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Why I became a time lord Thinking about death makes you live better

Kierkegaard is cold consolation (SF Studios)


March 29, 2023   6 mins

In the classic John Huston film Beat the Devil, the diminutive character actor Peter Lorre delivers a concise disquisition on the nature of time: “What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.” Amid this stream of clichés — time lends itself to such bromides — Lorre lands on the truth. With each passing second, we are losing it. Those who are overburdened by responsibilities — myself and yourself included — might even say that their time is being “stolen”. And it is into this ever-flowing river of lost time that writer and artist Jenny Odell, author of 2019’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, has now stepped, with the new Saving Time: Discover a Life Beyond the Clock.

This is a genre of writing that I, a historian by training and an around-the-clock worker by disposition, consume like Lay’s potato chips. I’ve waded through these swift waters accompanied by everyone from former Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion — keenly aware that no moment of immersion is the same as any other and none of them will ever recur. The one thing that history doesn’t do, for good or ill, is repeat itself. What I have sought is something I will never have: more time. Not better nor more meaningful time, as Odell is proposing to find, but merely more, in terms of sheer quantity. Because while I don’t want to live forever, I do hope to live long enough to do everything I’ve committed to do, such as help my daughter enter adulthood and support my parents and spouse in their old age.

Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.

Bubbling below the surface of How to Do Nothing is a sense of climate emergency, or climate apocalypticism. Odell is constantly out and about in nature, and conversant with all the worrywart liberal commentary about the heat death of the planet — which, like Jesus’s return in the Gospel of Mark, is always already imminent. This concern deeply informs Saving Time, giving it some of its urgency; it otherwise does the usual yeoman’s work of citing people such as British labour historian E.P. Thompson on the development of time and work-discipline, Frederick Winslow Taylor on industrial efficiency, and German philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure — all names you will encounter frequently if you have found the time to bathe in the waters of the time genre.

Odell, to her credit, seizes upon the opportunity to situate the climate emergency in a discussion of the ways ancient Greeks delineated time: Chronos — time as a sort of forward, linear progression — and Kairos — a “crisis” or rupture in time. We all live in linear time, yet experience reminders — floods and famines — of the perpetual crisis in which we have found ourselves. Odell, in prose that betrays the vast condescension of our present, seems to think of this as a 21st-century phenomenon.

It most certainly is not; Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted “Theses on the Concept of History” reckons with a similar dichotomy of time: the “history of organic life on earth” as opposed to “Messianic time, [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”. For Benjamin, the powder keg that was Germany’s war on Europe — which, as an expatriate Jew facing repatriation in 1940, drove him to suicide — was the crisis, his “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” in front of him as he is propelled into the future. Humans from the emergence of civilisation, have always perceived themselves as living on borrowed time — because, of course, we are; we have always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “mortal men doomed to die”.

It is the approach to mortality that separates Odell’s work from, say, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — a title that references the average human lifespan. Odell, an atheist, is concerned with climate damage to the entire ecosystem; Burkeman, who is at least culturally Jewish, is concerned with trying to lead a balanced, moderate life in the amount of time allotted to him. It is the latter view that has always appealed to me — the Earth might be ending, but to those of us raised with anything resembling a coherent religious worldview and now struggling to raise a family, everything is already ending. As Father John Misty sings in “Holy Shit”, “Carbon footprint, incest streams…planet cancer, sweet revenge…but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

It is interesting, yet unsurprising, to see discussions of personal mortality get so little attention in a work like Saving Time. As my father lay on his deathbed — he died in his own bed, at home — he remarked to me that he had always thought it easier to die alongside millions of others in a meteor strike or global conflict than quietly and at home as an old and feeble man. This, he admitted, was a narcissistic strain of thought he inherited from his own father, who despised the civilian life that followed his time as a Second World War submariner, because it offered no promise of a collective death that would serve as a coda to some grand heroic saga. Today, as Odell acknowledges, we are bombarded with daily alerts of one crisis or another. So it requires an act of will to remember that one’s own death is not an event so significant that it must coincide with the end of life as we know it. It will only coincide with the end of life as you know it.

It seems odd, then, that Odell cites Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper — not his description of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, but the fact that preparation for death is behind everything written therein. This is because, for the devout Pieper, as for Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, life is a preparation for eternity. “As a teacher usually says to the youthful student, who is even now finding the time of schooling too long, ‘Now, just don’t you get impatient, you have a long life before you,’” Kierkegaard writes in The Gospel of Sufferings, “so eternity speaks with more reason to the sufferer: ‘Just wait, do not become impatient, there is plenty of time, there is eternity.’”

