Wasting Time?
The beauty and the pain of contemplating time
I’m typing, yet, another entry. Typing words in an electronic format with a keyboard. Words are ephemeral, not like I was painting on a canvas or carving a sculpture in stone. Electronic words, even more temporary, not destined for a public library or a printed book. It won’t be long until my typed words are obliterated with no evidence they ever existed.
To make matters worse, my cat keeps scratching on my leg. I think she’s wanting outside. Now she’s walking on the computer table and pushing items off the desktop and onto the floor, a stapler, pencils, anything not locked down. With each item launched she looks in my direction, a demand, “let’s go.” I could use this time to take her out. Am I wasting time?
What to do? How to feel? There is no easy way. Time is ticking.
We all do this. Contemplate time.
Time is personal, but also public. Who’s to judge about what is time waste.
“Time,” at least as most people conceive it, is a perishable and diminishing commodity, not to use it is to loose it. You can say “I’m saving time,” when you do something faster or better, but this is more or less a re-distribution of time. We can waste it by playing videogames or mindlessly watching TV, but is this really a total waste of time? Because, if you don’t do something with it, time passes anyway. In fact, when you are bored, you perceive that you have too much time to spend. So, you might say, “Dr., I’ve got too much time on my hands?”
Who invented time?
God invented time. Really? I use God, here, as a metaphor. It’s just another way of saying that time existed before you or I were born. People did, it seems, invent the counting and tracking of time, just like we invented the counting and tracking of commodities, and ultimately, money. Because time and money are both abstract concepts that can easily be quantified and counted. No matter, because if we invented time, we invented it within a time-referenced system.
Time, Does it have a beginning? Who knows? They say time begins when we are born. That’s no different than saying time began as soon as we became aware of it. Time ends when we die, but that’s not the case because other people keep on living and counting time after we die. Once again, when we die we lose awareness of time, at least on a linear scale like we know it while we are alive. In death, we simply leave this time-referenced system. So birth and death are not the ultimate beginning and ending of time, this is just the beginning and end of our awareness of it and, while we are living in this system that calculates time and things.
I could go on endlessly with these kinds of Socratic questions, but where would they lead? Even reading this blog could be construed as a waste of time. So, why write it and why read it?
Because - and this is a big “because” - We want to. I want to write this blog, and you want to read it. In fact, this is what time is: Time = “a temporary space of conscious awareness for doing what you want to do.”
Of course, this is not the definitive definition of time, but it is certainly a big part of what time is, a sort of holding space with a beginning and an end point that allows us to act how we want to act.
In my generation (persons between the ages of 50 and 70 years), we put high value on a certain kind of acting. This kind of acting was defined as work.
Work Defined: “An activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” A secondary definition is: “A task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to (or must) do.”
I was taught that the most valuable way to spend your time (or to act) was to work. Work is good, play is bad. Therefore, I learned a work ethic. Industriousness.
Everything “good” is subordinated under “Work.” Work is a symbol of self-reliance. Work is the distinguishing characteristic from childhood dependency to becoming an independent adult. “Make your own way,” no one is entitled to freeload through life. When you work, you earn money, as you accumulate and spend money you have a livelihood. When you are sick, you are dependent, you are weak. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Stop acting like a baby. The song, “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.” Mantras of my age. I’m industriousness personified. When I contemplate “time” it gets tangled up in the concept of “work.”
To be sure, there are grand examples of people with seemingly boundless and endless focused energy for work. Examples of people who do extraordinary things in almost every field of endeavor: The arts, sciences, the professions, academics. We build monuments to industrious people. These are our social heroes. There are also time efficiency experts. People who seemingly never waste time. We admire these people. We put ourselves down because we can’t live up to these role models.
I recall when I was an undergraduate, 21 years old, at Brigham Young University. I believed (back then) I was where God wanted me to be (getting a degree at BYU). This was not a metaphor, but a “real” God, a White, Elderly Man dressed in a White robe. I was in God’s domain, BYU, the “Emerald City.” But, it was not an “Emerald City” without strings attached.
That’s always been the problem with Mormonism, at least for me. There were always strings attached. If Jesus was a God, OK, but he was also “a hard-ass taskmaster.”
One string was that, “you never waste time.” What did this mean, not to waste time, within Mormonism. At one level it was to pray, read the scriptures, attend church, excel in academics, control every dark or sinful urge. You are a child of God, special. “So, actualize your specialness.” Reach towards perfection and all that perfection entails. I think this is why the “True Believer” always has that myopic look.
