The ticking time bomb

My father has often narrated an incident that happened years ago when he was visiting with his niece.  It was approaching dinner time and his niece suggested that he eat.  Especially because of the old tradition, my father wanted to dine with the niece's husband.

The in-law asked my father to go ahead.  My father was barely done with dinner when the in-law sat down to eat.

This would come across as strange to anybody.  So, of course, my father remarked about it and wondered why the in-law didn't join him at the table.

I will give you the time to read this for you to come up with your explanation.

It turned out that the in-law would eat only at the designated time.  He wouldn't advance it by even a couple of minutes.

While that person's behavior might be extreme, the reality is that we are all conditioned by the clock.  A strange Pavlovian behavior modification that compels us to get up by a certain time, eat at a certain hour, work at designated times, ... instead of eating when hungry, going to bed when we are tired, ...

What if we had no structure that coordinated all our clocks?  Of course humans have marked the passing of time.  But, the clock that we look at is a modern construct.  Clocks across the world being coordinated is even more recent.  Like with everything else that we humans have created for ourselves, we don't pause to consider our relationship with the clock that we invented:

[Kevin] Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on. 

So, what is really going on?

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time.

The confusion shows up in daily and long-term behaviors.  Ordering young ones to bed, for instance, when it is still light outside during these long summer days is as odd as waking up teenagers at six on cold and dark winter mornings so that they can get to school at eight!  We fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.  Our construct of time through the clock also warps our understanding of long-term issues like the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change.

"For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time."  Nature has rhythms, yes, but is not bound by the seconds of the clocks that we use.  While we debate about the "daylight time" versus "standard time" of the clock, it has no effect on the flora and the fauna around us, which is why farmers operate on a different schedule from us urban dwellers.  Cows have to be milked not when the daylight savings clock-time says they have to be milked!

We live in a strange world in which we even have meetings in which people across the world participate, which means that some of the participants are interrupting their sleep and dinner and sex and whatever in order to be at the meetings.  And then we wonder why we have physical and health problems!

There's no going back to a way of life without clocks that are coordinated.  There's no possibility of operating with a local measure of the passing of time that depends on the movement of the sun and the moon, and our minds and bodies responding to the local stimuli.  But, we should certainly assess our own relationship with the clock that controls us.

Dying slower: The curse of longevity

"You will be working for at least 45 years after you graduate" is something that I have been telling students for a long time.

I am not sure if any student gives a damn about it.

I suppose at 18, I would not have imagined 45 long years, when the prospect of 4 years of undergrad itself was huge.  Think about the proportions: 4 out of 18, and then 45 compared to 18.

As difficult as it might be to imagine these time horizons, we will be better off if we tried to.

If we did think about 45 years of working, and living into the 8th and 9th decade of one's life, then we might begin to appreciate the complex aspects of life.  We are already living nearly immortal lives compared to the average human a mere 200 years ago, when globally the life expectancy at birth was a mere 35 years.

When conditions have changed this rapidly, it also means that the magnitude of change has yet to sink into our collective consciousness.  Is it any wonder, for instance, that divorce rates are increasing?  Mating for life for about 2 decades before death strikes at 35 is different from mating for life for 70 years, right?  Not for everybody:  “Thirty more years of this joker? No way.”

What are we going to do with longevity anyway, when we are already bored enough that we watch endless cat videos?

After all, as writer Susan Ertz wryly observed in her 1943 novel “Anger in the Sky,” “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

I don't think it is any accident that our entertainment options have exploded an infinite number of ways along with the increasing life expectancy.  We have no idea how to spend our time, and are often bored out of our wits.  I won't be surprised if there is a show that is nothing but watching the paint dry. Oh wait, we already have that!

I am not sure if we are ready for longer and longer lifespans.  Yet, apparently we wish for longevity and immortality.  Be careful for what you wish for!

Health before wealth

Ever since I came across the phrase sanitas per escam, well, that is a motto that I have used a lot.  Even my food photographs on Facebook, before I took it all down, were in an album under that title.

My food photographs.  As in I made them. I took those photographs too.  And, yes, there was a separate album for foods made by M.

We continue to cook most of our meals.  And we continue to plate and serve in a manner that is pleasing to the eye as well.  We have simply stopped taking photographs.  We cook, we eat, and we enjoy.  Just like humans always did for the longest time.

