Time is Worth Wasting

Confronting the harsh reality of a productive life.

If we were to time travel prior to the invention of the mechanical clock, we would experience a radical shift in people’s relationship with time. Most people worked in agricultural labor, and their sense of time was more fluid than today. Their work corresponded to available sunlight and season. Their leisure time would be intimately tied to season and harvest. Their concept of time was less linear and more cyclical.

As generations pressed on and technological innovations developed, a new orientation to time emerged. During industrialization, time became a metric to compress as much labor into the day as humanly possible. Crushed by the often brutal working conditions, the gruelingly long work days and weeks began to be challenged by labor movements looking to liberate workers from harsh working conditions.

At the turn of the last century, there were visions of a future where technological advancements would relieve workers of excessive overwork. Liberated from the daily grind, workers would need to transition their lives in such a manner as to carefully attend to goals of their leisure rather than the stress of overwork.

The realities of our modern world ended up being less romantic than predicted. Instead, every innovation that supposedly promised savings in time or work has generally produced more work, accelerated the pace of work, and expanded our work responsibilities in the end.

Innovation did make us more productive. We ended up being the most productive workforce ever recorded. And there is no end in sight for productivity goals in the future. Instead of more time, however, our lives continue to accelerate at a near-terminal velocity.

Despite this, we continue fantasizing about how technology will eventually reduce our overall workloads. Recent commentary about artificial intelligence’s place in our work and leisure is another golden goose we are convinced will save us from ourselves. But history tells us that the time we think we will save will be filled without mercy or pause.

Our problem is not the need for more technology to give us more time. It’s not better time management skills or life hacks. More time cannot be found at the end of a social media influencer’s video.

Our problem with time begins with our culture’s orientation to time itself.

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Feeding the Hungry Productivity Beast

Our culture’s orientation to time is grafted onto the bones of our capitalist economic system’s values and assumptions. Our economy — and the nature of work it engenders — is built upon a delusion of limitless growth. The economy is expected to grow continuously, and we, the people, are the vessels that make that economy grow.

Our economic delusion of limitless growth is fueled by the compulsion of scarcity, an ever-present anxiety that we must constantly strive to meet the next achievement, next quarter’s profits, the next promotion, the next big deal. We must get ahead, or we will fall behind. A delusion of limitless growth compelled by scarcity fears keeps us all running on a treadmill of never-ending pressure of more.

But how does one outrun a treadmill? This is the catch! Our work, consequently, has become a place where we attempt to squeeze in as much productivity as can be mustered — hoping someday we will have enough time to rest. But the treadmill never stops.

We are all attempting to feed this insatiable beast, incurring what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called the ‘malady of infinite aspiration.’ No amount of technological, medical, or social advancement has seemed to reduce the burdens and demands of the average person. Instead, we see the complete opposite. We are pushed to do more in the name of efficiency. “Do more with less” is the mantra of the twenty-first century. And research shows that no matter how much economic prosperity is gained, people will feel pressured to do more.

The modern era of work has become so perverse in the pursuit of endless bottom lines that we work more now than our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors did. Anthropologist James Suzman suggests, in his book Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, that humanity’s workload increased precipitously as industrialization occurred. Since then, modest efforts have been made to curtail overworking despite Americans working the most compared to similar countries.

We come to this tendency to overwork naturally through our socialization.

Socializing Hustle and Bust

We have been socialized to hustle and grind our way into some future where we can relax. We comfort ourselves by calling this a good work ethic. And there is no doubt that many of us have been rewarded in our culture if we have been able to overwork, overachieve, and sacrifice our time.

And technology does not save us from this world we live in. We’ve met the innovative present not with an abundance of time and space. Instead, we’ve created what I like to call synthetic urgency — a sense that everything needs to get done all at once all of the time. And thanks to the very technology that should have been our salvation, we can now dilute the boundaries of when we work. Overwhelmed and flooded with stimuli, we search for ways to manage our bustling lives without losing our minds.

