"Time won't give me time …" goes my favorite Culture Club song. Now does that not capture so much of how we often feel about our lives? We never have time for anything nowadays do we? Days go by so quickly now and to-do lists are ever longer and stress inducing. We are always chiding ourselves on how unproductive we are and absorb ourselves in the ever larger host of books on self-helf and productivity hacks in search of answers. In today's world, rest is something of a dirty word. A day in which we simply went to the park for a long walk then sat in a cafe watching people go by is seen as a day wasted. There are more productive things to do. There are targets to meet, goals to achieve, people to network with, and social media profiles to grow.
I often wonder if our increasingly manic obsession with productivity is a byproduct of our difficult relationship with time. We want to be productive for the same reason a starting pitcher wants to leave it all out there in game seven of the World Series. There is no second chance, no do-over, no try again. We have one life after all and we make every attempt to squeeze the very most out of it. We obsess over productivity because we know that our time is short. This attitude is an admission of our own mortality and an attempt to cope with the dark truth that we will one day perish. Our desire to be as productive as possible derives from our enmity with time, which we see as dragging us by the collar closer and closer to the grave with each movement of the clock.
How we manifest the desire to be as productive as possible varies but we are all ultimately prisoners of an innate desire to squeeze the most out of life before our cruel friend time passes its verdict. Some of us wish to ensure we scale as high as possible in the corporate ladder and measure our having lived a productive life on those terms. Others measure it in money. Others will base it on the number of books and articles they wrote or the number of patents to their name. Still others will base it on other things. The point is, we all want to believe we are living the most productive life we can. Most of us will live lives that are more busy than truly productive. There is a difference between those terms but ultimately the goal is the same. None of us want to feel like our lives were wasted.
Time tortures us in a way that nothing else can. It slowly ticks away, constantly announcing to us our impending appointment with death but without the certainty of telling exactly when it will arrive. As the clock slowly moves we feel the increasing pressure to squeeze in as many accomplishments as possible. We know time is unforgiving and that a moment gone is a moment gone, never to be recovered. We feel as if we cannot let time get the last laugh. And so, sleep becomes the enemy, bird watching becomes the enemy, a bubble bath becomes the enemy, even art becomes the enemy. Anything that gets in the way of the goal, whatever it may be, is the enemy. They are allies of time and time is unforgiving and cruel right? They are in the way of the almighty legacy.
So what is a legacy? A legacy is what we call our attempt at some form or other immortality. It is our attempt to win a victory of sorts over time itself. We try to live on through our accomplishments knowing that our bodies will naturally pass away. We cannot truly accept death and the general finality of life so we hope that our having done something productive in this world will allow us to live on somehow, if only through the words and thoughts of others. I've heard it referred to as a kind of counterfeit immortality and I must say that I concur with such an assessment. Our desire for a legacy is also a desire to triumph over time somehow, someway. Is it wrong to desire this? No. Is it a desire that we can reasonably expect to be fulfilled? Also no. And yet it is probably worth striving for. There is something noble in wanting to achieve something special that will endure after one's death even if only for the selfish aspiration of victory over time.
All this begs another question. Is time really an enemy? I would submit that it is not. My explanation for this reasoning may be a little convoluted but please bear with me. Imagine if we had no concept of time. This would imply one of two things. We would be immortal and have no need to quantify and segment time into days, weeks, months etc. Alternatively, we could be blissfully ignorant about our mortality and therefore see no need to quantify and segment time. In either case, we would have no notion of how much time we have left to live and how much time we have already lost. In the first scenario, this idea is irrelevant and in the second we fail to see that it is relevant. Of course, here in our world, we do have a concept of time and we understand our own time being alive to be finite. Therefore, we preoccupy ourselves with the idea that we have less time than we did a day or a week ago to do and achieve the things we want to, to be productive, whatever meaning each individual assigns to that word.
Having presented all this I now make the following point. If we were immortal or simply thought ourselves to be, what incentive would there be to not procrastinate indefinitely on our goals? After all, we would only have an eternity to revisit them according to our conceit right? Having a concept of time, that is to say reconciling ourselves with our own mortality forces us to keep ourselves in check. We know that we will not exist forever and so we feel that motivation to do everything in our power to ensure that we live the most productive life possible. If time was the enemy it would not push us to such a noble pursuit. If time was the enemy we would have no notion of how far we have come and how far we can still go. Of course, this also means we have a notion of how much time we have wasted and this is why we develop such an adversarial relationship with time. Yet in the end, time is neither a friend nor an enemy, simply a reporter, a mirror held up onto ourselves that allows us to see what we have made of our lives.
No, time is not my enemy nor is it yours. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with pushing oneself to be as productive as possible. Just be mindful of what that word comes to mean in your world. Busy and productive are two different things. Also, some things that we call wasting time are really quite productive. A walk in the park, acting like toddlers with your spouse and rediscovering the concept of fun, actually enjoying a meal rather than wolfing it down or simply thinking can go much further towards a life worth living than marathon sessions in front of a computer. Productivity should mean building a life on one's own terms with as few regrets as possible. It is not a performance indicator or a dollar amount, it is feeling increasingly more satisfied with what you are making of each day that remains.
Three days have passed since I began work on this piece. I am three days or so further from birth and closer to death. This thought is slightly uncomfortable but I believe the time spent on this piece was time well spent. If anyone derives some value from this then that further reinforces my belief. In any case, this was an interesting exploration of something that I had been thinking of for some time. It was a productive endeavor because I wanted to do it and because the hours spent on this article were spent living life on my own terms creating something out of nothing. There is no need for unhealthy, panic strikes obsession because time may be running out. There just needs to be a firm certainty that the time is being well spent and there will be no need to try and wage an imaginary war with time.
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