Cooking and cleaning takes up time, of course.  No wonder I don't have time for Game of Thrones or whatever else that people are talking about.  Heck, I don't even get enough time in the day for me to play bridge online!

Well, yes, such tasty and healthy meals all the time means that I might live past 75, and die only at 99.6 years of age; but, that is a different problem for another day.

But, is spending time on Game of Thrones, or Facebook, or whatever else more important and valuable than cooking ones own meals?  Do people ask themselves this question?

The author of this op-ed argues something similar, by particularly aiming at what he refers to as The Prepared Food Industrial Complex.  Like the ones that young people rave about. Sometimes even the older ones.  But, ...

The $17 billion- a-year food delivery market is very flexible and well-intentioned like that. All these companies want to do is give me my life back by keeping me out of the kitchen — more time for YouTube, more time for CrossFit — and they’ve created myriad ways to do so.

I don't ever understand why time spent for cooking is a waste, and why time spent at the office or at a ballpark or in front of a digital screen is more valuable!

In fact, much of the P.F.I.C. pushes the idea that any time and any effort put into cooking is a waste. The goal, one meal kit company declares, is “saving time to make time — for everything else you want to do.” (Just so long as what you want to do isn’t “cook from scratch.”) Another meal kit service praises mail-order smoothies as a life-changing idea because there’s “no time to research, prep, buy, measure and blend before work.”

An acquaintance once joked that in most homes the kitchen is the most expensive real estate that is never used.  If only that was indeed a joke and not the reality!  Perhaps uber-clean stove-tops and ovens are no longer the result of prideful home-cleaning but merely a reflection of non-usage.

People who cook at home are conclusively healthier, consuming less sodium and fewer overall calories than people who mostly eat out. Cooking at home is better for the planet: it avoids the single-use plastics and paper goods that delivered food usually comes with, and with just a bit of creativity with leftovers, home cooking can be entirely free of food waste. Cooking is being studied as a promising tool for improving mental health, and even as a method for eliminating unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. And no matter what restaurant you order in from, there’s always a home-cooked meal that can be made for less money.

People seem to want to deny all these facts when they talk about the convenience of eating out all the time.  Crazy!

I am with the author when he writes:

Do I cook at home every day of the year? No. I love the burger at my favorite bistro too much to do that.

Yep. Same here.  Our burger bistros are different, however ;)

Sanitas per escam!

Cooking things up

The kitchen has always been a magical place for me.  Maybe because I started hanging around the kitchen right from when I can remember.  Why wouldn't I with all the awesome aromas and the chance to taste dishes and sweets and snacks right off the flame?  Oh that taste of butter that was churned right in front of my very eyes!

The excitement of the magic hasn't worn away even one bit.  I try, in my own ways, to create that magic and share it.  But, I know well that I am a part of a tiny minority.  We are practically an endangered species.  Barely ten percent of Americans love cooking.  Barely ten! "Only 10% of consumers now love to cook, while 45% hate it and 45% are lukewarm about it."  We can expect a lot more of the percentage to shift from the lukewarm category to hate.

It might seem bizarre that fewer amongst us like to cook even as the number of cooking shows has significantly grown, along with a tremendous growth in the number of people watching those shows.  "our fondness for Food TV has inspired us to watch more Food TV, and to want to eat more, but hasn’t increased our desire to cook."  Most people are mere spectators watching those shows, similar to how they are spectators when it comes to many other forms of entertainment--from wrestling to football to reality shows!

The trend is one in which people opt to buy prepared meals--the prepared ones in the grocery stores or made-to-order in restaurants.  People don't even brew their morning coffee at home, it seems like.  Why else would there be long lines at coffee kiosks?  At this rate, homes and apartments of the future might not even have to "waste" space for kitchens!

I wonder what people do with the time that they have from not spending it on shopping for groceries, preparing meals, and cleaning up the kitchens.  Is Facebooking and Instagramming that much a valuable use of time?  The government's "time use survey" from 2016 gives us an idea:

Notice how small that bar is across "household activities"?  Let's look at the breakdown of that category:

Food preparation and cleanup registers at barely half-an-hour a day, on an average.  At that low average number of hours, the best one could do is warm up frozen burritos in the microwave!