Vacations from work are a clear opportunity for us to be able to reclaim our time. However, the blended boundaries between work and our personal lives have increasingly made the separation of work from the rest of our time a disharmonious proposition. When on vacation, people rush their time as well. Visiting new places have become races to see how many sites one can capture on their phone to prove they did things away from work.

Even if successful at vacating from work, productivity rates these days mean returning to a workplace overwhelmed in your absence. All of this breeds a contemporary version of burnout. It all feels like too much, and we are not enough.

To make matters worse, we have transferred this rushed relationship onto our children as well. Millions of children are conditioned to think their time must be filled to the brim. Children’s school days are over-extended with activities to the point that they are afforded, on average, twenty minutes or less to eat lunch. Recess and play are momentary disruptions to an intense curriculum with questionable educational outcomes for most.

Children are then carted off to after-school activities and then homework — all of which can directly intrude on getting sufficient sleep requirements. Parents hold some badge of honor for their insane schedules where they have effectively become chauffeurs for their children’s extracurricular activities. And despite all this quality time in the car, only about 30–40% of families regularly eat dinner together. The message is clear for children and parents — there is no rest, only more to do.

All of these jam-packed schedules filled with too much work, over commitments, and obligations lead to an experience sometimes termed time famine. The most common thing people do to manage time famine is to attempt to better control their time.

Controlling Time

Overwhelmed and stressed, we are left on our own to find ways to “maximize our day.” Enter onto the scene an era of hacks and hustles promising a contented life. We see a proliferation of social media posts and mobile apps about optimizing our morning routines, hacking our bodies and calendars, and techniques to slide in extra work where possible.

Despite the panacea of resources, it begs the question: To what end are we seeking all this managed time? What will we do with all this supposed saved time?

Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, notes that part of our problematic relationship with time is due to our desire to control it. More specifically, he calls into question our assumption that we can control our time.

We treat time as a resource to be owned and thus managed. There are strong historical roots to this conceptualization of time. As societies emerged into the industrial era, time became money to the systems of profit governing labor. The faster and more efficient a factory was at manufacturing — the more profits were made. Time, then, became seen as a monetary resource.

As a result, our language about time began to change. We no longer “passed the time”; we “spent time.”

Time was understood as something we owned and used accordingly. Before long, managerial models began to search for the maximum efficient use of worker’s time and eliminate ‘wasted’ time.

But this relationship with time as money or as a possession conflicts with a simple reality: we can’t save up time. Time cannot be stored in a bank or a shoe box under your bed. Paradoxically, the more we try to control time, the more we lose any sense of having it.

When we treat time as money, we measure everything we do according to our economic and cultural values of endless productivity. This, in turn, wears us out and exhausts us leading to the search for some blissful place where time stops and we can enjoy our life.

We busily organize and plan out a schedule, hoping to eventually get to a place of contentment. The philosopher Alan Watts speaks to this tendency to lean forward into some fantasy future that we never quite enjoy. In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, he states plainly, “What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become now.”

Behind all of these strategies to maximize, compress, and dominate our time is a powerful social misconception. It is built on the idea that you can (and should) control time. Okay, maybe not right now — but eventually. Eventually, you are going to be able to find more time, have the perfect schedule, find a way to never have to meal plan again.

Google Calendars and Death

What if I told you that rather than having time, you are time.

Our lives are time itself.

This concept of time has ancient origins. For example, Zen Master Dōgen in the thirteenth century noted, “time is not a storm moving across the sky from East to West, time is being itself.”

We treat time as a resource to be owned and thus managed.

The hard truth is there will always be too much to do. Everyone dies with unfinished business. And our limited time alive means we have to make important choices and creating more time isn’t one available to us.

Rushing to the end of the day, the end of the week, end of the month, and end of the year — we lose sight of the larger movement in our lives. Captivated by being productive, we rush with no clarity as to where we think we are going.

