Convenience and time

Over our trip to Yellowstone, I finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It was recommended by one of my friends who is a librarian and often has good books to suggest. This one was very good and very thought provoking. 

It's been a week and I'm not sure I'm up for thoughtful musings, so instead I'll share a couple of quotes from this book that I find interesting. Feel free to discuss.

"In start-up jargon, the way to make a fortune in Silicon Valley is to identify a 'pain point' -- one of the small annoyances resulting from (more jargon) the 'friction' of daily life -- and then to offer a way to circumvent it. Thus Uber eliminates the 'pain' of having to track down a number for your local taxi company and call it, or trying to hail a cab from the street; digital wallet apps like Apple Pay remove the 'pain'  of having to reach into your bag for your physical wallet or cash. The food delivery service Seamless has even run advertisements -- tongue-in-cheek ones, but still -- boasting that it lets you avoid the agony of talking to a flesh-and-blood restaurant worker; instead you need only commune with a screen. It's true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it's often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that, multiplied thousands of times, bind a neighborhood together; your interactions with the woman who runs the nearby Chinese takeout might feel insignificant, but they help make yours the area where people still talk to one another, where tech-induced loneliness doesn't yet reign supreme. ... Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what's most valuable in any given context." (p. 52)

"Frequently, the effect of convenience isn't just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can stay home, order food on Seamless, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing do -- though you might be perfectly well aware that you'd have had a better time had your kept your appointment to meet friends in the city or tried to make an interesting new recipe. ... As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient that remain." (p. 53)

"The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there's the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty -- the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people's intrusion into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there's the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when." (p. 198)

"And yet the trouble with this kind of individualistic freedom, as Judith Shulevitz points out, is that a society in thrall to it, as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself ... We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It's harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project -- nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band -- that takes place in a setting other than the workplace. .. The reason it's hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn't usually that we 'don't have the time,' in the strict sense of that phrase, though that's what we tell ourselves. It's that we do have the time -- but that there's almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we've constructed lives that can't be made to mesh.

All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics -- the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations -- are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected -- alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. 'Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,' wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It's in the interest of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him." (p. 199 - 200)

The rest of the book is equally as thought provoking. Highly recommended.