But how practical is it? It depends on the consequences. Usually, living for today amounts to making the most of working in my cubicle. It amounts to making the most of opening as many browser windows as possible and reading as many articles as possible in the shortest amount of time possible, all without any real, clear purpose as to why or what I hope to get out of it all.

That’s one problem. The other is myopia. I lack foresight. I am simply no good at predicting how I will react emotionally in any given situation. For instance, I might think it thrilling to bungie jump. Yet, if I ever do, I might throw up and think it rather dangerous and retarded. Or, I might think it satisfying to jump while skiing. Yet, if I ever do happen to try that sort of stunt on, say, my second day of skiing, with weak and tired legs, I might find myself staining the snow and wishing that I had never talked myself into doing something so equally dumb. In short, regret and guilt tend to show up arm in arm when I least expect them.

What I have learned, though, and what I can use to offer as a bit of advice is that it usually helps a lot to quickly think through your impulses and weigh any foreseeable consequences before taking action. That usually helps.

My only fear is that technology will solve our problems for us without requiring our understanding. For example, we can already write AI software that learns from a few basic facts and solves incredibly complex problems for us, such as evolutionary optimization. Quantum computers are also being used to answer fundamental biological questions, like the precise energy of a hydrogen molecule. These are no doubt great advances. My fear is that we do not understand them and, therefore, cannot ask our newest oracle, as it were, the right questions.

Then again, the worst effect of our ignorance is probably slow advancement, since technology can also be used to help us optimize our questions. And, if not, then we will inevitably merge enough with technology to provide a different kind of “understanding” through brain-computer interaction. So, I guess my fear is irrational, a human quality that I would gladly give up in the merger.

Using organic life as a guide, purpose relates to procreation or, more generally perhaps, multiplication and division. We are here to prove a math theorem?

What this means for those of us who now live a good portion of our lives online is that we must improve our ability to manage our very finite and irreversible time on this planet if we expect to accomplish anything or, in the most basic sense, feel content at the end of the day. I cannot remember the end of a day in which I felt content for having achieved all that I had planned to achieve at its beginning.

We could adapt to the Internet’s impact by not only organizing our time, but also scheduling each 30-minute block of it. The clear benefit of this mad method is that it would surely minimize our misuse of time. Unfortunately, this would also just as clearly minimize our creativity and overall sense of humanity. We might as well give in and accept ourselves as machines.

So, the problem of time management in the Age of the Internet is how we manage time without losing ourselves. If creativity could be scheduled, I suppose that would be a start.