The Wasting of Time
Part 1: The “SCHEDULE”
My whole life is found in one note on my iPhone: my “SCHEDULE,” with the title in bold and all caps.
The current day, each day of the coming week, and a few days throughout the coming year, are all delineated hour-by-hour in one long, vertical scroll.
It is a schedule, as the title implies, but it’s not just that.
My long-term life aspirations, chores, errands and even second-nature or purely-automatic physical tasks like “Wake up,” “Brush teeth,” and “Sleep,” all coexist on this note.
The heftiest section of the “SCHEDULE” is my 11pm slot. There, I keep a chunk of 20 or more long-term life goals, relating to career, education, relationships, travel, art, faith, and personal growth. Being long-term, these goals never quite get accomplished. (Though, it’s possible that some have been accomplished that I simply can’t remember. Once I complete a task in the “SCHEDULE,” I delete it, and promptly forget about it. I keep no archive).
Once the clock strikes 11pm and these goals go another day without completion, I highlight this chunk, and then cut and paste it into the 11pm slot of the next day.
I can’t move these goals into a separate note outside of the “SCHEDULE,” or (I’m convinced) they’ll never be done.
It’s difficult to describe quantitatively or qualitatively how the note helps my life, and yet still I swear by it.
Unlike those pesky platforms actually designed for task-organization, like Google Calendar, my note is infinitely malleable in terms of what I can write and how I can arrange text.
The constant rearranging of categories and time slots on my “SCHEDULE” is oddly-satisfying in itself, like a puzzle. Each day is a new game of tetris.
I remembered to write this very Substack piece you’re reading now, because at some point, I scribbled the vague idea that I should in my “SCHEDULE.”
Even more central to my keeping of the note is that it serves as a big sensory compression blanket for my brain. Some have remarked that my rigidity in timekeeping seems to clash with my creative side. But in truth, I keep the “SCHEDULE” in the first place because my thinking is so chaotic and scattered that I don’t know where I would be without it. The note keeps my life contained and contextualized.
At the time I created the “SCHEDULE,” at age 16, I was convinced that I had never accomplished anything worthwhile.
I hadn’t done anything sufficiently impressive for my college applications (at least not to grant myself access into the hallowed Ivy League). I hadn’t amassed enough interesting life stories to tell at parties or to use as fodder for my creative writing. I hadn’t even had all that much fun for its own sake.
I felt that I had wasted my life.
(A ridiculous thought — I was so young, and I barely had much of a self-directed life up to that point).
To correct course, I made the “SCHEDULE,” and now the “SCHEDULE” makes me.
Despite the baseline comforts the “SCHEDULE” has brought me since age 16, I’ve continued to look back on earlier eras of my life and feel that they had been a waste. I recognize that it’s an incoherent view of reality. I’m using my current standard for what is a waste of time and applying it to earlier versions of myself, who had different hopes, abilities, and horizons. My infant self did not waste time by lying around endlessly, but now when I do it, it’s rightly considered “bedrot.”
But the mind is not coherent. It’s a primal clash of emotions.
Part 2: The World Outside the “SCHEDULE”
At the age of 22, and as a newly-minted member of the working world and global economy, it’s now harder to stifle my anxieties about the wasting of time by myself and others under the weight of my massive “SCHEDULE.”
I now waste hours thinking about the hours that go wasted in this world.
Wasted Work -
The wasting of time seems embedded into our economic system.
A sizable portion of our economy involves bombarding people with imagery to convince them to purchase products that they either don’t need, or which are essentially identical to competitor products. Often, the products aren’t even ones that most consumers wanted or imagined wanting, until they were swayed by targeted marketing.
What comes to mind right now is that there are probably board meetings in progress about how to best promote Cottonelle toilet paper and overtake Charmin.
The popular imagination of decadence features imagery of delirious and orgiastic hedonism, but real decadence is lamer and tamer. In our decadent society, the business world reeks of triviality with a professional veneer. Most major decisions and technological innovations (including mass-produced toilet paper) have already been made long ago, and now a large percentage of the public trudges through a facsimile of real work, creating slideshows and ads for things that really don’t matter.