Oh well, I suppose this is yet another aspect of life in which I am out of step with the majority.  Time for me to have some home-made food ;)

Stuff doesn't make you happy. HAHAHAHA!

I laugh because they had to do research in order to figure that out, when even half-baked and pretentious irreligious philosophers who blab, er, blog everyday have been saying that forever, channeling the wisdom from the old country!

I had to follow up on this 60-second science podcast at Scientific American.  I simply had to.

"One of the most common things people do with their money is get stuff," Norton tells Harvard Business Review. But research shows that "things" don't make you happy.
Instead, spend your hard earned cash on what Norton calls "prosocial" experiences — like a vacation or dinner with the family.

Seriously, how is this any different from the age old wisdom?

"When you ask people the secret to happiness, they talk about living with purpose or having close relationships," says Norton. And while money can get in the way of that — if you work all the time at a job you hate, for example — spending money on things that foster those goals actually does increase well-being.

Seriously, how is this any different from the age old wisdom?

There is one aspect of the research that deserves serious thought and discussions.  According to researchers--at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School--"using money to buy free time -- such as paying to delegate household chores like cleaning and cooking -- is linked to greater life satisfaction."

"People who hire a housecleaner or pay the kid next door to mow the lawn might feel like they're being lazy," said study lead author Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at Harvard Business School who carried out the research as a PhD candidate in the UBC department of psychology. "But our results suggest that buying time has similar benefits for happiness as having more money."
...
"The benefits of buying time aren't just for wealthy people," said UBC psychology professor and the study's senior author Elizabeth Dunn. "We thought the effects might only hold up for people with quite a bit of disposable income, but to our surprise, we found the same effects across the income spectrum."

I suspect that this buying time contributes to one's happiness if that time were spent on "prosocial" experiences.  But, if that bought time were spent on, say, playing video games or mindless Facebooking, then I would think that the person comes out worse off.

There is another easy way to buy oneself time--simply cut the unnecessary waste of time.  Especially because of a fear of missing out, people increasingly seem to want to be engaged in a gazillion things and seemingly all at the same time.  Instead, if only people can be disciplined enough to simplify, simplify, and simplify; they would then have plenty of time to spend on "prosocial" experiences.

I would have told you all that for free without the "insights" from a HBS research, for which lots of money would have been spent.  But then, ahem, nobody listens to me! ;)

Food for thought

Having a few people around the dinner table is always a wonderful learning opportunity for me--to understand how human I am and, therefore, how much I prove that to err is human.  I never fail to err, it turns out.  I suppose that unlike that guy with a pointy cap, I am not infallible ;)

Getting together with people is about more than food, of course.  But, does the food have to be home-cooked?  Do people consider that as a waste of time?

I recall a husband teasing his wife at a party that the kitchen in their home is the most expensive room with all the fancy upgrades they had made, because now they were eating out more than before.  She immediately put him in his place with a sharp comeback.  The rest of us experienced quite an awkward moment.  We men, believing we are funny, easily connect our feet and mouths.  I suppose it is best for the males not to talk at dinners, whether or not the food is home-cooked ;)

Of course, cooking and food are not new questions.  Not new to this blog, where Soylent has been featured in more posts than I would like to.  But, seriously, how many of us would completely opt out of cooking if we could?

Take my favourite example, from a ground-breaking, obsessively detailed ethnography of the material culture of 32 middle-class Los Angeles households based on research conducted at UCLA between 2001 and 2005. In the resulting book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (2012), the authors note that when families in the study cooked weekday dinners from fresh, rather than pre-packaged, ingredients, it took only 10 to 12 minutes longer, on average, than preparing a convenience-food meal. Nonetheless, most of the parents in the study cite time scarcity as the reason they rely on frozen pizza, boxed macaroni-and-cheese, microwave dinners and takeout for two-thirds of their family’s weeknight meals.

Interesting, right?  As I read that, I was thinking about my latest restaurant experience.  Time to drive to the restaurant and then the time driving back.  The waiting time. The time it takes for the food to arrive.  It is not as if eating out takes way less time than cooking at home with all the modern convenient gadgets.

"Why, then, is eating convenience food viewed as a timesaving strategy?"

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’

How strange, right?  It comes back to that one thing that I have always argued is what education is fundamentally all about: Thinking.  In this case, the family food preparer can't be bothered with investing the time need to think about what to cook and to, therefore, plan out the sequence of actions.

