I. Visions
Lying on a pitch-black field amidst a galaxy of stars
Running through millet farms along an endless sunrise
Drifting into new islands of consciousness on a sweltering afternoon
My memories from boarding school are like the visions of some other life.
Because it was some other life. My boarding school sprawls over hundreds of acres of rural India. Its 300 students are the disciples of an antiquated way of life. No internet, no phones, no money[i].
In every way, my school life was the antithesis to modernity. We were ancient, not modern; childlike, not mature; free, not powerful.
For four years I lived that life.
And then, in the span of three hours, I was thrust out into the modern megapolis of Bangalore. A high-school graduate newly minted into modern life.
On the surface, some things had changed. I knew that.
But something had changed fundamentally in my life. And it would take me years to piece it together.
Somewhere in my mind, a clock had started ticking.
II. Our Questions
This essay is about that ticking clock—one that seems to have invaded many of our lives. It is about the feeling that we need to properly use every second of our lives.
This essay is about the guilt of procrastination, the frustration of traffic and the burden of deciding how to spend the weekend.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by what you could be doing, this essay is about you.
How did we become so overwhelmed?
Why does free time feel so expensive?
Actually, what even happened to free time?
II. What’s in Freiburg?
There is one profound answer for how we’ve become so overwhelmed. To see it, let’s hop over to Freiburg, Germany in 1954.
We’re eavesdropping on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. And the question he’s considering is: what is the essence of modern technology?[ii]
Now Heidegger’s version of “modern” technology is mechanized agriculture and hydroelectric dams. In two minutes, we’ll see that his answer has everything to do with why we’re overwhelmed today.
On technology, Heidegger’s insight is that the essence of modern technology is to unlock value from the world.
While pre-modern technology benefitted from the natural world as it was, modern technology transforms nature into resources that can be utilized.
This is the difference between a primitive windmill and a hydroelectric plant. The windmill skates by on whatever wind there is. The hydroelectric plant, well—
“The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.” (p. 16)[ii]
Modern technology turns natural entities into standing resources. It strips substances of their own essences, turning them into raw materials whose value is tied to the production process.
And since technology[iii] is created to unlock value from things in this way, the fundamental force driving technology is the urge to unlock value from the world. To use Heidegger’s term, technology is about challenging-forth value.
But value for whose benefit?
Of course, it seems that we human beings use technology to benefit ourselves. Dams turn rivers into reservoirs to serve our desire for electricity. But are we in charge of our desires?
This is the monumental question. Do we control our desire to unlock value from the world, or does the desire to unlock value control us?
Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this [challenging-forth]… happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?
The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines.
This is Heidegger’s point.
Technology appears to be an instrument in human hands, but that’s partly an illusion. In essence, technology is the manifestation of a psychological compulsion—the urge to unlock value. And that is an urge we do not really control.
IV. Time
Heidegger’s insight reveals an intriguing answer to the end of free time.
Let’s put it together.
Technology has transformed much of our world into a standing resource that can be used. But as the overseers of technology and standing resources, we have inadvertently become the ultimate standing resource in our own eyes.
We are the standing resource that creates all standing resources.
The more capable we become through technology, the more compelling a standing resource view of the world becomes. But the more immersed we become in a standing resource view of the world, the more we tend make utilities out of ourselves.
The death of free time is a direct result of this self utilitization[iv].
For, time is the measure of the human resource. So, when we see ourselves as utility generators, every moment of our life becomes measurable against the utility we might have generated.
And this acute utility-awareness comes with the burden of evaluating every moment of our time in terms of what we might create.
Why now?
But being utility-seeking can’t be the entire reason we’re overwhelmed.
After all this isn’t a modern phenomenon. Humans have always been strategic, calculating, utility-seeking beings. So why are we overwhelmed now?
What has changed is the nature of technology, which has brought us to an unprecedented moment in history. A moment where our natural tendency for utility can spiral into an epidemic of overwhelm.
I call this moment utility neverland. And it is defined by one socio-economic fact:
It is now possible to create utility from anywhere, at any time. And because of this, our minds are never free from the utility-generating mode of being.
To see what distinguishes utility neverland, consider a pre-modern fishing village.
Life in a fishing village must have been severe in many ways. But the chronic overwhelm of not doing enough with one’s time wouldn’t be one of its burdens.
In a fishing village, you don’t feel the guilt of procrastination in afternoon heat or dark night. For there is nothing to be done at these times.
Every society prior to ours has had such dead times—moments where productivity is impossible.
At dead times the mind is released from the mode of utility generation. Free to wander, create, and go wherever minds go when no longer on the leash.