Not only did I believe that every step should be forward, but it also had to be upward. The bigger and higher the step, the better, (by my reckoning). When I started my education, I wasn’t sure about my major, but I new I must decide quickly and get on with it. Eventually, I decided, Geology. Why? Because my Mission President was a Geologist. I started taking courses, and failing courses. I wasn’t interested in Geology. But at the time, I didn’t view my lack of interest as interest, but “sin.” I was a sinner because I was failing my classes. I was failing my classes because I wasn’t working hard enough. It wasn’t until a whole year had passed that I realized that I wasn’t succeeding in this major because I didn’t like what I was studying, couldn’t relate to it.
My life got complicated, in part, because I was so determined to carve that perfect 45 degree upward diagonal line from where I was to what I was “supposed” to be that it was making me miserable. I was, in a way, “wasting time” by doing something, (and working very hard at it), without really wanting to do it.
I present another brief look into my own past because while I was engaged in striving, pushing, and punishing myself, I was never relaxed or content. I was in a continuous state of anxious restlessness. I had acquired the skill of setting unrealistic expectations. I avoided thinking too deeply or too long (wasting time) about what I was doing. Instead, I was constantly “doing” driving myself for something bigger and better, and I couldn’t stop. I was constantly under the impression that I was wasting time even when I wasn’t sure where I was going. I found myself comparing myself to everyone or anyone with the idea that I must achieve more and more. Another’s sense of success, was my feeling of failure because I “wasn’t measuring up.”
Problematic Thinking and Wasting Time
To “waste time” has a number of inherent contradictions. For example, what is the opposite of “wasting time?”
If you ask someone what it means not to waste time, you will get a whole range of answers. I have a comments section below, just take a minute or two and list what you think it means to “not waste time.”
Stay on task
Complete an activity
Work towards your goals
Improve yourself
Make someone else happy (my cat)
Get something done
I typed into Google, “not wasting time” and here is the answer I got:
Avoid wasting time by just starting a project or task you have been putting off. If you do not feel like doing your scheduled workout, just start by at least committing to 10 minutes. You may find that you feel better once you start exercising and this may lead you to do a longer workout. Dec 17, 2021
“Google help” also added this picture to drive their point home. “Wasting Time”
Where did this definition come from? What is the meaning of this suggestion? What are the implications of following this suggestion? What does this question tell you about how “google” defines time and its usage or “wasting time?”
The first thing that comes to my mind when I read this suggestion is to ask, Why has this person been putting off something they are currently not doing? Maybe there is a good reason. A second question is: What is the person doing right now? I guess the assumption is that whatever you are doing right now instead of the task you are putting off is more valuable to you than the task you are putting off?
If I was writing a self-help book, I could fill pages quickly by making of a list of activities to get you to do something you don’t want to do. We have all kinds of ideas and tricks about how to motivate a person to do something that they don’t want to do (like physical exercise). The thornier issue is trying to discover what internally motivates a person. What it is that a person really wants to do, and Why.
But, wasting time gets more complicated, I think, than simply saying: “If I only do what I want to do I will never waste time.” So, I’m not arguing for this position either.
Another critical feature to understand about “wasting time” is what the meaning of the word, “waste” is?
Waste defined: 1. (verb), waste time. To use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose. 2. (adjective) waste paper. (Of a material, substance, or byproduct) eliminated or discarded as no longer useful or required after the completion of a process.
The term, waste, is socially determined. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. So, clearly, what we think of when we think of “waste” is idiosyncratic. Someone might believe that “thinking” is a waste of time. You just need to start doing something, even if you do it for only 10 minutes a day. Obviously, thinking about exercising doesn’t really help exercise your body. So thinking about exercising could be construed in some circles as a waste of time.
This gets into a larger issue of what it means when you feel like you are wasting time. In my practice I encounter this topic constantly, but it doesn’t always come in the form of wasting time. It has a number of variants:
Dr., I can’t focus.
Dr. I can never finish a task.
Dr. I can’t attend to anything for any length of time.
Dr. Do you think I could have ADHD?
Dr. I’m doing nothing with my life.
All I do is satisfy my own needs, eating, watching TV, I have too much time on my hands.
Dr. My anxiety, depression, phobia is linked to the fact that something is wrong with me. I can’t think about myself or my behaviors without thinking that something is wrong with me.
Dr. I’m bored and lost. I have no purpose for living.
I hear this so frequently and with such intensity that I’ve started to wonder if there is something larger to these complaints. Do all these complaints have something to do with the person’s relationship to their perception of time passing?
I am publishing this entry at this point, and will add to it as time passes March 6, 2022