Time is everything. How you spend it determines what happens to you, and how you think about it influences how you spend it. That’s just how it goes.
Objective time flows at the same rate, always. At least within the same reference frame. Subjective time, however, is a different story. Our experience of time changes greatly over time and throughout space. It depends on what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, where you are, when you are, how long you’ve been there for, how old you are, you get the picture. It depends on a whole lot of things. Interestingly, time has a lot to do with culture. As in how you think, feel and act through and about time will have a lot to do with your particular cultural context. This is true for every level of culture: family, friends, city, state, nation, planet. Each has a different sense of time.
Across the board, time — our sense of time — seems to be speeding up. We are busier, there’s more going on, and it’s all happening faster. Blink and a year’s gone by. What’s the deal? Well, technology is the first thing to point a finger at. Instantaneous communication and efficient, high-speed transportation have changed our relationship with both space and time. Feedback loops between intention and action have shrunk to nothing. Instant gratification has become the norm. Everything’ssquishedtogether. It’sasifthere’snoroomtobreathe. A full-blown cultural analysis of our relationship with time throughout history would be interesting. But it’s hardly necessary in order to substantiate this observation. Time feels as if it’s moving faster than ever. And this has interesting implications. Namely, it causes us to act as if time genuinely was moving faster. That the world is currently obsessed with the notion of ‘productivity’ is no coincidence. It’s more than a symptom of worldly ambition. Instead, it reflects a deep-ceded anxiety about our relationship with time, our relationship with existence itself. Shit-times-running-out-fuck-better-do-as-much-as-I-can-right-now-ahh-Jesus-sweet-mother-Mary-Josephine.
That time is moving faster is obviously an illusion. Time’s ticking as it always has. There’s no less space between ticks. Still the same second of silence. Tick. Tick. Tick. See? Living as if there’s not enough time in a day is problematic for a number of reasons. Beyond being a recipe for a shitty quality of life, it promotes a certain mode of thought, a certain fixation on the short-term; the units of time we can reliably manage: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, quarters. Our view of time has become myopic. We have become masters of ‘optimising’ our days at the expense of living our seconds and navigating our years. Ironically, my sense is also that this comes at the expense, rather than benefit, of productivity. How? Because the greatest productivity gains are often had during the least ‘productive’ moments. That is, in-between time; when there is space between moments, space between thoughts.
Time has become claustrophobic. Every moment, every email, every meeting is right next to, and on top of, the other. There’s little room to breathe, little room to think. For the ambitious spirit, perhaps the entrepreneur in particular, this is a dangerous trap. Great things are accomplished over great spans of time; the product of great ideas, great thoughts. Squish time together and you are bound to forget that the future is long; you compress your vision, thwart the growth of ideas.
A fertile, creative mind is one that embraces time, one that learns to channel it, one that learns to be nourished by it, grow alongside it. A troubled mind, a pathological mind, is one that tries to fight it, slice and dice it, and God bless, optimise it. Spend time wisely, not ‘productively’. Better yet, work to make sure they are one and the same. But be careful, for the latter often masquerades as the former.