In a communal economy, when one does their job fully and completely, they really are (for a time) done with their job. They can then either enjoy the fruits of their labor in leisure, or go on to assist others with a new job. When the cheetah mother successfully hunts her gazelle, she goes on to enjoy the meat with her cubs. She knows when to hunt again by an instinctual sense of need, not by the daily, external expectation of work attendance. Her job is clear, and when she’s done, she’s done, until the next job.
But in our contemporary, global economy, when an employee does his job fully and completely, he often eliminates his employer’s need for himself and renders himself less employable. Instead of resting, new problems have to be manufactured and then “solved,” ad nauseam.
These economic grievances of mine are inspired by the anti-capitalist anthropologist David Graeber, particularly his theory of post-industrial “bullshit jobs.” But my grievances are not anti-capitalist per se (assuming that the ever-shifting specter of “capitalism” is even a concrete entity I can attack or defend). Communist regimes, with their system of “full employment,” were often even worse time-wasters, with their massive systems of bureaucratic managers, and their businesses’ use of large, redundant groups of men to, say, hand a customer a single slab of meat.
Theoretically, in a free market, all of the toilet paper marketing associates could realize that they have been wasting their lives and quit en masse. The consumer public could boycott over-advertised products. This might force executives to rethink the marketing and distribution of their products to something more efficient and more respectful of the time of their workers and the ad-soaked consumer public.
But there is no sign of this happening anytime soon.
More accurately, then, my grievances are not about what is possible with capitalism, but about what is possible with humanity.
Even more accurately, my grievances aren’t even grievances, as much as vague anxieties about the meaning of life and work in a postindustrial world in which, increasingly, humans need not apply.
I am worried that, with or without capitalism, we are doomed to waste time until we die.
This worry has served me well in the task of writing and editing.
My constant anxiety about whether or not things — including life itself — are genuinely important and worthwhile has given me skill in avoiding floundering writing and determining newsworthy content.
I don’t speak when there’s nothing to say. I don’t write when there’s nothing to write.
As an editor of my college newspaper, I had an intuition for what stories didn’t matter or were banal, and thus by elimination what stories maybe did matter. I knew how to edit for interest.
One dream of mine is to become a professional writer. But this comes with its own anxieties: Why are my thoughts worth more than anyone else’s? Why add to the deluge of writers already out there? Enough time is already wasted on the endless interpretation of events. Many would surely be better off directly experiencing life without constantly projecting their “takes” onto it.
My idols Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion could have had these doubts as well, from time to time. If they allowed such doubts to fester and paralyze them, Wolfe or Didion would never have shaped me or millions of others readers.
But still, I wonder… in the time it took me to parse through their works, I could have read different great writers who would have shaped me similarly.
Even if Wolfe and Didion were somehow demonstrated to be objectively superior writers, my expectations in a world without them would have been unknowingly lowered.
Wasted Art -
I have always been in awe of the amount of books on display at Barnes & Noble. But this year, I have found myself increasingly convinced that there’s no way they all should’ve been written.
Why do we make new art? There’s already enough great art to fill a lifetime of leisure, and we now have algorithms and all of cyberspace at our disposal to match our demand for distraction or catharsis with a near-infinite entertainment supply.
If a reader likes tragic, dramatic stories of unrequited love, he need not create something new or wait for somebody else to do it. There is already the tried-and-true Sorrows of Young Werther. If he finds this story insufficiently relatable, GPT-10 can switch the book’s eighteenth-century German setting to twenty-first century suburban California. No extra effort need be expended by some struggling part-time waitress with writing aspirations in order to satisfy the reader’s desires. She can finally just relax and ride the rising tide of leisure and consumption.
Every story that “needs to be told” can be instantly retrieved, or otherwise created and tweaked, by AI upon command.
Even if there are still artistic horizons unexplored and stones left unturned, I wonder: what does that matter? Is novelty or experimentation in itself the standard for excellence? Likely not, otherwise all literary, musical, and cinematic canons would have long been totally replaced by mere bestsellers’ charts and New Releases lists— a fate which, despite conservative fears, has not quite come yet.