There is a lizard in South America called the green basilisk, which is affectionally referred to as the ‘Jesus Lizard’ for its capacity to run across a water’s surface. Evolved as an escape behavior, the lizard can busily jog across the water’s surface with dexterity, evading danger. Our busy lives seem like this lizard, rushing across our rivers of daily tasks, except where exactly are we trying to get “on the other side” of in our rushed lives?

What are we so busy running away from? Where do we think we are running toward?

If we slow down for a second, we sink into the waters of our life, and they reflect perhaps deeper core insecurities avoided in the rush of our daily grind.

One of those possible insecurities is our own mortality.

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, noted that we generally have a hard time confronting our death and limitedness. This, in turn, causes us to behave in a delusional state in which we act as if an endless parade of tomorrows is available for us to cram life into. Much like our economy, we treat our lives as an endlessly advancing stock market of profits. It seems that our hustle-and-grind culture has also helped distract us from the existential realities we face.

Our economy’s delusion of limitedness has rubbed off on us. Hustling our way to future happiness, we deny the limited nature of our very lives.

At this point, a little fear might creep in, saying something like, “I shouldn’t waste my time then!” And before you know it, we are back to square one—rushing to cram in as many things as possible in the name of busyness.

Instead, consider that time is, in fact, worth wasting.

Wasting Time

Because we are time and our time is limited, it begs the question ‘how do we want to spend our time?’ The Stoic philosopher Seneca was captivated by this inquiry — wondering by what metric we measure a good life.

Our modern world feeds us ideas of a good life filled with endless consumable purchases, promotions, and compressed schedules. But your limited time alive need not be bundled up and quantified for an economic system that dehumanizes and commodifies our human experience.

The hard truth is there will always be too much to do. Everyone dies with unfinished business.

Our perpetual busyness — rushing around with no clear sense of direction — is often a fog that sets in and obscures what is truly important to us. Your life is not measured in billable hours, the number of chores achieved today, emails answered, or the number of likes on a recent social media post.

Unlike the delusion of endless growth espoused by our economy, your life is valuable precisely because it is limited. Life does not increase in value simply by doing more things with it. When we stop treating our time as a commodity to be spent as we hastily rush through our days, we start showing up to our life — to be present to our limitedness and engage our lives with purpose and intention.

This doesn’t suggest that we naively give up on our daily responsibilities or essential tasks that ought to be completed. It means that we need to intentionally and presently understand that we are time.

We become intentional and discerning about how we show up to our lives. Merely packing things into our schedules is, in fact, the opposite of maximizing our time. Spread too thin, your life becomes frail and chaotic.

Instead, we resist being baited to engage time in a manner that compromises our wellbeing. We actively resist a cultural worldview that celebrates time famine, convincing us to be that green basilisk running aimlessly across waters you are told to avoid while constantly running toward a more productive tomorrow.

We find ways to enrich our experience of time. These can be small moments — grateful moments, joyful moments, or simply a moment to catch our breath. It’s about genuinely enjoying that meal (and the people you are sharing it with, hopefully), as Alan Watts was talking about. It’s about lingering over that last bite. It’s about noticing a person you love and giving them your full attention. It’s about pausing in a space of immeasurable gratitude for the time you have to live.

In larger ways, we make meaningful life decisions based on a fundamental understanding of our lives’ true value. Claiming our life and our time in this manner is not without consequence. Insatiably hungry systems will view your actions, most likely, as ‘wasteful’ and ‘unproductive’. Even lazy, perhaps.

But we understand time to be much more profound than a resource to be managed. Our time alive is not simply to move a line on a profit spreadsheet to the green. Time is our limited life. We are no longer primarily moved by the appearances of ‘progress’ at the cost of our wellbeing.

To the outside world, it may appear that you are wasting your time, but instead, you truly appreciate what time means. ∎

Originally published on Medium here.

Justin D. Henderson, PhD is an assistant professor of counseling, a counseling psychologist, and a workplace consultant. Dr. Henderson’s scholarship focuses on improving individual and community well-being and advancing social justice.