If an ancient Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter (hello, slavery). What he could have never imagined was the notion of buying the potter’s time. This is the paradox of our times (pun intended). Your time is no longer your own. It belongs to the company you intern at in the summer, the clubs you join, the greek chapter you are a part of, and any organization with which you identify (although, humans unattached to organizations exist too).
You also have no time. You are not supposed to read this because you are too busy. At Penn, we have scheduling fatigue and talk with friends via 30-minute Google Calendar blocks. Our Path@Penn is so crammed we lack time to digest and reflect on the very same material we are supposed to learn. Not only are we incapable of slowing down (we walk 10% faster in just the last decade) but if we do not make “productive” use of our time, we fear missing out, both on work (that internship) and socially (that party).
What we are missing out on is, in fact, ourselves. The notion that our time can demand something of us is illogical. What if we have it wrong? What if time is not something you can “use” nor consequently “waste?” What if time “just is”?
None of this is revolutionary. Seneca’s “De Brevitate Vitae" already taught us that we complain we do not have enough time in this world when, in fact, we do because time is abundant; we spend the majority of it doing fundamentally useless things, unaligned with our values. I would add that we spend so much time "doing" that it has become too expensive in minutes to ask why we do it. Seneca argues that everyone lets their life rush by, thinking only of tomorrow and getting bored of today. Yet spending life by planning it means to postpone it; waiting as the biggest obstacle to living. Focused on tomorrow, we are bound to miss today.
I cannot help but ask myself: How on earth did we get entangled in time, craving and extracting its utmost usefulness? I cannot presume to answer, but I can offer a profoundly simple observation: I was not like that as a child. What about you?
We live by mechanical time: Wake up at eight each morning, eat lunch at noon, exercise at five, and sleep at midnight. However, some live by body time, perhaps kids. They do not keep clocks. They eat when hunger tells them to eat, move when their body calls them to, and sleep when tired. Of course, kids have routines too, and my experience may not be universal. This is just a parable on two philosophies of time: chronos and kairos. The former is the time of clocks from seconds to years. It measures time. The latter is the time of living and experiencing. It measures moments. One is quantitative, the other is qualitative.
Physicist Alan Lightman introduced me to the idea that both exist, and are equally valuable philosophies in his profound book “In Praise of Wasting Time.” He, unsurprisingly, urges us to spend time doing absolutely nothing, free of a purpose, and to see this time in quiet reflection and mental replenishment not as what it is not, but what it is. We view it as time to consolidate our identity and values, restore our wellbeing, unleash our imaginations. Time to understand who we are and who we are becoming. When you see me sitting alone on a bench on Locust, I am not staring at the void: I am staring at myself, and it may well be the most important occupation of my mind.
Using your time productively may have gotten you into Penn, but I am not the first one to argue that because of how things work at elite colleges, once in, all you need to do (to a significant extent) is just show up. Therefore no, categorically no, before you counter, this is not slacking off or something for the privileged or the rich. Of course, you have circumstances and limitations. I cannot be naive (we are not children anymore, rough!), but is it not easy to use your ingenuity only when convenient? In other words, if you got into a prestigious university, do you seriously think you cannot find a way to explore or embrace this philosophy of ownership of time, whether fully breathing it or in your own way? I did, and I am far from special.
I unapologetically “wasted” my summer, if barely working or achieving internship goals and spending my days reading novels and thinking and staring at the ceiling counts as "wasting time." I have no successful or sceney achievement that qualifies by Penn’s performance definitions. Only reflections. Just a reminder that some of us are not building our resumes or networks but our minds. What happens is you realize time is not scarce, insight is. Access to ideas that stimulate you, teach you, make you breathe life. So if you really must maximize something, maximize insight, not time.
We went deaf. We lost silences. We lost the capacity to pay attention to others and to listen to our heartbeats. We are oblivious. We live by the rigidity of a clock rather than the simplicity of emotion. We are desperate for unscheduled time — free of a purpose — for a richer inner life, for a space that does not exist contingent on time. Thankfully we can do something about it, starting with letting time just be.
This is how some of us see the world. I am open to being wrong. Wasting time is not a panacea, but it has made me breathe life again. It permanently broke my understanding of time, and I suspect and hope it will do that to you too, if you only let it ….
FRANCESCO SALAMONE is a Wharton junior studying decision processes from Palermo, Italy. His email address is frasala@wharton.upenn.edu.
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