The No-Time Problem

It’s not often you find a book review turning out to be a great article in itself even as it says the book itself is average! But that’s exactly what Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow managed to do in her review of Judy Wajcman’s book, Pressed for Time.

The theme of the book is about the “crazy busy” lives most of us feel we lead, what Tuhus-Dubrow describes as:

“What changed? Was it just that then I was a kid, and now I have a kid? Time no longer seems unlimited: then I had possibilities; now I have responsibilities.”

Of course, if we are perfectly honest about it, she reminds us that we should check whether we really had more time back then or whether we are “just misremembering it all through a haze of nostalgia”. Or if:

“When we complain about how busy we are, it may be sincere, but it is also a kind of humblebrag.”

(Humblebrag. I love that word. I’d never heard it until then but its meaning is so obvious, isn’t it?)

Some of the contributing factors to this feeling include “hyper-globalization” (“The 9-to-5 office…has given way to irregular hours, extended hours, working from home and so on”) and the “over-scheduled child” we ferry around. Even household gadgets like washing machines and dish washers haven’t freed up our time because as the book says, “(the) appliances are being used to increase output rather than to reduce the time spent on housework.” It’s a zero-sum game! And the always connected gadgets create their own expectations:

“With the advent of e-mail, texting and social media, our expectations of response time changes. Because it is possible to communicate instantaneously, we expect immediate responses.”

Of course, as Wajcman says, the Internet and the smartphone can be (and are) used to do personal work during office hours and the teenager at the dining table is “now able to concurrently experience family time and time with friends” (If you rolled your eyes at that one, I’m with you, but that just means we are both old!). So it depends on how we use these gadgets. Then again, as Tuhus-Dubrow says:

“Social-media sites are operated by corporations that stand to profit from our addictions to them.”

I think Tuhus-Dubrow nails it when she says that:

“We have…more people, more books, more cultural products of every kind, in addition to the staggering volume of online content. We feel ever more acutely the mismatch between available time and all the possible ways we could spend it.”

Tuhus-Dubrow’s had some (almost) philosophical lines on the topic:

“And yet, despite the ostensible constant novelty—new information, new communication, new techno-toys—there is a numbing sameness to the experience of daily life for many of us. Too much of life is spent in the same essential way: clicking and typing and scrolling, liking and tweeting, assimilating the latest horrors from the news. And this relates back to the speed of time’s passage. True experiential variety, the social scientists tell us, is what gives life the feeling of passing more slowly—getting out of our routines, having adventures. It’s when the days pass by in a barely distinguishable blur that we look back and think, “Where did the time go?””

Alex Balk summarized all of the above to a tweet length soundbyte: “Click your way to the grave”! Well, that’s pretty much what many of us do.