I am, per my earlier admission, a workaholic. The clocks that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution rule my every waking minute; right now, as I type this, it is 2:04am in Pittsburgh. I have a Zoom meeting at 9:30am and another at 11am. This is not a complaint; it is the life I have made for myself. I have read Pieper and Thompson and all the rest. I understand how time, per the historian Fernand Braudel, passes both slowly for the unbending structures of society and quickly for individuals like me. But most important, in a way that none of these books on time emphasises, I know I am going to die. My father and mother never ceased with these reminders, which echoed those of Epictetus: “What harm is it, when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?”

When my mother and I would read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth — my favourite book in the early years of my homeschooling — we would linger lovingly over the passages about time. (There are many: one of the main characters is Tock, a “watchdog” with a clock embedded in his torso.) She would point out the inanity of the main character Milo’s early thoughts about wanting time to pass — “wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” — given that each moment we are bestowed by nature or heaven is a gift, the “present” (another cliché, of course). The great takeaway of the book, which brilliantly skewers the ways we waste time, was that we have as much time as we’re going to get: “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.”

For those of us who have already watched our parents and a good many of our close relatives die — particularly for people, like me, who do not share Pieper and Kierkegaard’s belief in eternity — this is cold consolation, but consolation nevertheless: we’re given the time we need to have the time of our lives, and no more. Our lives, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it, are defined by “finitude”, even as “a world is worlding around us”. We exist in a state of “being-towards-death”: a fascinating state, if only to us personally or to our families and friends, that will endure until it doesn’t. There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.


Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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Elliott Bjorn
Elliott Bjorn
1 year ago

Yea, whatever…..“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.” Thurber, The 13 Clocks

I used to think about Mortality a great deal when I was a young man – for reason, as I spent years either in solitude in nature, or with weird people and scenes, wile also having been a great amount of my young years in the places of great antiquity.

If you accept mortality as universal this has a great deal of impact on what is ultimate. Ultimate is a bit problematic philosophically then, if it all is just beginning and ending endlessly, wile never ever repeating, endlessly like some fractile; but I never could believe that existential way…..

The definition I settled on for Religion is ‘Concerning that which is Ultimate.’ I guess sort of tinged by the old Ontological argument – which from memory is ‘That than which nothing can be greater’ to prove the existence of god, and so Ultimate. Anyway…so I used to sit around and wonder about meaning of it all – it is so easy to go all Hindu; Juggernaut endlessly and inexorably driving his mighty wagon ahead, crushing all life under it, and after passing new life springs up from the barren ground… and such..but I never could believe that, it just makes a good analogy….

I liked all three Religions of the Book, by far Christianity the best, and in my agnosticism leaned that way….. and I would think of that, and round and round – living in wilds, and then around weirdos, you saw how all life is just turning of the great wheel….But Ultimate….I just believed there was ultimate by faith I guess… but what then? I never figured anything out – years and years of solitude and I have no idea…..

In the ending of Candide I found the best line on existence, and knowledge, and life, and everything….

”In the neighbourhood there lived a very famous Dervish who was esteemed the best philosopher in all Turkey, and they went to consult him. Pangloss was the speaker.

”Master,” said he, “we come to beg you to tell why so strange an animal as man was made.”

“With what meddlest thou?” said the Dervish; “is it thy business?”

“But, reverend father,” said Candide, “there is horrible evil in this world.”

“What signifies it,” said the Dervish, “whether there be evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?”

“What, then, must we do?” said Pangloss.

“Hold your tongue,” answered the Dervish.

“I was in hopes,” said Pangloss, “that I should reason with you a little about causes and effects, about the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and the pre-established harmony.”

At these words, the Dervish shut the door in their faces.”

haha, so Muslim, and the old, more mystical Christianity, that we are not to know the secrets – only what our station in the religion deserves. And so I decided this is the best answer… and then the end…

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”

“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”

“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”

””All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.””

haha

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Elliott Bjorn

Yes the ending of Candide is really great – keep yourself busy with the seasons and enjoy each day as best you can.

I also love this by Vonnegut:
‘I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different’

As for the author of this article,
I can’t help feeling the whole piece is an exercise in a sort of Yankee humblebrag: ‘look at me! I’m still working at 2am and I have 17 side hustles!’

