AHHHHbout Time
TL;DR: I was freaking out when I wrote this and didn’t have the heart to edit out the insanity. I think it adds to it. I wrote this while reading ‘Saving Time’ by Jenny Odell.
Disclaimer: I have this problem where every time I drink coffee - even if it’s just one cup - I absolutely freak out. People think I’m exaggerating when I say this but I have had to leave cafes to go cry in the bathroom - for absolutely no reason - because caffeine makes me get really sad sometimes and I’m overcome by what I can only describe as despair. No other food/beverage has this effect on me - not even alcohol or harder drugs.
The question then, clearly, is why I still drink coffee. The fact is that I usually don’t - but sometimes enough time will pass that I’ll be like, it can’t be that bad, it’s just coffee and essentially gaslight myself into trying it again. I’ll get some fun coffee drink at some cute little cafe and then I will become either manic, anxious or incredibly morose. This happened to me a few days ago at The Brown Table. This is the essay I wrote while in this caffeinated state.
If we remove this intermediary of third spaces - the society wide panic for them - what lies underneath?
If I remove all the intermediaries for connection from my life - movies that make it sound like people are in the room, that let you simulate having a social life, looking at people’s faces without actually having to offer up anything of your own - instagram too - a connection that demands nothing from you, not even real recognition, really knowing them - then what happens? How lonely is your life, actually?
AHHHHHHH. Books too I guess. Any artefact - any form of media that eats your time and at the same time carries the human voice, the human soul in some atrophied, alien form, that doesn’t need them to actually be there with you, to actually interact with you.
I used to wonder - what’s the point of meeting a celebrity? You get everything you love from them in their work - that’s why they are a celebrity. What will I get in this personal interaction that I cannot get from your work.
Jensen Huang in his talk in Mumbai that I attended in October said he feeds papers into ChatGPT and reverse engineers the person from their work, to chat with them. We are encased in our entirety it would seem, in our work - fully derivable. Anybody can have you, if you give them a little bit of your work.
That's why I want to write right? To leave myself behind, to spread myself around to connect with other people. The personal scale of connection - that’s terrifying, that’s limited and therefore more important to get right - you can’t scatter your seeds and hope for the best. Every bad date is catastrophic - it is in a limited set of the people you can connect with.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Being around people - that’s what we crave. We have so many intermediaries for it. For witness. God as witness, creation as a way of dispersing the witness outside of your limited physicality and time. Marriage as an institution to assure witness. Love - we crave it so much because it is witnessing, in its most pure form.
The way we work. We can't always get people to care about what we care about at work - despite HR pushing ideals and culture and mission. So get to use the proxy of money - I’ll pay you to put your time and effort into this - into playacting care for this.
What if we didn't have this? If we had to say, please help me with this - for no reward? Please dedicate your time to this thing I want to build? It would be terrifying. It would be impossible - an impossible standard for creation in the world.
Money - the ability to employ people, to pay for their time - it lowers the bar for creation. Technology lowers the bar for creation. Social media lowers the bar for self expression through creation.
The more we encourage creation, the more we encourage the reproduction of the self in an alien medium - writing, video, picture - we can’t help but express ourselves - every single time we do that, we enable connection but we also diminish physical, in person, 1:1 connection - the real, hard fucking work of finding physical people around you and spending enough time with them, being patient enough with their cycles and times and everything else they bring - to connect, really.
What is the value of one real friendship versus many many fans? Fans are not your friends. Content creators are not your friends, they are a facsimile for connection that requires next to nothing from you. The time they require from you too - it's empty time, time that is eaten, eaten up, destroyed. Not time that creates but time that destroys. They are an opioid, an easy substitute for the real thing.
Imagine if you had to find a singer to find music. Not a CD, not one person singing to a million. But for every person to have music, they must find a singer - 10 if they want 10 different songs. The scale of search, for connection. The amazing virtuoso you find - the witness you have to provide to them to give it meaning. The intent you need to bring if you were in a village and hearing AR Rehman for the first time - knowing that in his life, only 100 people might hear him overall. In this thought experiment, he doesn’t have technology to allow the reproduction of his expression in an alien form - in any media essentially. He can’t reach more people - can only sing in person. What would you do to value him, to value this talent that has fallen into your lap? What do we do with him now?
I’m not saying this is bad, we go back - or I am saying it is bad but that we can’t go back, that’s impossible.
But I’m trying to imagine a world before this anyway to understand what we’ve lost, what we could have found there. If I couldn’t publish this - if I had to meet a friend and say this to them. How I would be so much more desperate for a friend, one who understands. Here, it lives outside of me - if not now, I feel somewhat that somewhere, some time it will find an audience. It eases the loneliness, the immediacy of a thought you want to express. But should it? Should we be desperate to express ourselves to a specific other?
Maybe artists make the worst lovers.They know they can find love - connection, audience, witness - elsewhere. Maybe that's why we have all become bad at love. We don’t yearn for love because we don't yearn for witness as much. We have witnesses already, at our finger tips - or at least a way of preserving ourselves in media that can later be discovered and witnessed.