Furthermore, desire is elastic. Can people miss something they are unaware exists? Do the world’s remaining uncontacted tribes miss Chopin concertos and The Sopranos? Surely, they would have to be introduced to it first, and even then they may lack the context to appreciate it.
Is artistic creation in the age of infinite content a waste of time?
Why create anything at all in a post-scarcity society?
Romantic nationalism (and, to some degree, religious faith) has been largely abandoned by the West, leaving us with a society centered around eliminating suffering, scarcity, and conflict.
As the system perfects itself, with the last mouths fed, torsos clothed, wounds healed, and whims sated, what need will remain for creation?
Humanity will always have some dramatic conflict, but will it not become increasingly petty and trivial? And has not the demand for conflict already exceeded the supply?
When I was in Downtown Raleigh, North Carolina last year, the streets were lined with bright, colorful advertisements promoting the region’s Civil War trails. We say war is hell. The tourism industry suggests it is a hell we collectively can’t stop reliving.
All great stories are rooted in conflict. Every great book or film has a dramatic arc. Remove language from the equation, and still, all great music centers around tension and release.
The feeble human heart is emotionally-unequipped for peace and post-scarcity. We will conjure the ghosts of earlier eras to get our fill of conflict, consuming a steady diet of period pieces and old classics, all the while we rid our own lives of it.
The Marxist utopian end-view of history predicts a society of superabundance, in which all old power structures have crumbled under the weight of their own obsolescence, freeing everyone to engage in pleasurable but essentially useless tasks in perpetuity. The liberal democratic alteration of this view, à la Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” is much closer to the West’s current trajectory, but not all that different.
In this post-scarcity end-state, all artistic production and consumption strikes me as a LARP.
But maybe this pessimism is wrong.
A religious view asserts that this world, while finite in material resources, is infinitely abundant in God’s love, and in ways of understanding him through art, worship, and meaningful work; in other words, that the world is enchanted.
Such a view justifies art. It establishes a divine imperative for creation, and sets a bar for artistic excellence that is present, but insurmountable.
Technology allows more of everything. It elevates all experiences. It introduces more excitement and more tedium, more catharsis and more frustration, more focus and more distraction. It can bring us closer to and farther from God, but can never make us God. In societies both technologically-advanced and primitive, the soul always has hope but is always in jeopardy.
As with religion itself, I do have faith in this idea, but I can’t say that I feel it very often.
More often, I feel that our needs our primarily material, and that everything new has already been done — that this very article that you are reading right now is a futile exercise which has already been thought and written thousands of times over.
I’m an avid user of TikTok and Reddit, which means I am well aware of the fact that I’ve never had an original experience. (Yes, it’s ironic that someone who cares so much about wasting time would even have a TikTok account, but my main rationalization is that the app helps me capture the zeitgeist).
The mystique that could have come from the era preceding mass media — the idea that the little nuances of my life are truly particular to my life — is gone.
It can be comforting to know that nearly every life experience I’ve had has been to some degree shared by countless strangers.
But I’m also less left feeling like I am an NPC — a superfluous person. That what I do, and what millions of others do on a daily basis, is a waste of time.
This may be the underlying anxiety of my life.
In trying to recover meaning, I sometimes sit and brainstorm things I do that I do not suspect are a waste of time.
The list usually goes (in no particular order):
Playing piano
Going on walks
Physical exercise
Being in the presence of great art
Prayer and stillness, when done right (though I doubt how often I do it right, or if there is really a way to do it right)
Writing, when done right (following a train of thought or succession of events from some sort of beginning to end)
Doing any of the above, or anything at all, with people I love
This list should be long enough to keep the demon of acedia at bay, but he is unrelenting. To stay afloat, I know I need to be equally unrelenting in my faith.
What I can’t tell is if this unrelenting battle to believe in a meaningful life should entail keeping, or deleting, my “SCHEDULE.”