On the Passage of Time
A philosophical exploration with some practical advice on how to spend our time
The Saturday Brunch: a figurative flat white or fizzy to start your weekend
I’ll be starting to highlight some wonderful thinkers, writers, and artists in this publication. This week’s Saturday Brunch comes from Vlad Gogish with whom I’ve collaborated previously through his Idea Salon publication. He writes on a diversity of subjects and you can subscribe on Medium to receive his new articles.
Vlad tells us: “As a consultant, I advise my clients about human capital issues that shape business . As an author, I write about ideas that shape the world.”
Time is something that’s fascinated me in many ways. Once I start thinking about it, I got lost in thought. Heidegger’s Being and Time and Hawking’s A Brief History of Time blow my mind. Here are a few other long reads.
Vlad’s writing today brings up some deep philosophical ideas while simultaneously offering practical advice for our own approaches to time.
They say two things in life are certain—taxes and death. Implied here is that time is a certainty as well. Thanatos or the tax man may not arrive today or tomorrow, but at some point life leads to them both. And this raises yet another foundational question: what is time?
In some ways, it is a human construct: the earth spins regardless of whether people note that a day has passed. In other ways, it is a natural phenomenon, as can be seen by the rings of a tree or carbon dating. It is indefinite (time has neither a beginning nor an end) and relative (as we live each moment in the present, we experience it in the context of our past and concerns about the future).
How should we think about time in a practical way, when it appears so abstract, theoretical, and fleeting?
One way is to consider its opportunity cost. When one does something, another thing goes undone. If you are working, you are not spending time with your family in that moment, and vice versa. While the idea that there is a tradeoff to any choice can be paralyzing at first, it is actually quite liberating. Rather than worrying about whether we are spending time in the best possible way, we can focus on our task at hand knowing that activities that wait for us can have their day. This approach makes us more intentional about how we plan and spend our time. Tradeoffs force discipline and clarity.
Another consideration is the ownership and control of time, and its quality and quantity. Everyone wishes for more time, presumably to spend in ways that would satisfy them. Aside from very few, most people have to trade their free time (and their control of it) to employers for an hourly wage or salary. This trade needs to be reassessed periodically. We owe it to ourselves, our dependents, and even our employers to ask whether our jobs are our highest and best use. Being miserable causes suffering in the moment but also prevents us from using our time better.
We should take note of time, but in a balanced and somewhat disinterested way. It is best not to dwell on regrets about the past or worries about the future. The present moment must be experienced. If not enjoyed, then accepted. That does not mean resignation to one’s fate or a lack of trying to better one’s circumstances. But it does mean that if we are experiencing difficulty, simply waiting for it to stop or hope for an abstract future is not constructive. It is only when we fully acknowledge the present that we can make better choices about the future and have a balanced view of the past.
By what unit do we measure time? The hour? The week? The year? At what point do we stop a pursuit after we have spent too much time on it without the right results?
Just like time itself, the answer is also relative, vis-a-vis the past and the future. The time horizon for life-changing choices such as pursuing higher education or raising children is in years, if not decades. Living life and learning from the success and failures is what the good life is all about. If one commits to a course of study or the awesome responsibility of raising a family, success must be measured over the long term. This is because mistakes and obstacles are certain, and time needs to pass for us to learn from them and succeed where we had originally failed. Measuring time too quickly, or expecting results to come too easily is a recipe for giving up, and therefore failure.
As the seasons change, time’s passage is on full display. Each leaf falling from a tree in the autumn or the new blade of grass in the spring bears testimony to the universal laws of nature. It is in observing these phenomena that one feels in some ways like a very insignificant particle in an endless universe.
But, this feeling must not be mistaken for hopelessness. The natural limitation on life means that we must give each day meaning, and make choices that we can look back on with pride. Birth and death are certain, but how we spend the time in-between is up to us. That, in the end, is the beauty of being on this earth.
Vlad Gogish is a guest writer for this Saturday Brunch edition of The Matterhorn. Please tell us what you think and join our mailing list if you’re not already a subscriber.
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