AHHHHHHHHH.
We have solved for the scarcity of time. We have! We have defied death and didn’t even notice it. And It’s so fucking scary. I’m freaking the fuck out. Is it this book or is it my coffee or is it two mornings ago when I wanted to sleep and was negotiating 15 minutes from myself and felt what life is this - where I am so regimented? And I am the least regimented I have ever been - barely regimented compared to most of the world. I still feel it. I feel guilty looking at a cat navigate climbing a tree - impatiently witnessing it decide which direction to go next - up or down and if so, how.
I measure my time at this coffee shop by how much of the food I have left to consume - proportionality of what I have spent: 700 bucks - to how much time I can take up in this space without being a free loader. It's not wrong - that’s the social contract. But it is terrifying. This is one of the reasons I love writing from home - I don’t feel there I am not taking anybody's time.
In public - even at work, in any kind of public - I feel this immense pressure to account for myself. What I’m doing, why I’m here, how much space and time I am taking up. Why so self conscious? Maybe everyone feels this at some level but the immense way in which I feel it just makes it easier for me to express.
In writing about love I find my favourite writing always says - all we have to give is attention. All we have to give is time. That unmixed attention is devotion. But doesn’t that come from the same school of thought that sees us as personified labor time? Sees us as vessels containing time that we spend at our discretion. Time as personal property that we exchange.
But what else do we have to give? AHHHHHHHHHH.
Jenny Odell calls it a chronophage - something that EATS time. AHHHHH.
Rumination eats time and intensifies our experience of it. Is it also like media - an alternative to experience. Maybe life should be light, maybe we SHOULD be losing it even as we gain it. Maybe that’s the antidote to the private property idea of time - something that’s mine to keep.
Maybe the problem is thinking of memory as MINE, something I don’t want to lose - why should I lose this too? Don’t I pervert you by preserving you in memory - an alien medium - am I not encroaching on your freedom by storing you away - just like reverse engineering you from your work? On the drive over here, imaging a conversation with an ex-boyfriend, prepare a defense in case he recognises the memory I’m using as the basis of an anecdote in my book.
And telling him in my imaginary defence - the memory is stripped of personal details. This moment belongs as much to me as it does to you. Who does a memory belong to at the end of the day? Of course our fingerprints are all over how we think about time, memories, the world - you shaped my conception of love, duh.
I want to take a break but in my frenzy I have deleted all the social media off my phone.
Instagram - you are self reporting, you are accounting for your own time, giving the report for it. Making it productive, making it work for you. Live out loud, in public, they advise. Increase the surface area of luck, how people can find you.
But isn’t it another way of making time dense with value - with more work - the pillars of capitalism and productivity.
But then again - love with connection - making time more dense with value. AHHHH. Absolves you from finding more value, more time that takes on that characteristic.
School time is training for factory time - people have said this before. A capitalist informing of time basically. Hard work, unceasing work that you show up for; discipline and punctuality as virtues. Who does that benefit? The characteristics of a good worker.
The fiscal quarter. The work week. Meal times - eating three predefined times in a day, not just whenever you are hungry - that fits into the clock, the schedule - the offshoot of the clock, its necessary accompaniment.
Romance in the workplace, in the school system. In the margins of productivity. From Severance: the best way to keep someone imprisoned is to give them the impression they are free. Free to find love and meaning and good times in the constraints of work.
Is ‘The Office’ any different from ‘Severance’? They both contextualise the person as a worker first - our own conception of ourselves too - as workers first? How are the colors of ‘The Office’, the setting so different from ‘Severance’ - it’s on the same scale, just minimalised for maximal effect. Bad workers are still workers first - before anything else, like humans for example.
The panopticon nature of a documentary - the way that’s normalised in ‘Parks and rec’, ‘The Office’ - get you used to surveillance in the workplace, the benevolent nature of it. That’s why when we heard the FBI agent was watching us through our laptops we made these memes - assuming the panopticon eye was benevolent, was kind, was humorous and loving even. Falling in love with our jailkeeper - almost like Stockholm syndrome.
Manu Pillai, in his talk in January, made me think of ‘The weapons of the weak’ - how the disenfranchised fight back in small ways. Mockery, culture, little disobedience. Now I think, ultimately completely useless, just a way for the powerful to reverse the narrative, to create these infrastructures of trust - AKA distrust - that further surveil, that show us time theft, mockery, false identities as the reasoning behind a heavier hand, more Taylorism, a YC company that tells you worker 4 on line 17 is slacking.
And we start surveilling ourselves on social media - too many people blogged about a day in the life of working at Google and then Google was like fuck this and fired a bunch of them. Good job guys. Workers always knew how much time their work took - Taylor complained. He worked to tell employers the standards - so they could affect those changes, implement those standards.
Worker solidarity today - how to automate your work, earn more for doing less - you idiots, you're telling on your ingroup, in no time, the arbitrage disappears and suddenly your job is automated, reduced. The owner knows - you told them while making a reel for a few seconds of attention, some likes that mean absolutely nothing.
