I’ve been thinking about time lately. I’m a year into a sabbatical (otherwise known as unemployment without much job hunting, or “intermittent retirement” in playful moments). Is this time off out of order? Shouldn’t I be waiting until I’m 68 to start fly fishing and spending the winters in Florida? The data suggests that would be a wiser way to take advantage of “prime earning years”. But there are other ways to see life’s seasons and rhythms, and we should be building a world that makes creative and supportive approaches to living possible.
Techno-futurists talk about a coming age of abundance. Just a few crypto-startup-bioengineering ventures away. That’s trash; we already live in an age of abundance, but that abundance is unevenly distributed. There are plenty of economists and Reaganites who would argue that uneven distributions are crucial for progress, innovation, motivation. That’s worse than trash: it’s self-serving radioactive waste. I won’t make this argument here, because wiser minds have already done strong work undoing the nonsenses of the priesthood of the wealthy (see Karl Polanyi and Kate Raworth).
One of the worst tragedies of the day is the failure to think creatively and openly about time. Even the recipients of uneven abundance tend to bury themselves in Taylorist and Protestant ideals; much of the accumulated capital goes unspent but time-wealth possibilities are not only squandered but proactively undone; Mary Harrington writes wisely about some of modernity’s broken attitudes about time.
What can we do about it? Perhaps the time-privileged could unlearn some of their overachieving optimization impulses (as I’m trying to do lately). But this is not a mutuality-oriented solution to our society-wide problem (it does exist, Margaret). It’s easy to score political points by talking about personal responsibility and freedom. But it’s crucial to have streets and drinkable water and laws. Societies ought to be judged by their infrastructure, fairness, and yes, individual choice availability. Time might become a component of society’s underlying framework. Imagine a world in which parents got ten years of paid parental leave. So many options for early childhood home schooling and family time could become available (eat your hearts out, family-values-types). Imagine a world where everyone could take a year off every five years to do whatever feels right. A world where nine to five becomes ten to one, three days a week. That’s an optimization problem we could economize for, if our obsession with growth and capital accumulation and winning the game could come a few stories down the values tower. Let’s make the time to figure it out, there’s plenty.