Maybe the author needs to read Candide…

Last edited 1 year ago by Jeff Butcher
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

Indeed. The humblebrag sums up this author’s entire output.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

Indeed. The humblebrag sums up this author’s entire output.

Paul Nathanson
Paul Nathanson
1 year ago
Reply to  Elliott Bjorn

“I liked all three Religions of the Book, by far Christianity the best …”
But you don’t say why, Elliott, which makes me curious, because Jews and Christians think of time in very similar ways (the main differences being in terminology). I refer only, of course, to those who have not adopted a secular notion of time. I don’t know if you’re even interested in what follows, but some reader of this particular article might be.
Secular time is linear (what the Greeks called chronos). Time has no direction, no goal (telos), no meaning. History, therefore, is merely a chronology of “one damned thing after another” (a statement that has been attributed to many sources). Moreover, secular time is homogeneous. No moment is inherently special or inherently significant (except in purely emotional terms).
Religious time, even in the West, is very different. It’s heterogeneous, not homogeneous. Some events or times are inherently special and therefore inherently more significant than others (what the Greeks called kairos). For Jews and Christians, time is neither linear nor cyclical (as it is for Hindus and Buddhists) but circular. And this is true on more than one level.
On the cosmic level, time begins with Creation (or, what could be called the Big Bang) and concludes with an equally dramatic counterpart. But time itself is a mundane interlude and therefore surrounded, as it were, by eternity–that is, timelessness.
The same paradigm–return to origin–applies on the collective level, too, but in this case as an interlude within history. The community, or nation, originates with the exemplary deeds of its founding heroes (the early Israelites such as Abraham, Moses and the prophets; the earliest Christians such as Jesus, Mary and Paul), continues through the vicissitudes of history, and will return to the conditions–intimacy with God–of its founding (known variously as the Garden of Eden, the Messianic Age, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly City and so on).
The same paradigm applies on the personal level, too. Each life (soul) exists in paradise (the womb), is born into the world for the duration of its life cycle, and will return, usually after repentance, to paradise (imagined variously as Eden, a cosmic Torah academy led by God, the immediate presence of Christ in a Heavenly Jerusalem and so forth).
But daily life as a Jew or Christian is not an abstraction or a set of beliefs, because the liturgical year, along with the sacraments and their Jewish equivalents, allow people to re-experience primordial events at special (sacred) times . At the Eucharist, for example, Christians (at least Catholic and Orthodox ones) re-experience the direct presence of Christ at the Last Supper. At the Passover Seder, Jews re-experience the primordial Exodus from Egypt. (I won’t suggest any cognitive explanation for this phenomenon, because it’s non-cognitive.) On occasions of this kind, the sacred replaces the profane, eternity replaces time.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Paul Nathanson

Sorry to interrupt these musings, but I just cannot resist making the point that Christians have never made a convincing case for the desirability of being in eternity with God, whatever. Muslims make a sexual analogy, which you can see is an intense pleasurable experience but Christianity is too anti sex to do this.

This led in my view to the much greater emphasis on the fallen being burned and tortured for eternity (nice) which certainly is a graphic image.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Paul Nathanson

Sorry to interrupt these musings, but I just cannot resist making the point that Christians have never made a convincing case for the desirability of being in eternity with God, whatever. Muslims make a sexual analogy, which you can see is an intense pleasurable experience but Christianity is too anti sex to do this.

This led in my view to the much greater emphasis on the fallen being burned and tortured for eternity (nice) which certainly is a graphic image.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
1 year ago
Reply to  Elliott Bjorn

Yes the ending of Candide is really great – keep yourself busy with the seasons and enjoy each day as best you can.

I also love this by Vonnegut:
‘I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different’

As for the author of this article,
I can’t help feeling the whole piece is an exercise in a sort of Yankee humblebrag: ‘look at me! I’m still working at 2am and I have 17 side hustles!’

