26

The importance of Time

It is precisely one month since my grandfather passed away, and in my most frustrating moments, I’ve been job hunting since the start of the year. Despite it all, I feel oddly optimistic. What I am thinking of today is Time. Time with a capital T. Time as a social construct. Time as an important part of complex systems. Not time with a small t, like the time we construct for daily routines, or task deadlines. I mean the passage of Time on a grander scale. Certain endeavours are not to be rushed. There is, unfortunately, an excessive and disgusting obsession with doing things as quickly as possible. I want to emphasise, on this day, and the rest of my 26th year, that there is no point in rushing through endeavours that require the capital T Time and oftentimes, the best way to live through those undertakings is to live slowly.

So let’s be contrarian for a moment, and let’s also be delusional. The limits that society and culture force onto us — and yes, this includes childbirth, the dreaded biological clock, relationships, business, product design/development, starting a family, doing a PhD and other major life endeavours — are more flexible than we think. There is a well-developed art of giving urgency to things that ought not to be urgent. It is an ugly art. The people who tell us to rush into such endeavours are either bitter, misinformed, or do not know any better because the predominant culture is to save Time, to be efficient, to ensure that Time (& resources) are not wasted. It is to treat Time as a currency. But even so, “saving Time” comes with its burdens. What it means to save Time is to bear the most unpleasant economic and psychological costs. Are these costs worth it? 

A few examples: the cost of not getting to know a person well before marriage, and going into that marriage too quickly or too soon, might turn out to be a relationship where you may be abused. The cost of speed in product development is spending more money. In a market failure, after all, you are either too soon or too fast. Being too soon leads to missed opportunities and making decisions without enough information; being too fast leads to wasted money and resources. Both are a consequence of “saving Time”. Joël de Rosnay said that the “only way to ‘save Time’ on the human scale is to create, to organize the world.” And I say that in order to create and organise the world — our individual worlds included — we must ‘waste Time’. Rosnay continues, “In our civilization of haste and waste the contemplation of a countryside, the conversation with a child, the participation in a sport, and even quiet meditation can seem a loss of Time—but how many fruitful ideas, creative thoughts, and new hypotheses have been born in such moments?”

So let Time play its course. Because this, too, can be productive. I understand that the paradox of Time is that we can never tell if “wasting Time” will serve us. There will always be uncertainty, and we have to learn to live with it. In the end, we will learn and course-correct and add to our existing body of knowledge. Why should we move fast and break things when most failures are a problem of quality, not speed? Why should we move fast and break things when the cost of speed is far greater than the cost of quality? The consequence of rushing, of not appreciating Time in full, is the dearth of quality, and I refuse to live a life or run a business or institution designed in poor quality.