Stockpiling Time

How American society encourages us to squander our lives

For the past several years, one of my most frequent classes has been a basic intro to Ethics in the philosophy department. I initially took it up because it seemed like an easy reach for a Great Books professor to break into larger lecture sections—after all, there is a clear “canon” of core ethical texts. I also found it to be a good way to indulge my larger scholarly interests in a way that’s not possible in the straight-discussion format of the Shimer Great Books School, because I am able to tell a genealogical “political theology”-style story about the emergence of secular ethical categories in the wake of religious authority. To that end, I use Plato’s Euthyphro as a framing text, and students each semester rediscover the running joke that basically every philosopher declares that if there is a God, he would agree with their philosophical system.

Beyond the simple fact of lecturing (which still feels vaguely “wrong” after my Great Books indoctrination), the course has also pushed me in some new and even unexpected directions. Much to my chagrin, I often find myself sounding like a self-help guru. This comes out most when I’m teaching Aristotle, whose ethical approach of developing virtues through forming habits is intrinsically much more “actionable” than Kant or the utilitarians—and in fact, I have adapted another colleague’s practice of assigning them to actually choose a concrete habit to develop over the course of several weeks.

Students consistently seem to find this project very meaningful. Many declare that they plan to keep up their new habit going forward—and indeed, I give them more than the canonical “21 days to form a new habit,” so it may be easier than it sounds. It has been interesting to see how their chosen habits have changed over the years. Early on, it was almost all about screen time, and though I lamented the repetitive nature of the student presentations, I recognized the severe need. More recently, though, students have emphasized more socially-oriented habits, such as developing the habit of friendliness by introducing themselves to classmates or the people who live on their dorm floor. I have perhaps inspired this one by using as my primary example my own father’s oft-repeated story of how he was naturally shy but pushed himself to be outgoing—to the point where he always seemed to be the most naturally social person I knew growing up. I’m glad that I played some small role in pushing them to open up more to others, but it is a little heartbreaking that behaviors we took for granted growing up feel like big achievements to the young adults in my class.

In lecture, I always emphasize that Aristotle’s prescription sounds easy enough, but that it is implicitly very intimidating. Shaping ourselves through habit is not something we do only after reading the Nicomachean Ethics—we are always doing it. Every time you chicken out rather than asking that special someone out, you’re practicing being timid and awkward. Every time you sit silently on your phone instead of talking to the person next to you, you’re getting better at being anti-social. Every moment of every day is a moment that we are shaping ourselves through habit, but—and here comes the self-help mantra—that means every moment is the moment you can begin changing your life.

In this context, inspired by Agamben’s reading of the Myth of Er from The Republic, I also frequently share this quote from Plato:

it looks like everything is at stake for a human being here, and for that reason each of us needs to pay the utmost attention, neglecting all other studies so that he may be a seeker and student of this study [philosophy], if there’s anywhere it’s possible for him to learn and find out what will make him capable and knowledgeable for distinguishing a worthwhile life from a worthless one, in order at all times and places to choose the life that’s better from among those that are possible. (618c, Grube translation as revised by Reeve)

As Agamben points out, this quote comes in the middle of Plato’s bizarre concluding myth, which seems to offer us all the freedom to choose our lives before birth but relentlessly renders that choice less and less free and less and less meaningful. The fantasy of controlling the broad circumstances of our life is undeniably attractive, but it will still always be us doing the choosing. If something like Plato’s myth of reincarnation is true, then, the only way to increase our odds of making the right choice is to become a better person now. And conveniently, even if that myth is false, we will nevertheless enjoy the benefits that come with working toward the only thing that really matters in life.

According to Plato and Aristotle, then, we really can change our lives. All it takes is a clear-eyed view of our actual situation and some degree of control over our activities. Obviously not everyone has that, and to be fair, Plato and Aristotle acknowledge that their advice only really applies to a relatively privileged segment of society. Equally obviously, though, students and professors at a private small liberal arts college presumably do enjoy the prerequites for self-improvement—as do, I daresay, the majority of people living in the most affluent and highly educated society ever to exist.

The relative privilege of America—not enjoyed by everyone, as I’m sure the online hordes would hasten to remind me!—makes us a kind of natural experiment in whether people want to take that kind of responsibility for their lives. And I believe the answer is clearly no. For evidence, I draw on two stories from this morning’s New York Times (both of which are gift links, so you don’t have to worry about “supporting” a national general-interest newspaper that sometimes publishes things you don’t like).

