The Last Time
And yet I hope it’s clear by now that none of this applies only to people who happen to be the parents of small children. Certainly, it’s true that a fast-developing newborn baby makes it especially hard to ignore the fact that life is a succession of transient experiences, valuable in themselves, which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on the destination to which you hope they might be leading. But the author and podcast host Sam Harris makes the disturbing observation that the same applies to everything: our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.
Admittedly, it’s not entirely our own fault that we approach our finite time in such a perversely instrumental and future-focused way. Powerful external pressures push us in this direction, too, because we exist inside an economic system that is instrumentalist to its core. One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d care to admit.
And yet we’d be fooling ourselves to put all the blame on capitalism for the way in which modern life so often feels like a slog, to be “gotten through” en route to some better time in the future. The truth is that we collaborate with this state of affairs. We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future—that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems—you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.
John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.” Because he never has to “cash out” the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he’s truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.
Absent in the Present
Attempting to “live in the moment,” to find meaning in life now, brings its own challenges too, though. Have you ever actually tried it? Despite the insistence of modern mindfulness teachers that it’s a speedy path to happiness—and despite a growing body of psychological research on the benefits of “savoring,” or making the deliberate effort to appreciate life’s smaller pleasures—it turns out to be bewilderingly difficult to do. In his hippie classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes arriving with his young son beside the blazing blue expanse of Crater Lake in Oregon, a collapsed prehistoric volcano that is America’s deepest body of water. He’s determined to get the most out of the experience, yet somehow he fails: “[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at this, just a feeling
that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to.” The more you try to be here now, to point at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like you aren’t here now—or alternatively that you are, but that the experience has been drained of all its flavor.
I know how Pirsig must have felt. Several years ago, I visited Tuktoyaktuk, a small town in the extreme north of Canada’s Northwest Territories. At the time, it was accessible only by air or sea or, in winter, by the route I took, which involved traveling in an off-road vehicle along the surface of a frozen river, past ships immobilized in ice for the season, and then driving upon the frozen Arctic Ocean itself. My journalistic assignment concerned the fight between Canada and Russia for oil resources beneath the North Pole—but naturally, having heard so much about them, I also wanted to see the northern lights. Several nights running, I forced myself outside into minus-thirty-degree-Celsius cold—a temperature at which the moisture inside your nose turns to ice the moment you inhale—to find only the darkness of thick cloud cover. It wasn’t until my last night there, shortly after two o’clock in the morning, that the couple renting the neighboring cabin at my bed-and-breakfast tapped excitedly on my door to tell me the time had come: the northern lights were on display. I threw some clothes over my full-body thermal underwear and stepped out under a cathedral sky, filled with moving curtains of green light, sweeping from horizon to horizon. I was determined to relish the exhibition, which the next morning locals would describe as a particularly impressive one. But the more I tried, the less I seemed able to do so. By the time I was getting ready to return to the warmth of my cabin, I was so far from being absorbed in the moment that a thought occurred to me, regarding the northern lights, which to this day I squirm to recall. Oh, I found myself thinking, they look like one of those screen savers.
The problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist, future-focused mindset I’ve been criticizing in this chapter, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself. It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing. You resolve to stay completely present while, say, washing the dishes—perhaps because you saw that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh about finding absorption in the most mundane of activities—only to discover that you can’t, because you’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re being present enough or not. The phrase “be here now” calls to mind images of bearded stoners in bell-bottomed pants, utterly relaxed about whatever’s happening around them. Yet in fact the attempt to be here now feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous—and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail. My favorite example of this effect is the 2015 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in which couples were instructed to have sex twice as frequently as usual for a two-month period. At the end of this time, the study concluded, they weren’t any happier than they had been at the start. This finding was widely reported as demonstrating that a more active sex life isn’t as enjoyable as you might have imagined. But what it really shows, I’d say, is that trying too hard to have a more active sex life is no fun at all.
A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not. After all, your self-conscious thoughts about whether you’re sufficiently focused on washing the dishes—or whether you’re enjoying the extra sex you’re having these days, since agreeing to participate in that psychology study—are thoughts arising in the present moment, too. And if you’re inescapably already in the moment, there’s surely something deeply dubious about trying to bring that state of affairs about. To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it. For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” is the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps—to modify your relationship to the present moment in time, when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with.
As the author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.” Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.
9.
Rediscovering Rest
One boiling summer weekend a few years ago, I joined the impassioned members of a campaigning group called Take Back Your Time in an airless university lecture theater in Seattle, where they’d assembled to further their long-standing mission of “eliminating the epidemic of overwork.” The gathering in which I participated, their annual conference, was a sparsely attended affair—in part because, as the organizers conceded, it was August, and lots of people were on vacation, and America’s most stridently pro-relaxation organization could hardly complain about that. But it was also because Take Back Your Time promotes what counts, these days, as a highly subversive message. There’s nothing unusual about its demands for more days off or shorter working hours; such proposals are increasingly common. But they are almost always justified on the grounds that a well-rested worker is a more productive worker—and it was precisely this rationale that the group had been set up to question. Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? “You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventyish filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense!” Later, I learned about the existence of a rival initiative, Project: Time Off, which, unlike Take Back Your Time, enjoyed generous corporate sponsorship, and better-attended conferences—and it was no surprise to learn that its mission was to promote “the personal, business, social and economic benefits” of leisure. It was also backed by the US Travel Association, which has its own reasons for wanting people to take more vacations.
The Decline of Pleasure
De Graaf had put his finger on one of the sneakier problems with treating time solely as something to be used as well as possible, which is that we start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too. Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the headline on one hugely popular New York Times piece). But a more surreptitious form of the same attitude has also infected your friend who always seems to be training for a 10K, yet who’s apparently incapable of just going for a run: she has convinced herself that running is a meaningful thing to do only insofar as it might lead toward a future accomplishment. And it infected me, too, during the years I spent a
ttending meditation classes and retreats with the barely conscious goal that I might one day reach a condition of permanent calm. Even an undertaking as seemingly hedonistic as a year spent backpacking around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose isn’t to explore the world but—a subtle distinction, this—to add to your mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you’ll feel, later on, that you’d used your life well.
The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. This was a pitfall the critic Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: “We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit, party for contacts … gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.” Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.
Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243) Page 11
