In Praise of Wasting Time

Alan Lightman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501154379
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks. We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-­four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with "extras." Our university curricula are so crammed our young people don't have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in "wasting time, " of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks.Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-­hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-­driven lives, and examines the many values of "wasting time"—for replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

1 A Village in Cambodia

Not long ago, I found myself in a small village in a remote area of Cambodia. Many rural areas in the world have modern plumbing, electric ovens, satellite TVs, and other such technological conveniences, but not this one. The inhabitants of Tramung Chrum live in one-room huts without electricity or running water. Dangling light bulbs in the huts are powered by car batteries. Food is cooked over open fires. The villagers support themselves by growing rice, watermelons, and cucumbers. Their religion is a version of moderate Islam, called Imam San Cham, combined with animism. When someone needs healing, the villagers perform a ceremony in which they summon the spirits of ancestors, monkeys, and horses. The ghosts inhabit the bodies of the villagers, who dance wildly through the night. Other than these moments, the villagers go about their lives in quiet calm. They rise with the sun. After breakfast, they herd their cows out for grazing, then walk to the rice fields and tend to their crops. They return to their huts as the light starts to dim and gather firewood for cooking the evening meal.

Each morning, the women ride their bicycles on a rutted red dirt road to a market ten miles away to trade for goods and food they cannot grow themselves. Through a translator, I asked one of the women how long the daily trip took. She gave me a puzzled look and said, “I never thought about that.”

I was startled at her disinterest in time. And envious. We in the “developed” world have created a frenzied lifestyle in which not a minute is to be wasted. The precious twenty-four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced to ten-minute units of efficiency. We become agitated and angry in the waiting room of a doctor’s office if we’ve been sitting for ten minutes or more. We grow impatient if our laser printers don’t spit out at least five pages per minute. And we must be connected to the grid at all times. We take our smartphones and laptops with us on vacation. We go through our email at restaurants. Or our online bank accounts while walking in the park. The teenagers I know (and some of their parents) check their smartphones at least every five minutes of their “free” waking hours. At night, many sleep with their phones on their chests or next to their beds. When the school day ends, our children are loaded with piano lessons and dance classes and soccer games and extra language classes. Our university curricula are so crammed that our young people don’t have time to digest and reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning.

I plead guilty myself. If I take the time to examine my own twenty-four hours per day, here’s what I find: from the instant I open my eyes in the morning until I turn out the lights at night, I am at work on some project. First thing in the morning, I check my email. For any unexpected opening of time that appears during the day, I rush to patch it, as if a tear in my trousers. I find a project, indeed I feel compelled to find a project, to fill up the hole. If I have an extra hour, I can work at my laptop on an article or class lesson. If I have a few minutes, I can answer a letter or read an online news story. With only seconds, I can check phone messages. Unconsciously, without thinking about it, I have subdivided my day into smaller and smaller units of efficient time use, until there are no holes left, no breathing spaces remaining. I rarely goof off. I rarely follow a path that I think might lead to a dead end. I rarely “waste” time. And certainly, I would never ever spend a couple of hours of each day going to the market without knowing exactly how long the trip took and figuring out how to listen to an audiobook on the way.

It’s not only me. All around me, I feel a sense of urgency, a vague fear of not being plugged in, a fear of not keeping up. I feel like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial, who lives in a world of ubiquitous suspicion and powerful but invisible authority. Yet there is no authority here, only a pervasive mentality.

I can remember a time when I did not live in this way. I can remember those days of my childhood when I would slowly walk home from school by myself and take long detours through the woods. With the silence broken only by the sound of my own footsteps, I would follow turtles as they lumbered down a dirt path. Where were they going, and why? I would build play forts out of fallen trees. I would sit on the banks of Cornfield Pond and waste hours watching tadpoles in the shallows or the sway of water grasses in the wind. My mind meandered. I thought about what I wanted for dinner that night, whether God was a man or a woman, whether tadpoles knew they were destined to become frogs, what it would feel like to be dead, what I wanted to be when I became a man, the fresh bruise on my knee. When the light began fading, I wandered home.

I ask myself: What happened to those careless, wasteful hours at the pond? How has the world changed? Of course, part of the answer is simply that I grew up. Adulthood undeniably brings responsibilities and career pressures and a certain awareness of the weight of life. Yet that is only part of what has happened. Indeed, an enormous transformation has occurred in the world from the 1950s and ’60s of my youth to today. A transformation so vast that it has altered all that we say and do and think, yet often in ways so subtle and ubiquitous that we are hardly aware of them. Among other things, the world today is faster, more scheduled, more fragmented, less patient, louder, more wired, more public. For want of a better phrase, I will call this world “the wired world.” By this term, I do not mean only digital communication, the Internet, and social media. I also mean the frenzied pace and noise of the world.

There are many different aspects of today’s time-driven, wired existence, but they are connected. All can be traced to recent technological advances and economic prosperity in a complex web of cause and effect. Throughout history, the pace of life has always been fueled by the speed of communication. The speed of communication, in turn, has been central to the technological advance that has led to the Internet, social media, and the vast and all-consuming network that I simply call “the grid.” That same technology has also been part of the general economic progress that has increased productivity in the workplace, which, when coupled with the time-equals-money equation, has led to a heightened awareness of the commercial and goal-oriented uses of time—at the expense of the more reflective, free-floating, and non-goal-oriented uses of time.

Technology, however, is only a tool. Human hands work the tool. Behind the technology, I believe that our entire way of thinking has changed, our way of being in the world, our social and psychological ethos. Many of us cannot spend an hour of unscheduled time, cannot sit alone in a room for ten minutes without external stimulation, cannot take a walk in the woods without a smartphone. This behavioral syndrome is part of the noisy, hyperconnected, splintered, and high-speed matrix of the wired world.