More than anything else, "food is the primary means by which we embody and enact our shifting, species-shaping relationship with natural world." We now have more than anecdotal evidence that kids do not know where the food comes from.  My favorite on this is a news report a few years ago on how a bunch of elementary school kids were "traumatized" when their teacher explained how Elsie becomes the hamburger that they like.

Oh well ... I suppose the only advantage with not cooking is this: There won't be dishes to clean.  I now head to the kitchen to wash those pots and pans.  Poor me!

Money stinks? Look who is talking!

There is no free lunch.  Which means, something offered for "free" has some hidden cost that perhaps we do not think about.

Think about the old days of television.  No, not in the old country, where in the old days there was only one channel--the government channel.  I am referring to the old days in the new country, before my time here.  The old days before cable.  As long as people had television sets at home, they could watch the shows for "free."  Except, well, they had to put up with the advertisements.

So, let us see how that business model worked.  A bunch of people got paid to air the programs and they made money from the advertisements that were targeted at the viewers who were paying for it with the time that they wasted watching the shows that ranged from the inane to the profound. Time is money, folks!

Now, consider a different business model that is contemporary.  There is only one thing that people need to do--sit around and waste their time.  It does not matter how they waste their time as long as they waste it.  They can talk about the food they ate, the music they listened to, the politician they hate, or watch cats playing pianos.  Or, heck, even complain about their constipation!  All they have to do is waste their time talking.  Of course, they don't have to pay anything other than with their time.  This is Facebook's business model:

Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise.

Facebook does not judge you for the high-calorie food that you ate, or the expensive shoes you bought, or whatever it is that you did;  all the creators of that medium want is you wasting your time and other people's time talking about it in Facebook.  What a simple business model, right?  Highly profitable too because we humans love wasting time talking shit!

Pundits made a big deal this week about how Facebook excelled as Apple stumbled. But there was a warning for Facebook in Apple’s results. Apple has relied heavily on one product — the iPhone — for much of its revenue, so when sales of the device slowed, there was little Apple could do to keep growing. Facebook is even more reliant on a single element: advertising revenue. If people spend markedly less time on Facebook — because an enticing new network comes along, for example — the company’s revenue growth could slow.

"If people spend markedly less time on Facebook" is where everything hangs.  It does not look like the trend curve will shift anytime soon.  Which means, yep, people talking shit makes Mark Zuckerberg stinking rich.  Ah, yes, there's a sucker born every minute ;)

Full Disclosure:
While I have vastly cut down my Facebook time, my account is alive
Yesterday, I posted there this photo of the dinner that I cooked ;)

The golden handcuffs from a Faustian bargain

If I described the working conditions like this:

people [work] so hard that they will not have time for such mundane things as buying lunch or popping to the dry-cleaners

And, if the workers considered taking a vacation, then the workplace seems to tell them, “take as little as possible, and as much as you dare.”

There is a fair chance that you would think those are not the best of working conditions.   If you are committed to anything left of the political center, you would be ready to launch into a tirade against those damn corporations that suck the life out of their workers--but you would be only half-right.  If you are coming to these issues from the other side of the political spectrum, you would shrug your shoulders and mutter that these are individual's choices and they can quit if they want to--you, too, would be half right ;)

Of course it is those damn corporations.  But, these are not any iron chains holding workers as slaves. Nope, these are "golden handcuffs" that chain tech workers to their desks or futons or whatever else:

Tech firms that offer lavish perks to their staff do not do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They offer them because they expect people to work so hard that they will not have time for such mundane things as buying lunch or popping to the dry-cleaners. As Gerald Ledford of the University of Southern California’s business school puts it, they are “golden handcuffs” to keep people at their desks. Some of the most extravagant perks are illusions: “take as much holiday as you like” may really mean “take as little as possible, and as much as you dare.” Some have vaguely sinister undertones: might the option for women to freeze their eggs end up becoming the expectation?

The only exciting thing for me in that excerpt?  University of Southern California--the university where I earned my graduate degrees ;)  Everything else there is worrisome.