Maybe the author needs to read Candide…

Last edited 1 year ago by Jeff Butcher
Paul Nathanson
Paul Nathanson
1 year ago
Reply to  Elliott Bjorn

“I liked all three Religions of the Book, by far Christianity the best …”
But you don’t say why, Elliott, which makes me curious, because Jews and Christians think of time in very similar ways (the main differences being in terminology). I refer only, of course, to those who have not adopted a secular notion of time. I don’t know if you’re even interested in what follows, but some reader of this particular article might be.
Secular time is linear (what the Greeks called chronos). Time has no direction, no goal (telos), no meaning. History, therefore, is merely a chronology of “one damned thing after another” (a statement that has been attributed to many sources). Moreover, secular time is homogeneous. No moment is inherently special or inherently significant (except in purely emotional terms).
Religious time, even in the West, is very different. It’s heterogeneous, not homogeneous. Some events or times are inherently special and therefore inherently more significant than others (what the Greeks called kairos). For Jews and Christians, time is neither linear nor cyclical (as it is for Hindus and Buddhists) but circular. And this is true on more than one level.
On the cosmic level, time begins with Creation (or, what could be called the Big Bang) and concludes with an equally dramatic counterpart. But time itself is a mundane interlude and therefore surrounded, as it were, by eternity–that is, timelessness.
The same paradigm–return to origin–applies on the collective level, too, but in this case as an interlude within history. The community, or nation, originates with the exemplary deeds of its founding heroes (the early Israelites such as Abraham, Moses and the prophets; the earliest Christians such as Jesus, Mary and Paul), continues through the vicissitudes of history, and will return to the conditions–intimacy with God–of its founding (known variously as the Garden of Eden, the Messianic Age, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly City and so on).
The same paradigm applies on the personal level, too. Each life (soul) exists in paradise (the womb), is born into the world for the duration of its life cycle, and will return, usually after repentance, to paradise (imagined variously as Eden, a cosmic Torah academy led by God, the immediate presence of Christ in a Heavenly Jerusalem and so forth).
But daily life as a Jew or Christian is not an abstraction or a set of beliefs, because the liturgical year, along with the sacraments and their Jewish equivalents, allow people to re-experience primordial events at special (sacred) times . At the Eucharist, for example, Christians (at least Catholic and Orthodox ones) re-experience the direct presence of Christ at the Last Supper. At the Passover Seder, Jews re-experience the primordial Exodus from Egypt. (I won’t suggest any cognitive explanation for this phenomenon, because it’s non-cognitive.) On occasions of this kind, the sacred replaces the profane, eternity replaces time.

Elliott Bjorn
Elliott Bjorn
1 year ago

Yea, whatever…..“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.” Thurber, The 13 Clocks

I used to think about Mortality a great deal when I was a young man – for reason, as I spent years either in solitude in nature, or with weird people and scenes, wile also having been a great amount of my young years in the places of great antiquity.

If you accept mortality as universal this has a great deal of impact on what is ultimate. Ultimate is a bit problematic philosophically then, if it all is just beginning and ending endlessly, wile never ever repeating, endlessly like some fractile; but I never could believe that existential way…..

The definition I settled on for Religion is ‘Concerning that which is Ultimate.’ I guess sort of tinged by the old Ontological argument – which from memory is ‘That than which nothing can be greater’ to prove the existence of god, and so Ultimate. Anyway…so I used to sit around and wonder about meaning of it all – it is so easy to go all Hindu; Juggernaut endlessly and inexorably driving his mighty wagon ahead, crushing all life under it, and after passing new life springs up from the barren ground… and such..but I never could believe that, it just makes a good analogy….

I liked all three Religions of the Book, by far Christianity the best, and in my agnosticism leaned that way….. and I would think of that, and round and round – living in wilds, and then around weirdos, you saw how all life is just turning of the great wheel….But Ultimate….I just believed there was ultimate by faith I guess… but what then? I never figured anything out – years and years of solitude and I have no idea…..

In the ending of Candide I found the best line on existence, and knowledge, and life, and everything….

”In the neighbourhood there lived a very famous Dervish who was esteemed the best philosopher in all Turkey, and they went to consult him. Pangloss was the speaker.

”Master,” said he, “we come to beg you to tell why so strange an animal as man was made.”

“With what meddlest thou?” said the Dervish; “is it thy business?”

“But, reverend father,” said Candide, “there is horrible evil in this world.”

“What signifies it,” said the Dervish, “whether there be evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?”

“What, then, must we do?” said Pangloss.

“Hold your tongue,” answered the Dervish.

“I was in hopes,” said Pangloss, “that I should reason with you a little about causes and effects, about the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and the pre-established harmony.”