But our utility neverland leaves no dead time. If you have a device that connects to the internet, you can create value. And any moment you choose not to do so must be justified in light of this loss.
Tossing in bed, awake at 3 am, you may decide to watch the moon as your mind drifts in the evening breeze. But your choice isn’t innocent of cost. Why not sift through some work emails or jot down ideas for your blog?
Humans today can do more for their material conditions while sitting on the toilet than our ancestors could in months of work. This is power, but it can easily turn into the burden of having to be useful even on the toilet.
And at the same time that utility creation has become easier, a second fact of modernity has increased our desire for utility. Utility (money) is more useful than it has ever been.
For socio-economic and historical reasons such as globalization and the decline of faith-based taboos, money now pervades almost every aspect of life. Today we can exchange money for something that feels like status, acceptance, and love to a greater degree than we ever could before.
And this makes money seductive. It tempts the utility-seeking mind to always be on.
These twin forces—the possibility to create utility anywhere and the seductive rewards for creating utility—make modernity a special concoction for overwhelm.
But this isn’t my tirade against modernity.
The two forces that make modernity overwhelming are arguably it’s most welcome privileges. One is power: to generate utility at any time. The other is possibility: to exchange utility for almost anything.
This is the profound and sobering reality we must confront.
Overwhelm isn’t incidental. It is a consequence of who we are as modern human beings.
Ambition and overwhelm are intertwined, possibility doesn’t emerge without the burden of choice, and power isn’t free from responsibility[v].
What we love and what we detest are more similar than we’d like to admit.
V. Where do we go now?
Because overwhelm is so ingrained into our way of life as modern beings, there are no easy solutions to becoming free[vi].
But understanding why we feel burdened offers us hope for cutting loose.
Overwhelm is the result of a single world-view dominating our mind—the view of time as a standing resource. When we think of our time as something we can use, manipulate, and store, we become burdened by the desire to “properly use” time.
But this is not the only way to relate to time.
In fact, there exists a mode of being that is oblivious to any future. One that makes no claims on time at all.
This is your mode of being when you are hyper-focused before a deadline, meditating deeply, or seconds away from winning a FIFA game. Call this the mode of timelessness.
Learning to live even briefly in timelessness can release us from the strangle-hold of a standing resource view of reality[vii]. Practicing timelessness can help us break the bad habit of compulsive utility seeking.
So how to practice timelessness? There are two states of mind worth cultivating.
First, is flow, a prime example of timelessness that is often defined in relation to time. In flow states time seems to stand still, but hours pass by with the blink of an eye.
Second, is presence or mindful awareness. In presence we no longer experience time intellectually. Time just becomes the fabric of experience. It is no longer a quantity to be managed.
If you’re present for every moment, there is no way you can run out of time.
There are practical ways to cultivate both flow and presence. The literature on each topic is large, and I encourage you to learn from the best of it.
But I won’t go into it here. Because ultimately, we find our own ways to timelessness. Your ways may be meditation or big-wave surfing, oil-painting or family-time[viii].
However you find it, I wish you the best.
For the most creative, lucid, and joyful humans of the coming decades will learn to reclaim moments of timelessness throughout their lives.
They will know what we know now.
A modern technological life comes with exceptional privileges.
But there is something vital about being ancient, not modern; childlike, not mature; free, not powerful. There is something in it for all of us.
I’m on a mission to build an internet for big ideas. And I would like to do it with you.
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ENDNOTES
[i] I’m not exaggerating, this school is a world within a world. An entire ethnography book has been written about the lives of students and teachers there.
[ii] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Heidegger, Martin, and William Lovitt. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2013.
[iii] He is specifically thinking of modern technology, but for our purposes it is enough to take this to be technology in general.
[iv] Utilitization isn’t a word…yet. I use it to mean “make utilities out of”. Different from utilize, i.e. “to make use of”.
[v] Thank you, Uncle Ben.
[vi] The fact that the structure of our societies generates overwhelm is a good reason to consider systemic changes. I leave the systemic analysis for a better-informed writer to explore.
[vii] It might even turn out that timelessness is the more accurate view of reality. For, there’s a philosophical case to be made that we don’t live in time at all. We are always in the present, and the present is always one single unit of experience. But you don’t need to accept this argument to appreciate the value of timelessness.
[viii] Heidegger’s cryptic suggestion for escaping the overwhelm of unlocking-value involves art. Something to recovering the idea of techne (relating to technique or craft) in art. I think his emphasis of techne has to do with the idea of presence or flow that comes from focusing on artistic craft.