Like you, the child feels the impatience of desire — I want it now — but cannot understand the reason for the rush.
What is the use of speed, when the pleasure is to entertain, linger and be slow.
How inexplicable your sudden urgencies seem to him, he awakens them, let's come, we will never arrive like that.
An expert in delays, he recreates himself in each game, on the rung of each ladder, on each excursion, like an endless story.
Your child senses that love demands temporary prodigality.
If you love someone, you give them your peace of mind, your slowdown, your forgetting about clocks.
However, your little foodie has serious competitors: every moment, digital devices and their voracious screens battle to hijack our hours.
Tech giants lust for gazes to auction off in a frenzied attention market.
Applications and social networks are free only in appearance.
We do not pay for them because the product is actually another: our time.
Spellbound by pulsating images and addictive stimuli, we give away information about our tastes, movements, opinions, miseries, and dreams.
The more the merrier: we feed minute banks and databases that companies will sell to the highest bidder and that will return in the form of personalized advertising and propaganda.
It is we who are for sale.
In the 1970s, before the spread of the internet and the first mobiles, an author of children's literature, Michael Ende, wrote a visionary fable about the looting of our temporal treasure.
The inhabitants of a large city begin to receive a visit from mysterious men dressed in gray, agents of the Time Savings Bank.
These persuasive newcomers promise succulent interest to the people who deposit in their bank the hours saved each day: instead of half an hour, dedicate a quarter of an hour to each client;
reduce your daily contact with your elderly mother to a few short words;
better yet, put her in a good but cheap nursing home, where she will be cared for;
don't waste a fraction of your precious days singing, reading, or in the company of your friends.
The time traders are quietly conquering society, without any resistance.
Anxiety, urgency and obsessive haste take hold of the people, who blindly follow the advice of the gray suit men making them for their own decisions.
“A difficult business, bleeding time from men, second by second.
We keep it, we need it, we crave it.
You don't know what your time means.
But we know it and we suck it to the skin.
And we need more, more and more ”.
Only Momo, an orphan girl who lives among the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, and the magical tortoise Cassiopeia manage to unmask and defeat the gray bankers who inhale the smoke of usurped moments.
Faced with our push to digitize education, Silicon Valley computer gurus are raising their kids without screens.
In the very expensive private schools of the technological mecca, children do their accounts with pencils, sheets and archaic blackboards provided with colored chalk.
Something smells rotten in California, when the cooks themselves forbid their family from savoring the same dish they offer us.
In classical mythology there was a divinity called Momo, like the girl from Ende.
The legendary Momo embodied irreverent mockery towards everyone, even against the inhabitants of Olympus: she ironically believed that the creation of human beings was overrated.
In his opinion, the gods should have provided a small door in the chest that would allow us to monitor our true ideas and sincere feelings.
I did not imagine that, a few millennia later, we would lightly give away vital data about our health, our political ideas and our secrets, true seeds of control.
Today, that door that Momo dreamed of exists, and certain companies open it to steal our time and privacy with the pick of our captive hours.