At these words, the Dervish shut the door in their faces.”

haha, so Muslim, and the old, more mystical Christianity, that we are not to know the secrets – only what our station in the religion deserves. And so I decided this is the best answer… and then the end…

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”

“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”

“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”

””All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.””

haha

ralph bell
ralph bell
1 year ago

What a great last paragraph-We are given the time to have the time of our lives and no more. So few people think this way unless they are given a terminal diagnosis or a near death experience. Most of us live to constantly try to avoid death and think longevity trumps quality.

ralph bell
ralph bell
1 year ago

What a great last paragraph-We are given the time to have the time of our lives and no more. So few people think this way unless they are given a terminal diagnosis or a near death experience. Most of us live to constantly try to avoid death and think longevity trumps quality.

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
1 year ago

It is so very sad, just four days shy of Holy Week and just eleven days before Easter, to witness someone who “doesn’t believe in eternity” searching for eternity in the ephemeral. So many good people who fancy themselves smarter-than-average are willing to forfeit their eternal souls so that their fellow secular academics won’t judge them for having faith in something they can’t see. The smartest people I know believe that Jesus died on the cross for the redemption of the world. I know a lot of smart people who don’t believe that but they are, as I see it, infinitely less smart for it.

Last edited 1 year ago by Sisyphus Jones
Mark Gourley
Mark Gourley
1 year ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Exactly. Thanks for making my argument for me.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Mark Gourley

An assertion of belief in an irrational superstition – I grant you a very important one culturally – doesn’t really count as an “argument”.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Mark Gourley

An assertion of belief in an irrational superstition – I grant you a very important one culturally – doesn’t really count as an “argument”.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Why is he necessarily searching for eternity rather than meaning in life? I cannot think of anything worse than sitting – doing what exactly? – in Heaven without escape. Christians have always presented an unconvincing, milksop idea of this, which is why I suppose they used to go all in on the much more graphic vision of burning and torture going on for ever in the ‘other place’

Mark Gourley
Mark Gourley
1 year ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Exactly. Thanks for making my argument for me.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Why is he necessarily searching for eternity rather than meaning in life? I cannot think of anything worse than sitting – doing what exactly? – in Heaven without escape. Christians have always presented an unconvincing, milksop idea of this, which is why I suppose they used to go all in on the much more graphic vision of burning and torture going on for ever in the ‘other place’

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
1 year ago

It is so very sad, just four days shy of Holy Week and just eleven days before Easter, to witness someone who “doesn’t believe in eternity” searching for eternity in the ephemeral. So many good people who fancy themselves smarter-than-average are willing to forfeit their eternal souls so that their fellow secular academics won’t judge them for having faith in something they can’t see. The smartest people I know believe that Jesus died on the cross for the redemption of the world. I know a lot of smart people who don’t believe that but they are, as I see it, infinitely less smart for it.

Last edited 1 year ago by Sisyphus Jones
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago

John Lennon was lazing around in his Dakota penthouse when a friend asked why he was wasting time. “It’s not wasting time”, he replied, “if I’m enjoying myself.” Works for me.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

To which can be added another Lennonism: “Life is what happens whilst you’re busy making other plans”
I wasn’t necessarily a fan of Lennon’s idealism, but those two quotes ring very true.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

To which can be added another Lennonism: “Life is what happens whilst you’re busy making other plans”
I wasn’t necessarily a fan of Lennon’s idealism, but those two quotes ring very true.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago

John Lennon was lazing around in his Dakota penthouse when a friend asked why he was wasting time. “It’s not wasting time”, he replied, “if I’m enjoying myself.” Works for me.

David Jennings
David Jennings
1 year ago

“Life is too short” is oftena complaint of the distracted. Seneca disagreed: he thought life was long enough: “it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste so much of it!”. While today we age decades longer than the ancient Romans, perhaps we do not live even as long as they did. That waste of time arises, according to Seneca, because “we act like mortals in all that we fear and act like immortals in all that we desire”. A mind distracted by fear and desires absorbs nothing deeply. Those who are distracted forget the past, neglect the present and fear the future. 
 

james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  David Jennings

“Don’t waste time. Time is what life is made of.” Bruce Lee.

james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  David Jennings

“Don’t waste time. Time is what life is made of.” Bruce Lee.

