succession of seconds, minutes, and hours. In reality, our experience of time is deeply subjective. Two hours can seem like an eternity or vanish in an instant ; a week can seem endless or dissolve without a trace. Our perception of time depends above all on memory. When we look back on our past, we judge the duration of a period based on the number of memories it contains : the more memories we have, the longer period seems to us. The fewer memories we have, the shorter it appears.
Instant gratification through compulsive scrolling
Think about vacations. During a vacation, time often seems to fly by. We’re immersed in new experiences, new places, new people and we’re not constantly checking the clock. Yet, when we return home and look back on that week, it seems surprisingly long. The reason is simple : we’ve built up a wealth of memories. Now compare same week to seven days spent between work, notifications, compulsive scrolling and routine. When you try to recall them, they often seem like a single indistinct mass, there are no points of reference, no memorable events, no stories.
Social media are machines designed to produce amnesia. It may seem like an extreme statement, but let’s try a little thought experiment. Try to remember what you saw yesterday on social media. I don’t mean the general theme ; I mean specific content. What was the first video ? Third ? Tenth ? What image appeared after that one ? What post did you see twenty minutes later ? Your memory is probably extremely fuzzy, yet you may have spent a whole hour consuming that content. Instead, try to recall a good book you’ve read in recent years, or a movie made an impression on you, or a particularly meaningful trip. The details will come to mind much more easily.
The difference isn’t random : lived experiences are remembered ; feeds are forgotten. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and every event is connected to the one before it ; every step generates meaning. Our brains are wired to memorize narrative structures, whereas a social media feed is the exact opposite. One second we’re watching a cooking video, the next a geopolitical news story pops up, then an ad, a cat, a financial crisis, a joke, then a tragedy or a dance. No element is connected to the previous one : there is no continuity, context, or plot. It’s like trying to read a novel during a storm, while someone keeps tearing out the pages and replacing them with pages from other books.
Result is that the brain struggles to form memories and as memory weakens, our perception of time also shrinks. This phenomenon should be of particular interest to investors. Financial markets reward the long term and building wealth requires patience. Compound interest takes decades and the best financial decisions often seem tedious in the short term and extraordinary in the long. Social media, on the other hand, trains the mind in the opposite direction : every piece of content lasts just a few seconds ; it must be immediate, intense and delivered instantly.
In other words, digital platforms train us to live in the very short term. We think we use social media for just a few minutes a day, but in reality, we’re letting them shape our relationship with time. Someone used to instant gratification will find it increasingly difficult to wait for the results of an investment. Someone who constantly checks notifications and updates will be more likely to react emotionally to market fluctuations. Yet another, immersed in a constant stream of stimuli, will gradually lose the ability to focus on processes take years. It is no coincidence that many investors know the theory perfectly but fail in practice. They know should stay the course, ignore the noise and think long-term, but they live immersed in an environment designed to make doing these things nearly impossible.
