Project Vision 21

I recently came across this quote by Argentinian philosopher Tomás Balmaceda that struck a deep chord:

“We struggle to sustain our attention, read a long text, tolerate the void. This time intolerance—the constant rush for information—erodes our capacity for reflection. Intelligence, in this context, isn't knowing how to use technology well, but knowing when not to use it.”

It’s a powerful insight. Balmaceda names something real and urgent: the way our lives have become ruled by an ever-accelerating demand for information, reaction, and stimulation. We click, scroll, swipe, and speak to intelligent machines, rarely stopping to consider what all this motion might be doing to our capacity to be still, to ponder, to reflect.

But I wonder if framing the challenge as a matter of when to use or not to use technology places the issue in an overly utilitarian light. As if the question were only one of mastery or discipline—like knowing when to put the phone down or close the laptop. That’s certainly part of it, but is it the whole story?

What if the issue is not just about how we use technology, but how technology uses us—or more precisely, how it shapes the very way we think, often without our awareness?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger once warned that the real danger of technology is not the tools themselves, but the kind of thinking they invite. He called it enframing—a way of interpreting everything, including ourselves, as resources to be optimized, calculated, and managed. Even when we step away from our devices, we may still carry this mindset with us, expecting every moment to be productive, every silence to be filled, every thought to yield a result.

This is where I believe Balmaceda’s diagnosis—so accurate in naming our “time intolerance”—opens the door to a deeper, more troubling question: What happens to reflection when even our withdrawal from technology is framed in technological terms?

In other words, if we only think of “not using” technology as a strategic move, we may still be caught in the same pattern of control and calculation that technology promotes. We may put the device down, but not leave the mindset behind.

To reclaim reflection, we may need more than moments of disconnection—we may need a transformation in how we relate to time, to thought, and to ourselves. We may need, as Heidegger suggested, to recover a more meditative way of thinking. A thinking that doesn’t rush to conclusions. A thinking that allows the void, the silence, the unanswered question to linger.

So yes, there is wisdom in knowing when not to use technology. But there is also wisdom in learning how to think differently, even when the screen is off. And that kind of wisdom may begin with asking not just what we are doing with our devices, but what our devices—and the culture they represent—are doing with us.

And that is a question no machine can or will answer for us.