David Jennings
David Jennings
1 year ago

“Life is too short” is oftena complaint of the distracted. Seneca disagreed: he thought life was long enough: “it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste so much of it!”. While today we age decades longer than the ancient Romans, perhaps we do not live even as long as they did. That waste of time arises, according to Seneca, because “we act like mortals in all that we fear and act like immortals in all that we desire”. A mind distracted by fear and desires absorbs nothing deeply. Those who are distracted forget the past, neglect the present and fear the future. 
 

Bob Null
Bob Null
1 year ago

“Life is but an unfortunate interlude between two eternities of bliss.” I don’t know who said that, but I read it many, many years ago.

Bob Null
Bob Null
1 year ago

“Life is but an unfortunate interlude between two eternities of bliss.” I don’t know who said that, but I read it many, many years ago.

Michael Coleman
Michael Coleman
1 year ago

“How to do nothing” is an intriguing concept. When I sold my business and retired 6 years ago I vowed to try to switch from my pre-existing goal driven mentality to one of living in the moment, which frequently is similar to doing nothing (but not exactly).
That switch is really hard – I’m convinced that besides our social programming that teaches that life is a series of goals (#1 say da da, #2 don’t crap your pants, …., #3,231 take care of your loved ones when you die), that being goal driven is also genetically hard wired into some of us. I’ve found 3 or 4 activities where I can manufacture goals. My goals now are all trivial, but they provide a balance to the majority of time doing nothing.

Michael Coleman
Michael Coleman
1 year ago

“How to do nothing” is an intriguing concept. When I sold my business and retired 6 years ago I vowed to try to switch from my pre-existing goal driven mentality to one of living in the moment, which frequently is similar to doing nothing (but not exactly).
That switch is really hard – I’m convinced that besides our social programming that teaches that life is a series of goals (#1 say da da, #2 don’t crap your pants, …., #3,231 take care of your loved ones when you die), that being goal driven is also genetically hard wired into some of us. I’ve found 3 or 4 activities where I can manufacture goals. My goals now are all trivial, but they provide a balance to the majority of time doing nothing.

Ralph Hanke
Ralph Hanke
1 year ago

I was watching a sunset move through the nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains and thought to myself: is there really such a thing as time or is it all just movement, which we explain as time.
Whatever, it was a gorgeous sunset and I was lucky to see it. I hope each of you see something so beautiful as well.

Ralph Hanke
Ralph Hanke
1 year ago

I was watching a sunset move through the nooks and crannies of the Rocky Mountains and thought to myself: is there really such a thing as time or is it all just movement, which we explain as time.
Whatever, it was a gorgeous sunset and I was lucky to see it. I hope each of you see something so beautiful as well.

Damian Grant
Damian Grant
1 year ago

I can’t help but be tempted to think that ‘Unherd’ have looked at their most common subscription demographic and have come up with an article which very much chimes with their times…or perhaps I’m just reading way too much into it….just a thought….

Julia Waugh
Julia Waugh
1 year ago
Reply to  Damian Grant

Are the young immortal?

Matt Spinolo
Matt Spinolo
1 year ago
Reply to  Julia Waugh

Not yet, but it seems they are working on it. Should be ready in the next 15 years.

Matt Spinolo
Matt Spinolo
1 year ago
Reply to  Julia Waugh

Not yet, but it seems they are working on it. Should be ready in the next 15 years.

Julia Waugh
Julia Waugh
1 year ago
Reply to  Damian Grant

Are the young immortal?

Damian Grant
Damian Grant
1 year ago

I can’t help but be tempted to think that ‘Unherd’ have looked at their most common subscription demographic and have come up with an article which very much chimes with their times…or perhaps I’m just reading way too much into it….just a thought….

Paul M
Paul M
1 year ago

As I got older, I realized life is nothing but a constant stream of small daily deaths and rebirths. It took me murdering my ego to realize I’ve already had enough time.

Paul M
Paul M
1 year ago

As I got older, I realized life is nothing but a constant stream of small daily deaths and rebirths. It took me murdering my ego to realize I’ve already had enough time.

Laura Creighton
Laura Creighton
1 year ago

I think a book the author would enjoy readinng is Bodil Jönsson‘s Swedish book ‘Tio Tanker Om Tid’ — Ten Thoughts about Time. There is an English translation https://books.google.se/books/about/Ten_Thoughts_about_Time.html?id=-4QWGQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
The book is now more than 20 years old, and she has written more thoughts about time. Good stuff.

