Payday 12 June 2001

Pic of the day: Narrow is the path that leads to life; and worse yet, you can't drive it by car.

Buying time, killing time

"Do not kill time - it is your life!" I am pretty sure it was the christian writer Elias Aslaksen who wrote this when I read it, though I doubt he can be the only one who have noticed. From that time onward, the notion of killing time has made me cringe. Whenever I smell the faint whiff of boredom, I set myself to use the free time in some way.

Yet Deceit is subtle. Sometimes we think we are using our time, and yet we find that we have killed it in vain. The happiness or productivity that we sought to gain, has eluded us. Time has passed, but we have not lived. We have neither reached our goal nor enjoyed the journey.

***

I have written in the past about this paradox: Until a few decades ago, happiness in western countries gradually rose along with incomes. But at some point, the two diverged. People earn more, but they are not happier. I have a new explanation for this today. In the past, I have said that people grew happier because their extra income secured their basic needs. Today our needs are such that they cannot be bought for money directly. They are too subtle to be available for any price outside ourselves. This may well be true. But time may also be essential.

A washing machine is not exactly a physical need. But for the millions of housewives who used to spend their days bent double over the washing tubs, it was a quiet revolution. The vaccuum cleaner is not to be ignored, either. Anyway, the various implements of the household have saved so much time that now the housewives can leave home and work long and hard enough to pay for all those things. :)

But more seriously, think about some of the great time savers of our time. The car lets you travel in comfort over distances that would take hours to pass even with a bicycle. In areas without too much congestion, this is a real timesaver. No wonder people were delighted.

But lately, we are losing the time again. Because it is now possible to commute over long distances, we have created a society in which people need to do just that. Because we can now send mail with the speed of light, we are flooded with e-mail that we are expected to reply to at the speed of light, too. (At work, I mean. I'm certainly not flooded at home.) And because we can easily create detailed reports with our computers, we now spend our workdays creating detailed reports which we did not need ten years ago, and probably still don't need.

And much of what we buy these days does not give us more time at all. On the contrary, it eats our time. We love entertainment, and there is a lot of entertainment to be bought. Books, CDs, movies, video, comics, manga, anime, computer games ... There is something for nearly every taste, and even some tasteless. It is fun, fun, fun ... but it eats time like fire eats wood.

***

Now, I am not saying that entertainment is bad, bad and must be spanked! No. We seem to hurt no one when we sit down to be entertained, if that is what we want with our lives. But often people have other plans. They have other goals. Entertainment is just a filler. They want to do something, to achieve something. But when they come home from work, the entertainment is waiting for them. Eventually they fall asleep in front of the TV. Their day has gone by. Their lives go by. They do not achieve their real goals.

Entertainment is fun. I like it too. But you probably have other plans with your life. You want to find True Love, and you are not likely to find that in the sofa in front of the TV. (OK, you can make love in the sofa in front of the TV. But the TV doesn't really help, I believe. Quite the oppposite. Not that I would know, of course.)

Freedom, equality and brotherhood - you won't find them on your CD and probably not even in the tourist paradise. Or at least these are not generally the richest ores to mine. You are not unhappy, for you are entertained, and it feels good. But you do not find what you search for. What you search for is your life. How many hours a day have you truly lived?

I believe that the answer is to make a choice. Either to accept that we want to be passively entertained, or start to take back our time. Whatever we do, we can do it consciously. Some things just lend themselves better to doing consciously, such as zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Other things are harder to do while retaining self-awareness, such as killing orcs or watching figure skating. Obviously we should start with the easy ones, if we want to take that road.

With enough practice, you can get something valuable out of even mindless drivel. Watch this space! :)

(Or, if you want entertainment with an afterthought right now, you could go read 1/0 and Ozy & Millie. Timeless wisdom for people who don't have time for wisdom.)