Masroof zamana
kyun mujhpe,
Waqt apna barbaad
kare?
-Kabhi Kabhi
(1976)
(Why
should this busy world waste its time on me?)
Premise
24 hours in a day, 7
days in a week and 52 weeks in a year. In a world increasingly beset
by inequalities, time is an equal opportunity provider. It does not
care if you are rich or poor, party-animal or recluse, slacker or
workaholic. Warren Buffet, Elon Musk and I, all get the same amount
of time. There is no new technology, no app, that can (yet?) increase
the time available to us. There is however plenty that modern
technology has done to place increasing demands on our time. The
choice of things to do available to anyone with a smart phone is
enormous: from playing candy crush to writing a book; offering almost
endless possibilities to amuse and entertain ourselves. All these
possibilities make it very difficult to value time.
A commonly used
measure of value is money. The money value of time suggests that the
time of a high-flying corporate executive is much more valuable than
of a retiree. But the retiree could spend his time watching a movie
instead of indulging his/her grandchild. To the extent that our
individual valuations are affected by options available, in recent
times the premium on everyones time has gone through the roof. There
is always something 'better' that we could be doing, learning, being
more productive, watching a movie, playing a game, browsing Facebook.
15 years ago, if there was no good show on TV at 6pm in the evening,
the most common way to pass-time was to go meet friends (real people,
not the show). Today, they could just look up re-runs of friends (the
show).
People and Time
Spending time with
people is messy business. In some case the complaints never seem to
end, in others unbounded enthusiasm and zest for living seem to be
based on distorted sense of reality. Either experience may trigger a
negative evaluations of our own lives. People can also be terribly
boring, not all of them funny and almost no one seems to get the idea
that timing is the essence of humor. Then there are the troubles of
trying to figure out what is appropriate and what is not, leading to
many an awkward silence. There are those insufferable know-it-alls,
the ones who just cannot stop arguing over trivial matters,
the ideologues and if you have spent any time in the US recently,
those who cant stop talking about trump. People also seem to have
this tendency to impose negative externalities; shrill voice, second
hand smoke, body odor, farts, grumbling stomach sounds. Spending time
with people also imposes compromises. Its Tuesday and the special at
this Chinese place is always great, but no one else seems to like it
and so the Thai place it is.
All of this is made
infinitely worse by the possibilities offered by a computer. The
comic timing of all the characters in (your show/movie/game of
choice) is always spot on. They do not bore you with their problems
in life and even when they do, the drama is exquisitely scripted. You
can eat anything you like (and can pay for) while watching them and
there are no awkward silences. And if a show is too preachy, or a
movie is too slow or a game is not engaging enough, its not much effort
to change to a different one. You could also choose to be productive
instead, why bother with characters when you can gorge on knowledge.
Sate your curiosity with something that places no demands on you. You
can still eat anything you like (and can pay for), zone out as
frequently as you like and wikipedia still lets you click your way
through millions of pages of information. Better still you could use
the time to make sure that you do better at your job, write a better
academic paper, get your PhD quicker. In fact, given how difficult
and frustrating it is to spend some time with another human-being
compared to the alternatives, it is astonishing to think that we
evolved as social creatures.
The gift of time
By
now this may seem like another bleak prognosis of the impact of
technology on human society. But I am trying to address a much more
important question: What is a good valentine's day gift? Is a
bouquet of roses the best expression of your love? Or if you are the
sort who does not restrict their celebration of valentines day to
romantic love, how expensive should a greeting card for your mother
be to adequately convey your love for her? Maybe it should it a sari
this time, given that you have started earning. Or maybe given your
recent wanderlust, a package tour to (fill in a fun/interesting
place). How about your friends? A message on the Whatsapp group
should be enough. To the really special ones, maybe a pm on Facebook,
maybe even an email if its been a while.
In fact these
concerns are not specific to valentine's day. We frequently struggle
with the general problem of valuing relationships. How do we convey
to someone that we value them and conversely, how to we figure out
how much others values us? My contention is that only reasonable way
to convey how much we value a relationship is with time. No amount of
money or hard-work will make 1 hour of time less than 1 hour of time.
This is specially true today when there is so much else that we could
be doing with our time. Every moment spent talking to someone is time
that could have been spent watching your favorite show or learning
how to program better or working towards that big promotion.
A rich/spendthrift
partner or spouse maybe able to splurge on trip. Does that mean that
they value you more that someone who is poorer/stingier? Is the
friend who gets you a job a better friend than the one who is
struggling to hold onto his own? On the other hand; we all have time,
we all have fixed amounts of it and it has become more valuable to
everyone given the choices that we have today. Time offers a better
way to both convey how much we value someone and to figure out how
much someone values us.
The uncle who spent
hours indulging you, the mother who gets up an hour early to make the
breakfast you like, the father who spends his evening teaching you
how to play cricket properly, the friend who finds time for a call,
the sibling who suffers your long stories are the people who are more
likely to value you and the relationship you share with them. We are
all difficult people to spend time with and its tempting to sit by
your computer browsing through valentines day catalogs to find gifts
to give away. But this valentine's day gift some time to the people
you love, see how that goes.
PS: In fact sometimes how much we value a relationship maybe determined by the time we spend on it. Like any precious resource, there is always risks related to investment of time. But the payoffs maybe high, how much of risk taker are you?
