In Praise of Wasting Time (TED Books)

by Alan Lightman

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.

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.

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.

Among other things, the world today is faster, more scheduled, more fragmented, less patient, louder, more wired, more public.

“the wired world.”

Think of this—for better or worse—in connection with the tentacular, the Chthuluscene.

With more speed and productivity, we are richer.

But richer in what ways...

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.

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?

Without the breathing and the voice of my inner self, I am a prisoner of the wired world around me.

“Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent.”

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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.”

The grid. It’s an addiction. We can get another hit with just the push of a button. And like any drug addiction, there’s never enough. We are dependent on the digital flow. We are always waiting for the next hit. We are always running to catch up. We are always behind. FOMO.

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As soon as they sat down, the young women placed their smartphones on the table, like miniature oxygen tanks carried everywhere by emphysema patients.

She says that with the advent of e-mail, her clients want immediate turnaround, even on complex matters, and the practice of law has been “forever changed from a reasoning profession to a marathon.”

The regime of the billable hour presupposes a distorted and harmful account of the meaning and purpose of a lawyer’s time, and therefore, the meaning and purpose of a lawyer’s life, which, after all, is lived in and through time.

The urgency to make every moment count has affected all aspects of life. It permeates our thoughts, our daily routines, our meals, our vacations, our family time, our relationship with our children. It becomes the air we breathe. It puts walls around our mental and psychic space. It even affects our ability to enjoy pleasurable experiences.

DeVoe and House concluded that “the impatience that results from placing a price on time impairs individuals’ ability to derive happiness from pleasurable experiences.”

Of course we’re Generation Stress. We have to be.

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When do they have time to reflect on what they have learned?

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Technology is both blessing and curse. In Thoreau’s day, the new technology was the railroad. “We do not ride on the railroad,” wrote Thoreau, “it rides upon us.” Can I escape? Can I find stillness? A leaf falls from a tree. Slowly, so slowly, I watch it stop time.

In various ways, the escape from structure and schedule, the indulgence in space without time, the development of one’s inner world, and the full release of the imagination are all interconnected.

Play as a space without time

Brian Sutton-Smith, who spent his life studying play, believed that “the benefit play accords each child, who gains confidence in a variety of . . . pretense forms and thereby develops an inner, subjective life, [is] a life that becomes the child’s own relatively private possession . . . . [T]he earliest pretend play . . . serves as the basis for their development of the duality of private and public that we adults take for granted.”

In play, rules are questioned, revised, or dispensed...

Our time-driven existence is diminishing the space for play and damaging our children.

child-driven play.”

Evidently, the decisive factor in increasing creativity seems to have been allowing a period of time to ponder a given problem at a leisurely and subconscious level, exploring possibilities while at play.

Seeding the mind with a particular problem before play may be crucial. In such a case, what appears as procrastination or avoidance of the problem might in fact be a beneficial use of the mind.

As Einstein said, a lot of good thinking and problem solving occurs at the unconscious level. For ...

Psychologist Anthony Pellegrini and others have concluded that play, in animals as well as humans, allows individuals to focus on means rather than ends.

non-goal-oriented activities we call play have been a critical part of the development of problem-solving skills and emotional awareness

but they have also been given the time and space to play with that training.

On one aspect of creativity most researchers agree. It is something called “divergent thinking”: the ability to explore many different avenues and solutions to a problem in a spontaneous and non-orderly fashion. “Convergent thinking,” by contrast, is the more logical and orderly step-by-step approach to a problem. Divergent thinking is more free-flowing than convergent thinking.

Divergent thinking does not cooperate on demand. It is not easily summoned. It does not follow the clock. It cannot be rushed. It withers and fades under external schedules and noise and assignments. Rather, it lollygags along on its own; it sprawls in the sun, taking its own time.

It is possible that both unconscious and conscious thought are required in certain kinds of discovery.

I would argue, however, that in most and perhaps all forms of creative activity, an unencumbered, unregimented, inward-looking mind is required at certain points—a mind that has unplugged from the wired world.

In 1926, the British social psychologist and educator Graham Wallas proposed that creative thinking follows a series of stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and finally verification.

it gives me the impression, as I have said, of having undergone a long incubation, though we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.

When I have worked a long time on one thing, I make it a point to bring all the facts regarding it together before I retire; and I have often been surprised at the results.

many of the discoveries followed the stages of (1) preparation, (2) being stuck, (3) new insight or change of perspective, and finally, (4) discovery.

The “stuckness” itself, the impasse, is important. Being stuck catalyzes the creative imagination. When we are stuck on a problem, our mind roams through a vast terrain of possible solutions—just

This relates to life stages as well...

I believe that getting stuck is often an essential part of the creative process. And when we are stuck—if we have managed to escape the heave and rush of the world, if we have managed to secure solitude and quiet and space without time—then our minds can roam and explore and invent in unfettered freedom. But too often we dread being stuck. Especially our students and young people. We believe that if we are stuck we have failed. On the contrary, we should welcome getting stuck. We should embrace getting stuck. That’s when discovery begins. If we have a prepared mind, if we have done our homework, then getting stuck is a trumpet call to our creative imaginations.

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Kim found that since 1990 there has been a significant decrease in children’s ability to produce unique and unusual ideas and to think in a detailed and reflective manner.

Her words to me: “Life is too short to spend time with people you don’t enjoy being with.”

Mmmmhhhhmmmm

Mental downtime is having the space and freedom to wander about the vast hallways of memory and contemplate who we are. Downtime is when we can ponder our past and imagine our future. Downtime is when we can repair our selves.

I suggest that there is a kind of necessary homeostasis of the mind: not a static equilibrium but a dynamic equilibrium in which we are constantly examining, testing, and replenishing our mental system, constantly securing the mental membrane between ourselves and the external world, constantly reorganizing and affirming ourselves.

Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.

In India [where I grew up] clocks are not of such importance . . . In India, time is like the flow of a river. We just stay in the moment. Time is abundant. It is not like money. It is not going to go away.”

Higher expectations take more time.

with the advent of e-mail, her clients “want immediate turnaround, even on complex matters.”

In such a manner of living, time becomes a steel mesh, laid down by an all-powerful but invisible dictator each morning the moment we wake.