The Age of Technology and Speed — and Its Anxiety Syndrome
On the five daily prayers as a merciful architecture of time
It is attributed to al-Hasan al-Basri, may God have mercy on him, that he said: you are but a handful of days, and whenever a day passes, a piece of you passes with it. It has also been said that time is spent either in consumption or in investment. I did not truly grasp this until I had freed myself entirely from the captivity of ever-accelerating busyness and the whirlwind of perpetual anxiety, my heartbeats straining in vain to keep pace with every notification, every urgent task, every to-do list that never ends..
One of us opens his eyes to his phone before opening them to his room, to the face of his wife or her husband, to the family around him. The first minute of the day begins with a notification, a message, a breaking headline, an alert from some new app. No sparrow at the window, no scent of coffee from the kitchen, not even the sound of the adhan ringing out — only a buzzing and a ringing that arrive before the mind is even aware it has woken.
And so begins our long journey of rapid responses: a quick reply, a quick decision, a quick leap between dozens of tasks and destinations. Rarely does the day end with us having accomplished some of what we planned; more often we go to sleep feeling that part of the list remains undone, absorbing the fact that we did not live our day but spent it running after it. This heavy feeling is no illusion: when we surrender the reins of our time to others, we lose the most precious thing we own, and we do not perceive the loss until we stand before the mirror one day and ask ourselves: how did the years of a lifetime go by?
Faced with these paradoxes and fears in the age of speed and technology, we come to realize, little by little, that the very speed we were promised would grant us time and ease is what has stolen our rest and our peace of mind. For when the pace of life around us accelerates so madly, the heartbeat quickens with it and the nerves vibrate; our minds scarcely find calm, tension mounts, and with it anxiety creeps in with a sly silence, without our noticing or feeling it — not over any particular event, nor any person by name, but a vague, unrelenting anxiety, an insistent whisper telling us that we are always behind on something, on everything, behind everyone; that we must always accomplish more, reply faster, brace for a new message or an important piece of news. An anxiety that becomes, day by day, an inseparable part of our lives before we even realize how painfully deep it has cut.
With the passage of time, that silent, racing anxiety hardens into a way of life, a disguised gloom that inhabits us without permission. It is what the husband complains of as he groans that he falls short with his family; the wife who burns out and finds herself quick to snap at her children; the worker who toils, chasing expectations that never end; the children who run each morning with their fathers and mothers toward somewhere or other without ever knowing the meaning of calm and rest, most of their childhood stolen from them; and the son who lives with a tormented conscience yet, under the pressure of time and the glow of the mobile screen, forgets to ask after his parents.
In truth the matter does not stop there. Before this squandering of time, this velocity of life, this swelling anxiety — how many among us had an ambition that all but reached the summits, had not the sheer multitude of distractions cast it down; and how much energy might have built glory, had it not been drowned in trivialities and dwindled under the bombardment of glowing images before ever finding its way into life. We know all of this and more, and still we do not stop; we complain endlessly, and still we do not change — because the vortex is faster than we are, and time is a sword, and we have been cut to pieces.
Among the gravest things this age has done to us is that it has erased the boundaries between our times. There is no longer a time for work and a time for rest; no clear divide between reflection and reaction, between duties and repose, between the outside and the inside — no privacy, no solitude, no room for escape. Everything has become connected to everything, and our minds can scarcely comprehend or settle, for they never find a moment to close the door upon themselves and gather their breath. Even when we retire to sleep, we look one last time at that constant companion of a device, asking it for a quick listen or a quiet scroll to drift off to, so that it becomes both the last of our day and the first.
It is the catastrophe of the syndrome of speed, devices, and anxiety — ruling over us as no colonizer ever did, for all its enormity and savagery.
The truth we are close to forgetting amid this predicament is that by our very nature we are not made to endure this perpetual connectivity, this ceaseless anxiety, this state of emergency that is never lifted. We are exquisitely sensitive creatures who need many pauses — stillness between one motion and the next, rest from time to time — or else our lives turn into a loud, unbroken din even in our moments of apparent silence. Time itself is not lived at one continuous, uninterrupted tempo; it has its terrain, its intervals, its stations, and every attempt to bend it, hasten it, or abolish its intervals is an unjust violation of the very nature of existence, leading to disorder in our living and to overwhelming psychological crises.
The strange thing is that we try to cure this anxiety with more of the very same disease. We flee the pressure of notifications, headlines, and video clips into yet more scrolling and gazing; from the anxiety of accumulating messages into ever more captivating feeds, deeper into the drowning of time — imagining that busyness relieves fatigue. We reap from this nothing but the further kindling and blazing of anxiety each time we try to smother it with more of the same fuel. Does a mind find its rest, after a long day's work, in social media — or in a reconnection with oneself, one's surroundings, and other people, or in a piece of silence?
The root of the problem lies far deeper. Most of us possess neither a clear goal nor a comprehensive plan to govern our time, so we spend our days panting after pleasures that never satisfy and distractions that never end. Whoever lacks a direction, a goal, and a road will be driven by the days to his own ruin; and whoever has no plan is but a laborer in someone else's.
By the time we reach this nervous and psychological conflagration, we are far beyond benefiting from a few ready-made, quick tips about balance, healthy living, and priorities, when what we need most is the overturning of an entire system of living — one that puts things back in their places and resets the rhythm of the day. All of that remains possible, before anxiety gnaws us from within and leaves us prey to chronic diseases and lasting psychological afflictions — the least of which is that many of us can no longer sleep without sedatives of one kind or another, which we call, at best, natural herbs and dietary supplements, if they are not outright mind-numbing drugs.