The first covers the growing reliance on delivery apps, including sometimes quite shocking anecdotal accounts of people spending upwards of $700 a week on the old Burrito Taxi. Many of the heavy users explain their behavior remarkably passively, through some combination of external time constraint and the siren song of instant gratification. Despite their awareness of the negative consequences of their actions for their own finances (not to mention on the full-grown adults who spend their days carrying around lazy people’s food), they can’t help but train their four-year-old child to place a Chik-fil-A order—they are victims of human finitude and evolutionary hard wiring.

I have a response to both of their excuses. To the claim of poor impulse control, I can only say: grow up. And to the claim of lacking time, I respond: time for what? Doubtless many people are working excessive hours and feel pressured to fill their childrens’ days with relentless CV lines. I get that. But preparing food is not some chore that you get out of the way to get back to your real life. Taking care of yourself, taking care of your children, teaching your children to take care of themselves—that just is life. If you stopped ordering the Burrito Taxi, maybe you wouldn’t need to work as many hours. And if you taught your child the basic skills of being a person, you would be giving them a bigger advantage in school and on the job market than any contrived extracurricular could possibly do. At the very least, by modelling an approach to life that doesn’t approach every day like an optimizable checklist, you might help them to escape that anxiety and malaise that paralyzes most of their peers—directly improving their everyday quality of life in a way that is presumably worthwhile even if it does not lead directly to better employment opportunities.

The second discusses a scientific study finding that longevity appears to depend primarily on genetics rather than lifestyle factors. I find such stories satisfying because my intuition is that almost all claims to maximize “wellness,” and certainly all attempts at de-ageing, are bullshit scams. As in the Myth of Er, it is comforting to imagine that we have control over our health and lifespan, but that appears to be tantamount to believing we can choose our parents. I have fallen victim to this tendency as well, having spent a few years trying to find a “natural” solution to elevated blood pressure that was almost certainly an unfixable genetic inheritance. This quest did have the side-benefit of getting me into a workout routine, which—whether or not it extends my lifespan—makes me feel stronger and more confident right now. But in retrospect, I just didn’t want to admit that I was getting older and would have to start thinking about my body in a different way. I now realize that my refusal to simply pop the pills when they were first suggested was foolish and a little desperate: in short, the dreaded loser behavior.

Taken together, these articles are symptomatic of a deep dynamic of American culture. We completely neglect the things that are actually under our control (e.g., the development of impulse control or the way we apportion our time) while lavishing huge amounts of effort on things that are not meaningfully under our control at all (viz., the broad strokes of our health and longevity). Indeed, we tend to make the latter into sites of moral shaming, as in our society-wide harassment campaign against all those whose genetic make-up gives them a higher natural body weight, while excusing and even praising those who most comprehensively refuse to cultivate themselves, such as the current president and all his pathetic sycophants.

In this context, I think that Plato’s dualism, while admittedly extreme, does get at a basic truth: our character and our minds are more important than our bodies. Yes, we should care for our bodies, but the reasonable baseline is fairly easily maintained for most. Not for everyone, to be sure! Many people need and deserve more medical support than they are getting, and that is a political and economic problem that we should address. But our moralized attitudes toward health and body type do not help the situation, because they encourage us to think of all health problems as the person’s “own fault” and to muse about whether they “deserve” to have public resources devoted to making up for their own supposed mistakes. Again, yes, there are people who are effectively killing themselves through their lifestyle—like the cheerful alcoholic from The Pitt—but they are extreme outliers. A rational society would reserve some of the scorn we direct at the “unhealthy” at those who squander countless hours in pursuit of the ridiculous spectacle of “six-pack abs” or who devote so much time and effort to lifespan extension that their present-day life appears absolutely miserable.

The two stories also come together in a different way, because they both touch on our cultural obsession with “saving time.” In the case of the delivery app article, it’s a question of the “convenience” that gives us “more time” in the moment, while in the longevity article, it’s more about stockpiling big chunks of time for later through how we spend our time now. But in neither case do I think anyone has any idea of what they’re saving that time for, what they want to live for. If you “don’t have time” to model and teach your children the basic skills of life, if you waste the prime years of your life obsessing over whether you’ll live to be 83 or merely 78, I don’t know what life even is to you—except for maybe a way to score points, or dopamine hits.

Maybe one reason we can’t seem to sustain a liveable society is that we are trying to do so with people who don’t have any idea what it would mean to live. But then again, they don’t know what it means to live because society is giving them meaningless and destructive models and goals, because society itself is devoted to nothing but the self-underming effort to run up the score by stockpiling abstract value as such. But just as you cannot, finally, save time, neither can we store up value or meaning or labor to use later—and perhaps the crisis we are living through is what happens when we try to cash in on all that value we accumulated and realize that there’s nothing there.