Laura Creighton
Laura Creighton
1 year ago

I think a book the author would enjoy readinng is Bodil Jönsson‘s Swedish book ‘Tio Tanker Om Tid’ — Ten Thoughts about Time. There is an English translation https://books.google.se/books/about/Ten_Thoughts_about_Time.html?id=-4QWGQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
The book is now more than 20 years old, and she has written more thoughts about time. Good stuff.

Mark Melvin
Mark Melvin
1 year ago

Cute article, the Time Lord bit was what attracted me to read it; Doctor Who reference and all (not the recent Doctors of course, thinking about Patrick Troughton time). Made me think of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Dunbar’s reasoning why he as a pilot refused to wear a watch. He said that if you look at your watch, you can see your life passing by. But if you had no watch and had no idea of the time, you couldn’t and so therefore you would live longer. Or at least feel so. I don’t wear a watch!

P Branagan
P Branagan
1 year ago

All value is created by or within finiteness.
In eternity there can be no values – no good or bad, right or wrong, no beauty and no love.
If the world was made of gold, then gold would have no value.
If someone said : I love you the same as everyone else, it would be meaningless, as love is directed at someone special. What makes love so deeply precious is the finiteness of the lives involved.
If we were immortal there would be no right or wrong as even the most egregious ‘act of harm’ would be so transient as to be meaningless.

Beauty is that special momentary feeling when we are grasped by some resonance with magical perfection that stands out from the mundane. But it is transitatory.

Heidegger wrote of the ground of being which is labelled Being with capital ‘b’. All beings – from the primordial energy fields that make up quarks and gluons to galaxies -emerge from the constant creative urge of Being. Creativity means newness and necessarily requires the ending of what went before. So ultimately ongoing creativity requires death.
As Heidegger wrote we live towards death and it is what gives life all it’s values.

Eternal life is simply the most horrific concept imaginable as it would mean the end of the constant creativity of Being while stripping life of all values including love and beauty.

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
1 year ago
Reply to  P Branagan

I loved reading your comment – which I deeply disagree with! LOL
What makes love precious to us is not the finite-ness of the lives involved, but the tiny supply of it that there is, to meet the immense demand – in all lives, in every life. We hoard it for ourselves, except in the rare case that we find someone whom we trust and who inspires our care.
But imagine a world where you and I and everyone had an inexhaustible supply of love, care and support for each other, and no need to hoard any of it for ourselves. Would love still be precious? Yes, but in the sense that breathable air is precious: it is everywhere, it’s easily accessed, but still necessary and of paramount importance. Sounds like a Heavenly Eternity to me. Now what if Eternity has an access point here and now?

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Ross
Richard Ross
Richard Ross
1 year ago
Reply to  P Branagan

I loved reading your comment – which I deeply disagree with! LOL
What makes love precious to us is not the finite-ness of the lives involved, but the tiny supply of it that there is, to meet the immense demand – in all lives, in every life. We hoard it for ourselves, except in the rare case that we find someone whom we trust and who inspires our care.
But imagine a world where you and I and everyone had an inexhaustible supply of love, care and support for each other, and no need to hoard any of it for ourselves. Would love still be precious? Yes, but in the sense that breathable air is precious: it is everywhere, it’s easily accessed, but still necessary and of paramount importance. Sounds like a Heavenly Eternity to me. Now what if Eternity has an access point here and now?

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Ross
P Branagan
P Branagan
1 year ago

All value is created by or within finiteness.
In eternity there can be no values – no good or bad, right or wrong, no beauty and no love.
If the world was made of gold, then gold would have no value.
If someone said : I love you the same as everyone else, it would be meaningless, as love is directed at someone special. What makes love so deeply precious is the finiteness of the lives involved.
If we were immortal there would be no right or wrong as even the most egregious ‘act of harm’ would be so transient as to be meaningless.

Beauty is that special momentary feeling when we are grasped by some resonance with magical perfection that stands out from the mundane. But it is transitatory.

Heidegger wrote of the ground of being which is labelled Being with capital ‘b’. All beings – from the primordial energy fields that make up quarks and gluons to galaxies -emerge from the constant creative urge of Being. Creativity means newness and necessarily requires the ending of what went before. So ultimately ongoing creativity requires death.
As Heidegger wrote we live towards death and it is what gives life all it’s values.

Eternal life is simply the most horrific concept imaginable as it would mean the end of the constant creativity of Being while stripping life of all values including love and beauty.