There is no way out of this vortex through miracle solutions and clever formulas while there stands the oldest and most deeply rooted order that grants us true pauses in our day: the one bestowed by the acts of worship, foremost among them the prayers — if we understand and grasp their role, and do not treat them as a number on the list, tasks to be dispatched in haste so that we may hurry back to the notifications and preoccupations on the mobile phone. Prayer, remembrance, and supplication are in truth a finely wrought daily program that apportions time in a way attentive to our needs, our empty spaces, and our nature, giving each stage of the day its due of pause and renewal — something the many and varied theories of time management have never attained, because they set out to administer tasks and feelings without providing an inner order that treats the problem itself.
As for the five prayers, they are a merciful psychological and spiritual timetable designed for the human being. Fajr opens our day with serenity and quiet before the battle begins. Zuhr cuts through the blaze of midday busyness and severs the cord of tension. Asr eases the edge of accumulated fatigue and grants energy for the road ahead. Maghrib draws a broad dark line separating the boil of day from the stillness of night. And Isha closes our day with tranquility and delivers us to a peaceful sleep. It is no coincidence that God swore in His Book by precisely these intervals of time — by the dawn, by the morning brightness, by the declining day, by the night — and He, glorified be He, swears only by what is momentous. These times and moments are not merely astronomical markers; they are stations of profound significance in our daily lives, for whoever knows how to pause at them.
The Quran has warned us explicitly against letting our wealth, our children, and our occupations — our phones and devices assuredly among them — divert us from the remembrance of God, and it named that a loss: for in doing so we barter our bond with God for the clamor of this world and the surplus of its goods, losing what cannot be replaced and gaining what will not last. This is what makes the prayers and remembrance among the priorities, the radiant stations in a Muslim's day.
And after each prayer come supplication, remembrance, contemplation, a returning to God — five pauses in a crowded, hurtling day. If we learned to stop at them well, gave them their due, and did not rush past them, we would find in them much of the rest and serenity we lack; we would return to them whenever fatigue and anxiety pressed hard upon us; and we would realize that our anxiety recedes when we restore our connection to the true source of peace.
Here the profound Quranic meaning comes to mind: “Truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find rest” (أَلَا بِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ الْقُلُوبُ). Tranquility never means the absence of problems; it means the presence of a deeper meaning that counterbalances the soul's turmoil. Remembrance fills a space of consciousness and heart, easing our tension so that our souls recover their clarity and luster. Only then do the day, the week, our work, and the whole span of life appear at their true size: a short journey, a fixed destination, and five stations for provisions, fuel, and repair when needed. This is what worship does in our lives when we practice it with presence and awareness.
None of this means, in any way, boycotting technology, switching off our phones, or rejecting the instruments of the age. Technology in itself is a blessing, and the means of communication can be immensely useful tools if we treat them as instruments of benefit and good — not as a pillow we lean upon unawares until they carry us away from our nature and from what our souls were fashioned upon.
The problem deepens when these tools turn from servant into master — and, very often, into opium. These devices have devoured the lifetimes of so many of us, costing us the life of the real world and transporting us to a parallel one we reach with a light touch, where we find what occupies us but does not fill us, what diverts us but does not rest us, and where we lose what we shall never recover — time — and from there come the regret and the heartaches.
The flaw lies neither in the existence of the smartphone nor in fast technology, but in notifications becoming the conductor of the rhythm of our hearts, our feelings, our entire day. Instead of listening to the beat of our hearts, the voice of our consciences, and the words of those we love — instead of letting the rhythm of our lives spring from our priorities, our worship, and what sets right our world and our hereafter — we leave ourselves in the grip of technology, ebbing and flowing, as it fills our empty spaces with every triviality and steals from us the loveliest of days and years while we slumber in heedlessness.
What is asked of us is not to flee the age nor to forswear technology. But is it reasonable to surrender to instruments that wring a whole lifetime out of us — or should we rather reorder our relationship with time and return technology to its natural place on the shelves of our lives: a tool in our hands, taken up when we need it and set back in its place, so that we may live our moment, our day, and our life?
It is natural that we find this hard to imagine, now that our phones outrun us to every beautiful scene we photograph and every family moment we capture, our unspoken plea being that we have no time to savor it now and so must store it away for later. But when did you ever find that your photograph beneath the tree carried the same fragrance as when you stretch out under it upon the grass, touch its dampness, and rest upon it, while the breeze threads through every hair of your head and opens the pores of your heart?
All of which means there is no refuge for us but the pauses. The prayers and acts of worship are the frame within and around which the rest of our motions and stillnesses are arranged. When prayer becomes a burden we discharge in haste, we gain none of its good; and if we neglect it, we have turned away from the remembrance of God for the din of busyness and alerts — then life closes in on us for all its breadth, and we become like one driven by a savage machine that devours the green and the dry and everything in between. And that is the straitened life.
But whoever among us can set for his prayer a time no rival is allowed to crowd, and for his remembrance moments in which he severs his connection to the outer world to be connected with God, savoring and replenishing — he will surely come to see that the anxiety he thought an inescapable fate of this age is nothing but the consequence of the absence of these merciful intervals, these saving pauses; and that recovering them is no spiritual luxury but, without question, the road to the serenity that descends upon the soul like a calm velvet curtain, relieving us of the clamor of the age and granting us the strength to face anxiety and pressures that never end.
Night and day work upon us whether we will it or not; if we do not work in them for what benefits us, they will work in us toward what wears us away. And between these two is decided the fate of our moments, our lives, our lifetimes.
We were given but a single life to live…
Dr. Fadila Grine
Montreal, June 30, 2026
