This is really three essays in one. The first is on the finitude of life and how not to waste it. The 2nd is on the concept of leisure and why we need to discuss it more. The third is on the remembering vs. the experiential self and whether and how some activities satisfy both or neither.
‘Wasting Time’
Late in my undergraduate degree I was fortunate enough to occupy the position of sports rep at one of the residential colleges at the Australian National University. The job involved organising sporting activities for around 520 people, sitting on a social committee, planning parties, being a rock star, that sort of thing. At the time, the college I represented was quite good at sport. We’d come 2nd three years in a row on the inter-college shield, and we’d won a range of sports. In my year as rep, I was quite determined to win. A big part of winning was turning up to training, and I used to get really pissed off with people who ‘didn’t have the time’ to come to training when they were actually just bad at time management. I was particularly upset with people who filled their days with ‘dead time’ — staying in the communal kitchen, sitting on facebook instead of studying, that sort of thing.
Dead time is a useful concept. It refers to time spent unproductively. Think about all the things you do in a day that, if you stopped doing them, would have no impact on your social life, academic life, identity or status. Those are things that constitute dead time. Watching viral videos is a pretty good example, but perhaps you need that for your social life. A better example is talking to the people you always talk to about things you’ve already discussed at length.
Dead time also comes in the form of minutes in a day that you just let slip by. For example, if you arrive at a doctor’s office and are forced to wait, don’t stare blankly at the wall—crack out your readings and get to them. Similarly, I am always astounded by the number of people who sit on a bus doing nothing. What a waste of time. Besides the environmental benefits, one of the best things about bus travel is that you don’t have to concentrate on driving so you can spend your transport time doing something more productive, like reading a book. If you get car-sick from reading, consider downloading some talks or lectures to your digital media player and listen to them while travelling. Try not to spend the small amounts of time between major engagements doing nothing: sitting on the couch with a blank head, watching something on television you have no interest in, talking to someone about the weather, etc.
Multi tasking is another time saving tool that I just don’t see people use enough. There is no reason why you can’t read an article while eating, or watch a movie while cleaning your room, or listen to a TED talk on the way to class.
If I consider anything to be of ultimate value, it is time. Life is glorious, and finite. If you want to make the most of it you need to make sure you don’t go wasting it on frivolities. One of the main ways to be sure you don’t have regrets is to do everything you could possibly want to do, and the only way to do that is to make the most of every moment. You aren’t going to have a raging social life, a plethora of adventures, wild sexy escapades, good grades, magical overseas trips and a cracking job while at university if you don’t use your time efficiently.
While I was at college I was a strong proponent of making maximal use of every minute of every day and the complete elimination of all dead time. Above, I’ve tried to summarise some of the techniques and ideas I came up with to guide that ideology. I think they are all quite good ideas—wisdom worth imparting—but now I would like to spend the rest of the article questioning that wisdom. Or rather, making it more nuanced.
‘Leisure Time’
Bertrand Russell has a really excellent essay called ‘In Praise of Idleness’. It contains several lines of argument, but the one that I want to consider here is his claim that all humans require ‘play’ and that it is thus barbaric that we work such long hours. He defines play as “periods of activity having no purpose other than present enjoyment”.
I am in agreement with Russell’s claim that modern, post-industrialist society is morbidly fixated on instrumentalism. All knowledge must be useful, all activity productive, all economies efficient, all organisations rational, all behaviour purposeful. This ideology has many benefits. Our society achieves many things—men on the moon, the 100m sprint in <9.6seconds, nuclear power, cancer vaccines etc. But we also spend a great deal of time furiously chasing after things that aren’t really that important—an extra 2 years mortality, slightly faster vehicular acceleration, an additional storey on our house—and amidst all this furious labour we fail to slow down long enough to appreciate what it is we already have.
But this is a familiar line of argument with me. Let’s look closer at this notion of leisure. I wrote recently (‘Getting deeper into notions of work, family, travel) about the fact many people in our society, including an increasing number of economists, are noting that we need to stop over-valuing material possessions and financial status. Instead, we should take note of the ‘priceless’ aspects of life—memories, family, friendship, holidays. I noted that while I agree with the sentiment of these commentators I can’t help but feel that there plea is itself superficial. Clive Hamilton, for example, bangs on at some length about the statistical relationship between greater affluence and increased happiness, and proceeds to prescribe the priceless items mentioned above without actually giving them any content.
Take family for example. Given the number of dysfunctional families in our society and the number of early divorces being filed, I am not optimistic about the extent to which Australian’s actually know what family entails. The Brady bunch presents an idealised image that very few can conform to. The liberal party continues to push a similarly narrow notion of family that excludes gays, the mentally ill, many migrants and single parents. Encouraging people to invest in family without nuancing that concept seems a little dangerous. We need to get a better understanding of what makes family life valuable and rewarding. Hopefully this will have the added effect of preventing individuals who would live much happier lives flying solo from starting families because they thought they were supposed to.
