Abusing Time

Let's be a little more... philosophical today. I think I've been putting in borderline zero days that would embarrass the whole rationale for this sabbatical.

Time is the single most important resource that anyone has. It's not money, heck, it's not even health. It's time. With time, one can recover some health, one can make money. One can achieve many things, when there is enough time to do so.

Time is the mightiest of levellers---everyone is credited the same rate of time, no matter how rich, poor, famous, infamous, mundane, saintly, or asshole-y they are. It's always ``one second per second'', even under relativistic conditions. Time cannot be banked---one cannot simply ``store'' the seconds now to be expended at a future date instead. Time always carries on, whether one is ready or not.

The cornerstone of capital is the intellectual breakthrough of creating a shared mythology of how time may be banked. It sets up the consensus of an accounting mechanism that permits us to do the impossible, that is, to bank time in the form of so-called capital. It does so by first equating time to value through the transmutation process called labour. From this shared starting point, more and more complex accounting mechanisms that attempt to refine the quantification of time as capital builds upon it, which includes theories of accounting like banking, interest rates, lending, and the difference between money and economic value as expressed as capital.

Capital is basically the shared fantasy of people in the same way that the US dollar is valuable---they only have value only because enough people believe that they have value. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the use-value of anything, which is not exactly related to time at all, and should be considered a somewhat orthogonal concept. Use-values does not occupy a high proportion of what we commonly understand as the capital of world, surprisingly enough.

But I'm not here to argue about capital---go look at Marx's Capital for an introduction. I'm here to argue about how we should look at time, and how we should use time. Capital is only relevant here in the form of the man-made fantasy that time can be stored away for future use.

I say nay. Don't get fooled by that fantasy. That ten minutes spent in childhood is vastly different from the ten minutes spent as a working adult in terms of their perceived value, and the context in which they are drawn from, for instance, as a relative proportion of the total time of being alive at the point of use.

Since time is the mightiest of levellers, and is the only un-renewable (what is renewable in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics anyway?) resource, it also means that only activities that are scheduled or done are considered valuable. This means that if something is worth doing, time should always be made to do it; ``busy-ness'' is never an acceptable excuse. Paradoxically, this includes activities/events that do not seem to contribute to the fantasy of banked time in the form of capital, like rest, and recreational activities like hobbies, or just play, that do not directly contribute to the generation and storing of capital.

To me, if someone keeps complaining about being busy, I need to first ask myself if this person has control over his/her time scheduling. If no, it means whoever is doing the scheduling is basically a slave-driver by some other name, since the schedule owner is clearly more interested in contributing to the fantasy of ``banking'' time for the future via some other person's efforts than respecting the boundaries of the other person. If yes, it means that the person has a poor concept of what truly matters in life, and has probably over-allocated too much of his/her time on things that probably need not happen at that time.

Now, that is a very strong assertion no matter how one looks at it, and I agree; it sounds like something that only a person of privilege can say. But this early conclusion is drawn only because one assumes that I am making the strong assumption that everyone has agency of choice within the society to decide how they want to use their time. For some people, this is not possible, and to me, it is not necessarily a case where the reason is that these people are lazy or lousy; it could very well be that the society on a whole has believed too much of the shared fantasy, giving it way too much importance than it should.

I am not advocating a purely socialistic approach towards this. I am also not advocating a head-in-sand approach towards this neither. What I am saying is that part of the so-called degeneration of society that people like to complain about comes from the steady stripping away of humanity from human activities. Yes, I get it---if one lives in an urban society, the ``cost of living'' is high, and there is a need to work hard enough to make enough money to ``live'', and that everyone wants to have a good [material] life.

But that's a fantasy bet, isn't it? Spending all the time that one has working for a soul-less legal fiction that is the corporation to chase after imaginary fantasies of value that pretend that they can store time for future expenditure, for a future that they don't even know they can arrive in one piece and in good shape.

Isn't it better to spend some time fulfilling the cost that society demands of us, and then spending the other time doing things that keep us human, like relating to God, relating to other people, and also relating to ourselves? What's the point of being a human in a human society when one treats oneself like a cog in a machine through overwork?

I mean, I didn't make this shit up. Just go search for ``biggest regrets'' using your favourite search engine and start reading. Despite all the differences in the wording of the various top n lists, the fundamental principle is the same: ``I wish I had used my time on things that made being a human... a human''.

Time is the mightiest of levellers---there is no easy way of working with it, just because there will always be things that demand time from us. But are we not humans with free will? Shouldn't we treat ourselves a little nicer instead of working ourselves to death in the pursuit of a shared fantasy? Shouldn't we learn to be more human, before it becomes impossible to do so?

This COVID-19 pandemic nonsense is a blessing, not even in disguise, to those who survive it. It provides a pretext for one to really examine the world around them, where the lies that are put forth get tested (and shown to be lies), the truth is proven to be truth, and the real helpers start shining once again to remind us that it is important to not lose our humanity.

Some might think that my sabbatical is a waste of time, a blemish to my employment record since it shows a gap year that seemingly does nothing to my career. But I say, if a hiring manager/boss cannot understand why such a gap year is necessary, then it is likely to not be a place that I want to work at. I suppose I'd rather take the so-called indignity of doing an honest job at sustainable but low levels of pay over a high-paying job that requires me to sacrifice my humanity.

Life's too short to be chasing imaginary delusional ``awards'' that we give to ourselves to make it seem like we are doing the right thing spending our time totally on work and not anything else. That's why I generally refuse to take things that I do as a hobby to make them into so-called side-hustles---they are hobbies because they keep me human, and if I start to taint them with Mammon's grasp, in what way are they going to keep me human still?

Anyway, that's enough for now. Till the next update.