PALO ALTO, Calif. — On a recent trip to visit my parents, I opened a journal from my senior year of high school to find something surprising. In almost all of the entries, I complained about never having enough time — to sleep, to think, to do a good job on anything. Describing a never-ending cycle of busywork and extracurricular activities, my teenage self sounds familiar: desperate to pay attention to just one or two things. In one entry, I’m sitting in a coffee shop doing homework and looking dolefully toward the Santa Cruz Mountains, wishing I could drop everything and see what’s over there.

When I read this, I thought about the students in my art classes at Stanford. When I was in high school, there was no Facebook, much less Instagram or TikTok. My life may have felt busy, but at least I didn’t have to worry about the accelerating effects of social media.

My students are growing up in a culture that is even more intensely individualized and fiercely competitive than it used to be, a punishing, Adderall-fueled version of my teenage years. I understand why it might be difficult for them to slow down for a class where I have them make painstaking collages, go on walking tours and take high-resolution scans of everyday objects. They are worried about their debt loads, their résumés, their careers. In my classes, they are liable to wonder why we’re spending time on something supposedly impractical. Time is precious; time is money.

Much of their time is taken up by advertising content, platforms and experiences that are cynically made to capture their attention on a device that is always at arm’s length. It’s well known at this point how bad this is for their capacity to concentrate. But the way that it is intertwined with economic worries makes it worse: The attention economy demands not just consumption but also the production and upkeep of a marketable self. The work of self-promotion fills every spare moment. In the age of the personal brand, when you might be posting not just for friends but potential employers, there’s no such thing as free time.