Leisure is a similar concept in this sense to family. Hamilton is very fond of a group he refers to as downshifters. These are people who have traded in hours worked per day to live a little slower and enjoy more leisure time. Again though, our mate Clive doesn’t really go into much detail about what these people are doing with their leisure. Are they investing time in previously neglected hobbies? Keeping more up to date with friends? Spending more time with the kids? Educating themselves? Writing monumental works of literature? Are they simply sleeping more?
It would be profitable to think about how we spend our leisure time. If you think about your average Australian individual, from lower class to mundane professional (i.e. APS and the majority if engineers in the country), most leisure time is spent on fairly meaningless activities.
Drinking and often getting drunk certainly appears to be the most popular. People assume that the only way to feel something is to get suspended in the moment, so they get ‘frothalised’. Many people drag themselves through the week looking forward to Friday when they can actually ‘live’—which for them consists of watching the football and knocking back a case/slab. Every weekend the pubs, clubs and bars of our cities are packed with individuals of all ages, drunk of their nuts, ‘looking for a good time’. Has anyone ever thought about why you need to be drunk to have a good time?
For a great many people, getting annihilated represents the only way to effectively switch off from their work lives, which follow them around and even go home with them. It is not an uncommon sight to see business people passed out on the sidewalk by 8pm in Sydney because they hit the piss so hard after work finished and had spent so few hours sleeping mid-week that their system shut down. While this sort of behaviour is obviously not healthy, it is understandable. Getting destroyed in this way constitutes a re-boot of the system, which is strung out after a long week. That said, I think perhaps we could think about how we live that we need this kind of off-switch. While work is always going to be tiring, ideally it will also be invigorating.
One of the most common leisure activities is following sports codes. Many a working individual supports a league team, a union team, a soccer team, an afl team, and Australian teams generally. While recently perusing the facebook page of a long disconnecting high school acquaintance of mine I noticed a string of status updates to the tune of ‘go the Brumbies tonight! Wohoo!’; ‘Fingers crossed for Newcastle against Dragons’ and ‘going to SFS to cheer on our boys tonight! Heaps pumped!’ This would all be normal if I didn’t know for a fact that this one time mate of mine, Dave, has never played any form of football, nor did he give a rats arse about it through high school or the early years of university while I kept in touch with him. His adoption of various codes of football seems to have accompanied his entry into the workforce, where he plugs away as an engineer for some Newcastle industrial corporation. Dave’s story seems to mirror that of many individuals who graduate from university and settle into the weekly routine of adult life, one of the first steps of which is to say: ‘I’d better pick a team to support.’ This kind of behaviour is enshrined in our political culture, where politicians are regularly photographed off to the footy, despite the fact that they clearly don’t give a shit.
Following a team seems like yet another simplistic way to inject some meaning into one’s life, to feel part of something bigger, and to either feel sorry for yourself (if you’re a Rabbitohs supporter) or like the winner that you actually aren’t (if you’re a Barcelona or Manchester United supporter). When you’re team wins, you feel a little giddy. When the Sydney Swans won that first premiership, loads of people felt like their life goal had been achieved. But it’s all superficial. You didn’t actually win the premiership, hell in some cases you didn’t even go to the games or buy merchandise. You’re not on the team. You did nothing special to join the club. In some cases, like my mates who haven’t left Australia but consider themselves dyed in the wool Man U supporters, you haven’t even been to the country in which the club plays. And yet, despite all this being fairly self evident, we persist with it, because we like to rib each other about how we won the other night, or we’ll get you next time.
The AFL takes this to the limit with its draft system, which practically guarantees that so long as you’re a fan for a long enough period, your team will eventually be strong and probably win a premiership. When AFL fans say ‘Geelong won last night because we’re awesome’ I always feel genuinely confused. Is this person deliberately behaving slightly irrationally? Surely they know that in a few years Geelong will be shit and there’s nothing they or the club can do about it. There is no legacy in AFL. The sport perfectly mirrors Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return of the same, yet nobody seems to have cottoned onto the fact with the kind of horror Nietzsche did.
For people that get drunk and follow football codes, life seems to be a repetitive chain of events. Work, drunk, sport, work, drunk, sport etc. It really is what T.S. Elliot said: school, holidays, school, holidays then work, work, work until you die. How can people be content with this?
Perhaps they’re not. The problem here is that we haven’t really about how to spend our leisure. Just like many people chase money without ever thinking about what they need it for, many people never think about how they spend their spare time. Leisure is a very new issue. In previous decades everyone has just been happy they had a job and could feed themselves. Now that we can do that pretty easily we’re left with all this spare time to fill up, but with what? We have no cultural education to apply to the appreciation of literature or art, most hobbies are considered nerdy or dorky, many shows are a bit too expensive to attend outside of special occasions—what does that leave?
