There's a certain difference in the feeling of using a computer versus being helped by a computer. I felt it first when I was ten or eleven and would construct scenes in Infini-D and render them on a Motorola Starmax 5000 downstairs. I'd go to bed and the trusty 266mhz processor would raytrace a 640×480 image for hours at a time.
Maybe it's silly but there's a line in my mind between idle cycles and non-idle cycles. Like the feeling of long defragmentation processes on Windows, or cleaning my room, they're periods which imply more productivity than they contain.
Or it could be less than silly, and say something about how we think about
technology: the difference between typing this article, character by
character and vim consuming 10% of my CPU and my family's old Apple
knockoff rendering a 3d scene overnight is that in the latter case the
computer is thinking about you rather than the other way around.
And so, time. Like anyone in 2013, I feel equal parts fear and ignorance of time. The horror story is always about a person who settles into a 'comfortable situation' and 'wakes up' 10 or 20 or 30 years later to realize that their life, place, marriage, job, or identity is wildly different than what they hoped.