Joel Stein: Step Away From the Phone Game, Mom

People are wasting a lot of time. They should really leave that to the professionals

Illustration by Tomasz Walenta for TIME; Getty Images (2)

The internet has taught me many things, most of them about how to please a woman, and nearly all of them wrong. But it's also shown me that absolutely no one values his time. Things I was sure you'd have to pay people for are being done for free, all the time. There's a fierce competition to be Amazon's Top Customer Reviewer. About 20% of the 31,000 volunteer Wikipedia contributors spend more than three hours a day editing entries. People answer surveys on pop-up ads, phone calls and e-mail. Someone at Airbnb bragged to me that a host spent three hours...

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