So how can we spend are leisure time meaningfully? Well, let’s put that to one side for a moment and just consider whether we actually need to. Bertrand Russell notes that every human needs ‘play’, which I defined earlier. There are also some individuals who consider play-time a human right. So we can afford to spend some time just basking in frivolous activity, which might include board games or getting drunk and engaging in cheeky banter. Sometimes we just need to let go and rejoice in being alive. Play can be just like laughter: “being rejoicing at being” (Milan Kundera – the Book of Laughter and Forgetting”)
But then there must be other things. When we speak of hobbies we generally think of things that enrich the individual’s life beyond present enjoyment. Woodcraft for example, produces items that last. Sport makes one fit, can take you to places you’ve never been before (like half way up a cliff) and makes you healthy. Collecting model trains eventually produces a collection to be proud of (and played with).
Consider your friendship group—how many of them have hobbies? How many of those hobbies aren’t computer games, drinking or fanfare? From my own experience, very few people have such hobbies.
Perhaps it is time we started to think a little bit more about the content of leisure. This will be a topic for further study, for now I would like to return to the notion of wasted time.
‘Using Time’
Many of the things that I considered wasteful while at college, which I outlined in the first part of this essay, I have since come to reconsider. For example, my attitude to socialising has changed considerably. The kitchen at college was effectively a time vacuum. You put time in and it disappears with very minimal returns. Arguably, time spent in the kitchen translated to social skills, but any gains were negligible. By contrast, the kind of time I spend with friends now is much more profitable. Perhaps the main reason for this change is the fact that I now have established friendship networks, whereas college residents typically socialise with anyone and everyone, including dial-tones, idiots, people you don’t actually like etc. A great deal of the hours socialising are thus wasteful. Post college it becomes easier to socialise
On a more fundamental level, I’ve come to reconsider what people get out of socialising, even ‘unproductive socialising’. Many people ‘waste’ time socialising, but how important are these hours to building social skills? Similarly, partying is something that is often considered empty, but how important are loose nights for divesting someone of inhibitions, building memories, testing boundaries and getting the most out of youth?
Is sex a waste of time? It doesn’t really produce anything lasting, especially the one night stand variety, and if you start the day with it then good luck getting anything done. What about masturbation?
Another curious question is idleness and relaxation. Some things are pure laziness and other things legitimately constitute ‘recharging the batteries’, but what about those grey patches, like hours of pop culture absorption? Back to back seasons of The Office or Family Guy can be thoroughly enjoyable, but they aren’t very productive. Does their viewing constitute wasted time?
What most of these questions ask is whether pleasure is itself something worth pursuing, or whether activities need to produce some kind of lasting effect for them to be valuable. This question must be at the heart of any discussion of leisure for the 21st Century.
This brings to mind a TED talk forwarded to me on the remembering vs. the experiential self. The experiential self draws pleasure from the here and now, from the moment. Activities like partying, socialising and pop culture absorption appeal to this aspect of our psyche. The experiential self needs play. A life without play is an unsatisfied life.
By contrast, the remembering self is reflective. It considers what has been and whether or not that has left any meaningful lasting benefits. Participation in events like marathons appeals to the remembering self; the activity itself is gruelling, but the final elation and the lasting achievement are magic. This aspect of our psyche will appreciate those hobbies which produce lasting benefits, like volunteer work or open source programming.
A life well lived appeases both the experiential and remembering self. A life of perpetual party as espoused by KE$HA is shallow and phoney, and unsustainable. It is little wonder that so many of history’s great party animals end up joining the 27 club. Better to die young that grow old enough to realise how little you’ve actually done. You can’t party forever. At some point you are going to need to define yourself and live for something other than the moment.
On the flip side, a life constantly checking things off a list never allows you to enjoy the moment. If you’re constantly chasing the next goal, if the journey means everything and the destination nothing, and if you are never satisfied, then you’re bound to feel frequently depressed because you never enjoy the here and now. You never stop long enough to be proud of what you have achieved thus far. Alexander the Great seems to have been a great example of a person who achieved a great deal but remained unhappy because he never stopped long enough (or early enough) to take stock of his achievements. Despite ruling pretty much the entire known world at the time, he continued to have drunken rages and urge further conquests, getting to the point where he declared himself a God because that was all that was left. If he’d chilled out a little he may have lived to enjoy his achievements.
Time is priceless; waste it at your own peril. Try to do meaningful things wherever possible—and things that are meaningful to you specifically, don’t just jump on the local football club bandwagon. But if you’re anything like me just remember that sometimes you need to stop and smell the roses.
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