On the Gift of Time

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?