It is not anything new.  I have blogged about this forever, it feels like.  When people are young, they seem to find the work world all too alluring and exciting.  Soon, the reality raises its ugly head:

A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work. In many areas they were even more discontented than non-tech workers: 36% of techies felt they had a clear career path compared with 50% of workers in areas such as marketing and finance; 28% of techies said they understand their companies’ vision compared with 43% of non-techies; and 47% of techies said they had good relations with their work colleagues compared with 56% of non-techies.

All the money and the perks don't add up to much, if money and perks are not the most important things one wants out in life.

All that is in some twisted way an ironical mirror image of sorts of the tech factory workers in China, say, at Apple's contractors:

"Reality for workers at Pegatron is working 12-hour shifts, six days a week, forced to do overtime work and unpaid labor, with very short breaks for meals ..."

It is such a strange bargain that we seem to sign off on, while in iron chains or in golden handcuffs.   I am so darn lucky to have lived a life without the iron chains or the golden handcuffs. 

The old year's gone away ... by the rivers of Babylon

We have to keep time and contextualize the life that we lead.  The passing of a day with the sunrise and sunset.  The week consisting of seven days.  A month with weeks, and a year with months.

Have you ever wondered why there are seven days in a week?  After all, it is arbitrary--not anything defined by the sunrise and sunset, right?  It could have been ten, given our ten fingers to count.  Or, five for the fingers in one hand.  Why seven?  Why this "totally random, basically meaningless divisions of time" that is "constant to almost every single culture"?

Jews, who use a lunar calendar made up of either 12 or 13 months beginning with the New Moon, use a seven-day week. The Bengali calendar, which splits the year up into six seasons of two months each, uses a seven-day week. Even the Bahá'í, with their 19-month (and change) year, use a seven-day week.

So, why seven, dammit?

“Only by establishing a weekly cycle of an unvarying, standard length could society guarantee that the continuity of its life would never be interrupted by natural phenomena such as the lunar cycle,” writes Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. In other words, this is all the moon’s fault for being so unreliable.
Zerubavel especially links the need for an interval of this length to the rise of market culture: there needed to be an agreed-upon time in which vendors and buyers could meet, and about four times every lunar cycle seemed a pretty good frequency.

Damn market! ;)

our best guess for the creation of the seven-day week is that the idea originated in ancient Babylonia. The Babylonians, living in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), held the number seven as a holy number, that being the number of objects in our Solar System they could observe at the time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The Babylonians already had months, just like anyone else, and if you want to split up a period of around 29 days into a smaller period, why not divide it basically into four parts, especially when that number is damnably close to your holy number of seven? So the Babylonians used a seven-day week, with the seventh day having certain religious responsibilities (relaxation, cessation of work, worship, that kind of thing).

Yes, from the cradle of human civilization.  And then the idea spread--perhaps one of the first global memes.

There’s nothing in particular about a 7-day week that makes it a requirement for anybody to observe; it seems that the idea took off simply because there was a need for a unit of time somewhere between five and 10 days long, and seven was a cool number. What’s surprising is that humans haven’t come up with anything better

What was good for the Babylonians is still good for us in this 21st century.

To say goodbye to the old year, here is a poem from my favorite source:

The Old Year
by John Clare
The Old Year's gone away      To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day      Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place      In either shade or sun: The last year he'd a neighbour's face,      In this he's known by none. All nothing everywhere:      Mists we on mornings see Have more of substance when they're here      And more of form than he. He was a friend by every fire,      In every cot and hall-- A guest to every heart's desire,      And now he's nought at all. Old papers thrown away,      Old garments cast aside, The talk of yesterday,      Are things identified; But time once torn away      No voices can recall: The eve of New Year's Day      Left the Old Year lost to all.

Time is not money. I value time. Ergo, ...

"Are you home these days? No school?" asked a neighbor the other day.

In a nanosecond, I went through the possibilities the conversation could lead to: a friendly humor about not working to a little tongue-in-cheek remark about how teachers have their summers off.  Unless I wanted to pick a fight, there was no point dealing with any snide remark.  I don't like to fight.  I am like Bugs Bunny, as a video recently pointed out, who always shied away from fights; but then he is always poked! ;)

"Yes, this is the first summer that I am not teaching any class" I replied as I continued to walk.  I worried that if I stopped, then the friendliness might be at grave danger.

"Oh like a real vacation then."

I smiled and continued to walk.  How do I explain the concept of a life in furlough?

