Spending Time
How did our ancestors manage newborns in addition to the wood-chopping, fire-feeding, water-hauling, livestock-tending and crop-growing upon which their survival depended?
New babies introduce a ton of new tasks to a day already chock-a-block with chores. Fortunately for new parents like my son and his partner, we live in an age where many of these tasks can be delegated to a device. Better yet, with just a few keystrokes these devices—breast pump, bottle sterilizer, bottle warmer, diaper washer—can be delivered overnight. What a thing! Marvelous!!
Yet ever since reading Tim Wu’s excellent essay, The Tyranny of Convenience, I can’t not see the staggering price that our modern ease carries—one that goes well beyond the cost of the time-savers themselves. Can I square my craving for chore relief with the ravaging of the environment? With the commodification of our individuality? With the dismantling of democracy?
I want to be freed from what for most of human history has been known as women’s work: the cooking and cleaning and shopping and systems-management that homes and families so relentlessly require. I indeed have better things to do with my time, which is growing short, than loading and unloading the dishwasher. I like to read, and to reflect. I like to ponder natural mysteries—How do bears find enough calories to fuel their mass? Where do hummingbirds sit out hurricanes? Why did humans evolve such enormous brains, necessitating their offspring be born utterly helpless?—while being out in nature. I especially love to do this in the company of like-minded people. This makes me extremely grateful for my iShark.
I also love—as in, swoon with pleasure—tapping into the universes my smartphone contains. That I can summon hours of entertainment—Abraham Verghese reading The Covenant of Water, Nate Hagens debating the existence of free will, Imelda May belting out“Big Bad Handsome Man”—as I drive the interstate or rake leaves or cook dinner is nothing short of stupendous. That I can have Siri scavenge the Web and produce an answer that solves a problem (affordable replacement lids for Pyrex storage containers!) is delegation at its best. That I can deposit a check or pay a bill or transfer money while sitting at my kitchen table is the very zenith of convenience. I thank God for my iPhone every hour of the day.
If this sounds like the rationalizing of a lazy selfish hedonist, well, yeah. I am a product of this Age, this Culture, of Convenience. I’m not ready to disavow its joys.
Here’s what I can do, however: be far more intentional in how I use the time that my devices reclaim for me. I want to make sure, whenever I unleash my iShark, that I don’t waste the hour it gives me comparing vitamin brands on Amazon. I want to make sure, next time I pick up my iPhone seeking thrills, that it propels me into an unfamiliar forest rather than down the rabbit hole that is Instagram. I want to be sure, next time I summon Siri, that she opens a topic worth exploring instead of delivering a fact that forecloses all further inquiry.
Convenience, I know, isn’t the answer to every problem. But how to spend the time it buys us? That is the question we should be asking ourselves every day.