Clearly, the recent technological and economic developments have been beneficial in many ways. Vast amounts of medical information about symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments are instantly available through the Internet to doctors in remote areas. Family members who are separated by great distance can see and talk to each other as if they were in the same room. With more speed and productivity, we are richer. We have more food and better houses. We have more cars, telephones, electric ranges and blenders, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, microwaves and refrigerators, televisions, iPhones and iPods and iPads, CD players and DVD players, humidifiers, copying machines, air conditioners and heaters. My own work as a scientist, writer, and social entrepreneur has profited enormously from the recent technological advances. I can do research online and scan through mountains of facts that, in the past, would have required that I travel to distant libraries or have articles and information mailed to me through the post. For a number of years, I have been overseeing a project in Southeast Asia for the advancement of young women, a project I could never have undertaken without quick communication between my desk in Concord, Massachusetts, and my second office in Phnom Penh. I much admire the technologies and individuals who have made my life possible. But these developments have come at a cost. And it is time that we recognize what we have lost.

What exactly have we lost? If we are so crushed by our schedules, to-do lists, and hyperconnected media that we no longer have moments to think and reflect on both ourselves and the world, what have we lost? If we cannot sit alone in a quiet room with only our thoughts for ten minutes, what have we lost? If we no longer have time to let our minds wander and roam without particular purpose, what have we lost? If we and our children no longer have time to play? If we no longer experience the quality of slowness, or a digestible rate of information, or silence, or privacy? More narrowly, what have I personally lost when I must be engaged with a project every hour of the day, when I rarely let my mind spin freely without friction or deadlines, when I rarely sever myself from the rush and the heave of the external world—what have I lost?

Certainly, I have threatened my creative activities. Psychologists have long known that creativity thrives on unstructured time, on play, on “divergent thinking,” on unpurposed ramblings through the mansions of life. Gustav Mahler routinely took three- or four-hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he took time off from his frenzied practice in Zurich and went to his country house in Bollingen. In the middle of a writing project, Gertrude Stein wandered about the countryside looking at cows. Einstein, in his 1949 autobiography, described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts previously unconnected. All unscheduled. “For me it is unquestionable that our thinking goes on . . . to a considerable degree unconsciously,” he wrote. Don’t we need empty spaces for such mental adventures?

I have also endangered the needed replenishment of mind that comes from doing nothing in particular, from taking long walks without destination, from simply finding a few moments of quiet away from the noise of the world. The mind needs to rest. The mind needs periods of calm. Such a need has been recognized for thousands of years. It was described as early as 1500 BCE in the meditation traditions of Hinduism. And later in Buddhism. A passage from the Buddhist Dhammapada reads: “When a monk has gone into an empty place, and has calmed his mind, [he] experiences a delight that transcends that of men.”

But I’ve lost more. I believe I have lost something of my inner self. By inner self, I mean that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom. My inner self roots me to me, and to the ground beneath me. The sunlight and soil that nourish my inner self are solitude and personal reflection. When I listen to my inner self, I hear the breathing of my spirit. Those breaths are so tiny and delicate, I need stillness to hear them, I need slowness to hear them. I need vast, silent spaces in my mind. I need privacy. Without the breathing and the voice of my inner self, I am a prisoner of the wired world around me.

2 The Grid

On the cover of the November 7, 2016, issue of Time is a picture of a teenage girl. She has shoulder-length dark hair, is wearing jeans and a lace-up pink shirt. Her arms droop at her sides. She looks like all the life has been drained out of her, like she has no hope left in the world. For all of us with children, we think, Please let my child never be so. Next to the teenager is the headline: “Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent.”

Of course, teenagers throughout time have been sulky and sullen. But this is something else, something new. The number of “distressed” young people in America is dramatically rising. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, from 2010 to 2015 the fraction of adolescents (ages twelve to seventeen) who reported at least one major depressive episode in the previous year increased from around eight percent to almost thirteen percent. There are, of course, many factors contributing to this epidemic. But some experts say that the main driver is the massive and pervasive presence of the digital grid, with little opportunity or desire to disconnect.

The grid replaces in-the-flesh reality with virtual reality, and that virtual reality is loud, all-consuming, dehumanizing, and relentless. It can drown out the rest of life. And it rushes ahead, without waiting for anyone. Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, says that our young people are “in a cauldron of stimulus they can’t get away from, or don’t want to get away from, or don’t know how to get away from.” According to a recent Pew survey, the average American teenager today sends or receives more than 110 text messages a day. A 2015 study of social-media use of thirteen-year-olds, conducted by researchers at the University of California (Davis) and the University of Texas (Dallas), found that “there is no firm line between their real and online worlds.” A big difference between the digital screens of today and the televisions of the 1950s is that in those days your parents could turn off the darn thing. Not so easy today, when a large fraction of young people have their own digital devices.

So what’s the problem with nonstop stimulation? Ross Peterson, a New England psychiatrist who has treated dozens of teenage patients, told me that in his view the source of increased depression and anxiety in teenagers is their “terror of aloneness.” That terror, in turn, is intimately connected to the intense hyperconnected social-media environment of today. Modern teenagers, who live on the virtual planets of Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram, find it nearly impossible to be alone. They are always connected. Peterson mentioned to me the acronym FOMO, which stands for “Fear of Missing Out.” And what are we missing out on if we aren’t intravenously connected to the grid? The vast, squirming, unceasing, ubiquitous explosion of images and words, stories, messages and tweets, provocations, real news and fake news, happenings, and connections that is the Internet. The grid. It’s an addiction. We can get another hit with ...