How nauseous I feel, reading the whole passage on gamification of the workplace. I can’t believe I went from writing papers in college about Taylorism to enthusiastically doing time tests at work and benefitting in every textbook Taylorism way. But that’s the capitalist equation - labour, capital, resources are all inputs. If you’re playing the game, you’re optimising the equation. Playing the game and then doing it badly seems - silly?
It’s insidious. Me in Istanbul last year - looking at the monument, hearing from the guide how quickly it was built and wondering - how did they project manage this whole thing? That must signal some kind of atrophy of the soul right?
If the analogy of spending time is suspect - from the root of time as money - then is saving time - in the memory bank, not through hacks - also related to the momentary nature of time?
The West always looks to the East for answers - the colonised who live in the west particularly and we, in the East, we look to the past. Maybe all the answers are in the Eastern past - the least studied/documented time, simply because we don't know it enough to say no actually, they had these problems too. Maybe we always had these problems - not time emergent.
The colonial writing Odell quotes: “We have left time and been launched into eternity” - maybe without christianity, without the timekeeping invented by the monasteries, St. Augustine wouldn’t have needed his christian god to find eternity - it would have been found in the unstructured nature of time itself.
But sorry - the creation and destruction of the sunrise and sunset. Time has always reminded us of its passage - has always slipped, has always marked itself in regular -ish intervals. We simply helped it along on the journey, made it more accurate and precise.
“Keep the trains running” - the role I see of the CEO. And that’s imposing regularity on the irregular nature of time. To keep things the same - the most impossible tasks of them all.
Craft as a celebration of irregularities and yet valued as labour time. Time as the input, labour hours as the input. How many hours of this poor man/woman's life are you buying? So commensurable. What about beauty? Harder to make commensurable - it lies in the eyes of the beholder, needs to be experienced. You can't force it, speed it up. Transmit it. Proxies exist of course.
We are all workers with nothing but labour time to sell.
Pomodoro method - is simply being made aware of time, its smallest pieces. Time blindness is seen in contrast as a disability. My sign, which Vishal gave me as a gift: ‘Shh…I’m daydreaming.’ The privilege of escaping time - only the boss would have it - even as the boss I would feel guilty having it. Stealing time - from whom? An indiscipline around time.
The tools I used to get over my time blindness - calendars and reminders and alarms. Marching to the rhythm of the day.
Daydreaming as a dreamer - artist. Or as an ideas man - the CEO, the boss. The only way out of this system is to make it to the top. The only way out is to the top. Enforce it on others - to escape it. A perfect, self perpetuating system.
Odell gives us the example of this man, writing in his journal: “In their writing, he takes on the role of god as admonition and for himself as sinner. Inhabiting confession and rebuke,” Witness brings with it judgement - god is a proxy for doing it for yourself too. Witness brings with it the judgement that implies morality - without SELF CONSCIOUSNESS we would not be able to catch ourselves sinning, wasting - like children. We would need policing from the outside - assumes we need policing from SOMEWHERE - within or without. Obviously, policing from within is more efficient.
Culture enforces self consciousness as a way to police from within. Asks us to witness from within - through god, or love (they judge us by market principles - like Big and Carrie in SATC - he likes her but is embarrassed by her, he incentives her to conform so he can confer his love to her, and she does, somewhat, eventually) or through ourselves - CHARACTER - that thing we develop from learning, discipline, punctuality, all of it.
Punctuality = temporal discipline.
Efficiency = Disciplinary pacing.
Productivity and policing are indistinguishable.
Children - we see policing them as protecting them from harm, as a form of care. We’re not entirely wrong. But but but, to what degree. How much of it is necessary?
Paradise lost - the human unobserved, left to their own devices, how would we act? Still we see the emergence of consciousness, of self reflection, we can’t escape that.
Only the rich can waste time - they have earnt it. FIRE - earn the right to waste time, to live life the way you want ot. Earnt leaves. Earnt leisure. AHHHHHHH.
Odell writes bout first order desires - what you want - and second order desires - what you WANT to want. The divided heart. What we all want, dream of: a heart that can be trusted - to want what is good for itself. The opposite of which is the divine madness you’re struck by when you’re in love - the thing I long for, knowing I don’t have it. That I have learnt well the lesson of boundaries, of “GOOD” love - of respect within love. That’s good, that’s good, it prevents hurt. But is minimising pain the goal of life? OR getting what you want? But then - what do you want - the first order or the second? How in tune are you with your higher self - your long term self or your soul - these constructs of spirituality.
The first order being policed by the second order - which, if any, are constructed. First order by short term temptations - the senses, the animal, base parts of ourselves. Or the Second order - the soul, elevated, but also the policing part of ourselves, the culture created part we must learn/attain/realise/reach for?
If it were natural - why would it be so hard? - both sides argue.
The first order - hard because it's hard to satisfy, hard to hold onto. Temporary nature of things.
The second order - hard to want, hard to tap into, not intuitive, not ‘medium is the message’ (the medium of life being our body - our physicality). Longer, protects you from pain. Tell you to change your mind so you have nothing to lose.
What is life with nothing to lose?