Tick, tick, tickin’ away
Are we saving time or is time wasting us?
February 20, 2008
Chrystal Vible
I stand at a crossroads, two means to an end, the end being dry hands. I can either go right and, in a matter of six seconds, dole out a lengthy piece of paper from the towel dispenser and rub my hands dry. Or for the price of 34 seconds, I can go left and watch the droplets that cover my hands shrink and evaporate under the invisible warm air of the electric hand dryer. Both are means to arrive at the desired end, dry hands, differing only in their approximate lengths of time from execution to completion, by 28 seconds.
Concerned here with the specific effects on the environment, I am instead choosing to analyze the effects of this monster called time on our health and well-being. Let’s think about this. With the four minutes I saved driving just 10 km over the speed limit to get to school this morning, and with the 42 seconds I saved grabbing the closest parking spot to RNT, and with the 23 minutes I saved eating at the caf before class rather than cooking, I have banked approximately 27 minutes and 42 seconds of time to spend on – well, that’s the question.
What do we do with all of our saved time? I suggest we’ve fallen prey to a huge scandal. We look down smiling at this monster called time, thinking that it’s him we have tamed, when really, it’s time who has made his white-knuckled grip our permanent home. Is it not the biggest irony that Facebook, an networking site meant to help us save time in making the most distant relationships easier to maintain, is the most popular thing for people on campus to give up for Lent? Is it because people feel bad working on those hard-to-keep-up relationships? No, countless hours are spend looking at pictures of people we don’t even know. Facebook is meant to save us time, but we happily sacrifice our time to it.
We value technology for its time saving capabilities, but we use that saved time on things that distract us from the fact that our lives lack meaning. So I comment not on the meaning of life, (that’s for you, along with all the great minds in history, to ponder), but on our time saved and time wasted.
Instead of racing against the clock, which is in the end a race only against myself, I’ll try to choose to take those extra 28 seconds, relax those oh-so-tense-muscles in my shoulders, and take a long deep breath, feel my heart beating at a constant pace that tells me I don’t really have as much as control I think I do. I’ll think about that tree that’s still growing rather than being wiped in between my hands and being tossed into the garbage, not because I want to save time, but because I don’t want time to waste me.
Now you go...
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