Source

Over my years here in the US, I have come to understand that Americans have an innate distrust of anyone who seems like is not working long days.  Working late into one's life is a badge of honor to many.  And working long hours--"I am so busy"--is another badge of honor.  Pretty soon, people all around me walk with many badges while, to them, I am doing nothing to earn badges.  It is almost as if I am, ahem, un-American!:

The United States is famously a nation of people who think they should be on the job—and be on the job and be on the job. We work more hours than the Japanese. We work more than the Germans. We’re the only first-world nation that does not mandate vacation time or sick days. And let’s not even discuss our maternity leave policies.
Yet we don’t seem to be aware of how second-tier our standards are compared to other nations.

The Protestant work ethic has seeped into the Catholics, the Mormons, the Hindus, the atheists, ... Wait, it gets worse, writes that author at Slate:

If you don’t take part in this orgy of work and more work? Something must be wrong with you— and that’s you, specifically.

How do I begin to explain that I intentionally chose this profession even though it pays less than other professions that I could have easily signed up for?  And that the nature of this profession is that we have only nine-month contracts, which results in an appearance of leisure time, even though I am working every day?

At least, they don't beat up on me.  But, the political rhetoric in this country beats up on the poor and the low-income households.  As if they are all poor only because they are lazy bums who don't work long hours--even though the data clearly show otherwise.  What gives?

Here’s a thought: In an era in which decent, high-paying jobs are hard to find, and in which the workforce-participation rate is at lows not seen since the late 1970s, gainful employment turns into something of a status item. That allows us to rationalize the increasing hours we put in on the job—often done because we fear the consequences of saying no—as choice. Then we turn around and demean others who don’t work.

It is a strange life that we lead.

I know you are not a busy person. Why? You are reading this!

Back when I was young--ah, those years that were so long ago--even when I was merely agnostic, I was convinced that there was nothing after death.  A conviction that there was, literally, only life to live.  Then, kaput. Gone. And, therefore, I didn't want to live a life that I did not want to and do something for a living that did not interest me.

I thank the cosmos (though the cosmos couldn't care whether or not I exist) for such an understanding early enough in my life.  

The way I earn my paycheck now is exactly how I would like to earn my paycheck--of course, a few more dollars will always help, but this is plenty enough.  "Plenty enough" in dollars is nothing compared to what I could/would have earned had I continued on with engineering.  But, this plenty enough provides me with a hassle-free life.  And has always provided me with an abundance of a commodity that no amount of dollars can buy--time.

Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm.

Incredibly busy many affluent people are.

A couple, who are a gazillion times wealthier than I will ever be, commented to me when we met before my Ecuador trip, "you are lucky that professors have a long summer break for such travels. We have no time."  I thought to myself that with all their wealth they could easily not work for another second in their lives and travel all they wanted to; but they choose not to because they equate not working with gazillons foregone.

When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter.

But, unlike what we think, the problem is not entirely new either:

Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,” he observed in “On the Shortness of Life”, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. “Life is long if you know how to use it,” he counselled.

A wise Seneca observed the rich rushing around complaining about not having enough time, and this pretentious blogger also observes the same.  Perhaps we even observe these only because we are sitting quietly not rushing around chasing money!

But, once I turn my attention away from the affluent population, which includes me, and consider, for instance, the lives of the non-traditional students in my classes, then I notice a difference--those students are also incredibly short of time because they juggle school with work and family, and barely have any leisure time.  They, unfortunately, seem to lack both money and time.

Ultimately, more people at the top are trading leisure for work because the gains of working—and the costs of shirking—are higher than ever before. Revealingly, inequalities in leisure have coincided with other measures of inequality, in wages and consumption, which have been increasing steadily since the 1980s. While the wages of most workers, and particularly uneducated workers, have either remained stagnant or grown slowly, the incomes at the top—and those at the very top most of all—have been rising at a swift rate. This makes leisure time terribly expensive.
So if leisureliness was once a badge of honour among the well-off of the 19th century, in the words of Thorsten Veblen, an American economist at the time, then busyness—and even stressful feelings of time scarcity—has become that badge now. To be pressed for time has become a sign of prosperity, an indicator of social status, and one that most people are inclined to claim.

Let's see: those with gazillions are working even harder because they value their "free time" as way too much money to be lost, and those struggling for paychecks are working even harder because they cannot afford to take time off.  Isn't something seriously wrong with this picture?

Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too much of it. Instead, most people worry over how it flies, and wonder where it goes. Cruelly, it runs away faster as people get older, as each accumulating year grows less significant, proportionally, but also less vivid. Experiences become less novel and more habitual. The years soon bleed together and end up rushing past, with the most vibrant memories tucked somewhere near the beginning. And of course the more one tries to hold on to something, the swifter it seems to go.

The faster does time fly as we age, and as we rush around.  But, it will all end; after all, as I like to say, we all come with our own expiration dates.  Perhaps there are those who will think in their death-beds,  "instead of watching the sunset, I am so glad I spent a couple of additional hours in the office in order to earn more."

I, for one, am so glad that I have the time to watch the river flow by, the birds chirp, the sun set, the children scream, the adults yak in their cellphones, the older folks shuffle along.

If you behave well, I will even spend some of that time with you ;)

Source

I became a time traveler when I read about Einstein's "Time Dilation"

The mortal that I am, I have worries in plenty.  It is difficult to put into practice the wonderful words of wisdom from the old country of centuries past:

शोकस्थानसहस्राणि दुःखस्थानशतानि च ।
दिवसे दिवसे मूढमाविशन्ति न पण्डितम् ॥

- महाभारत, अरण्य

Everyday there are thousand reasons to feel sad, hundred reasons to worry.
Such things only bother fools; not wise men.

Mahabharata, Aranya

Source

A fool I am!  Let us see when I become wise ;)

When I decided that I needed a distraction from what seemed like a growing mountain of worries, oddly enough it was not poetry that I turned to.  It was not music that I played.  Instead, I moused over to the Scientific American website.  I suppose there is always that old math and science nerd in me!

Even more interesting was this: Scientific American did not let me down.

Experiments at a particle accelerator have confirmed the "time dilation" effect predicted by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity

What a wonderful distraction to read about this!

The nerd was curious now.  At least two clocks will be needed to compare the slowing down, which means the question was simple: where was that second clock?

 the researchers used the Experimental Storage Ring, where high-speed particles are stored and studied at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for heavy-ion research in Darmstadt, Germany.
The scientists made the moving clock by accelerating lithium ions to one-third the speed of light. Then they measured a set of transitions within the lithium as electrons hopped between various energy levels. The frequency of the transitions served as the ‘ticking’ of the clock. Transitions within lithium ions that were not moving served as the stationary clock.
The researchers measured the time-dilation effect more precisely than in any previous study, including one published in 2007 by the same research group. “It’s nearly five times better than our old result, and 50 to 100 times better than any other method used by other people to measure relativistic time dilation,” says co-author Gerald Gwinner, a physicist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

I have no idea what these people are talking about anymore.  The frequency of transitions serving as the ticking of a clock?  WTF!

But, that didn't stop me.  As an old Sanskrit couplet noted, the mind is the fastest mode of transport ever, and before I knew it, the mind had moved away from the website and was back in the old country.  I was a student talking and arguing physics with my old friend.

The worries are there, yes.  But, pleasant memories do help.

To live a life is, I suppose, to create enough pleasant memories that can sustain us through.  The third act of the drama of life is all that remains to create memories, and to overcome worries--which will only increase, I imagine.  I wonder what the future holds--if only the mind could travel into the future too!

Source

The Economist Envy

The magazine, that is, not the profession.  (Though, it might work as well.)

More than a year ago, the Atlantic (itself suffering from the very envy!) observer this in the context of Time and Newsweek trying to compete against this magazine newspaper from Britain:

The Economist is truly a remarkable invention—a weekly newspaper, as it calls itself, that canvasses the globe with an assurance that no one else can match. Where else, really, can you actually keep up with Africa? But even as The Economist signals its gravitas with every strenuously reader-unfriendly page, it has never been quite as brilliant as its more devoted fans would have the rest of us believe. (Though, one must add, nor is it as shallow as its detractors would tell you it is.) ...
Repositioning your brand today is so much harder than it was in the old days, especially when you’re destined to be seen as a copycat product.

Fast forward a few months. Newsweek has been sold, and is fast disappearing. US News decided to become a web-based arbiter of everything from best hospitals to universities, and the Onion has a great satire on  Time:

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults