I was trawling through some of my old posts on The Subway Test, and I noticed that I had published this one, “A Meditation on Time,” exactly ten years ago. As I reread it, I realized that a lot of what I was struggling with back then has gotten even more visible, more acute, with the advent of LLMs. It feels like a message in a time capsule to my future self. And maybe to you: I hope that time is not your enemy.
Here is what I wrote on that long-ago February day:
I have been taking my sweet time in reading Anna Karenina, a Christmas gift from my lovely stepdaughter. At the rate I’m going, I would guess I have two more months with this delicious, painful, hilarious book. Meanwhile, as I dither through this enormous work of art, it’s been hanging over my head that I don’t keep up my blog as befits a serious writer, dispensing witty remarks and novel observations at least once per week.
I really don’t yearn for “simpler times” (e.g. Tolstoy’s time), in which the world of ideas moved more slowly and people had time–from our perspective, anyway–to write long letters and long novels, to linger over an idea in a journal for months and even years. Many people of Tolstoy’s day didn’t regard their time as leisurely: they felt as rushed and harried as we do now, since the era of railroads and electricity had sped up life for them at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will regard my lifestyle as leisurely, since most of us today don’t yet have Adderall prescriptions or cranial implants or other technological prostheses to speed up our rate of pumping out new ideas and reacting to new ideas we see.
This morning as I read my ten pages on the bus, I was taken by Tolstoy’s words about time: Prince Shcherbatsky is reacting to being told that “time is money,” and he says, “Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for fifty kopeks, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any amount.”
It occurred to me as I sat with that quote today that I have given away lots of time in my life for fifty kopeks, or for less. When I returned to graduate school in my thirties, I was so excited to be able to take classes at public expense (since I am an employee of the state, my classes cost $5 per course)–I often joked with people that I had spent more money on parking tickets than on tuition when I was in grad school the second time. I feel thankful to the Great State of Washington every time I think of what I learned there.
But I also made a huge blunder by valuing my labor at zero in those days. The courses cost $5, so my degree must only cost about $100, no? Yet, of course there was the massive opportunity cost of my shutting myself up for years to read academic papers on ecology and statistical analysis: there were hikes I didn’t take, other skills I didn’t learn, traveling I didn’t do. I’ve written in a couple of my stories from that period about students who get into ecology because they love spending time outdoors in nature, but that their ecological studies lock them up in a lab for months on end doing gas chromatography or grinding up plant tissue samples.
I’ve come home with a fever tonight–ironically, the fever is what has slowed me down enough to be able to meditate about time in this blog post. And I have realized that as I age, I am becoming less and less willing to give up time to others (that is, to people I don’t love) for any amount. Even if by magic I could, I wouldn’t give up this feverish time tonight–unpleasant as it is–for money. I’m sure I have my price for taking on more work, but I’m realizing that the price is much, much higher than a community college would typically pay. I would just rather have the time.
I’m back after a month away from The Subway Test, the longest hiatus I’ve given this blog in a year or more. As I wrote a month ago, I needed time to focus on getting the manuscript of my novel Stranger Bird ready for publication. It’s been a long few weeks, but the manuscript is finally in the hands of my layout editor, Erica, and I’m glad to be back working on other kinds of creative projects.
More than practically any other issue or idea in my life, I’ve struggled with time. I certainly contended over the last four weeks with a sense of time scarcity, even time starvation. Some of that feeling of lack comes from my own prodigious talents at wasting time. I’ve felt often enough that my time slips away from me like water out of a cracked bucket, lost to internet surfing and daydreaming, to chatting with colleagues and wandering about campus like a dilatory schoolboy.
Yet I don’t waste time every day–some days, some weeks even, I can approach my work with a grim and joyless puritanism, with the motto that if it’s fun, I can’t do it. I rarely feel much jealousy for the wealthy and powerful, but one thought that bedevils me with some frequency is the sense that, in spite of the fact that wealthy and powerful people have the same 24 hours a day that I do, those people have accomplished so much more than I in my 47 years on the planet. If I want to start feeling bad about myself, that’s the expressway to Self Loathington. Sometimes while I am on that expressway I can approach my work with a withering focus for a while, before my natural curiosity about whatever I’m not working on at the moment takes over once again.
One of the main characters in my novel Pacifica is a kind of spiritual self-portrait: a middle-aged librarian named Pánfilo (one of those wonderfully antique Mexican names that I love, from the Greek meaning “lover of all”). As I wrote in my first description of him,
Over the course of his forty-nine years of life, Pánfilo Gonzalez had completed seven hundred and twenty two college credits at nine universities, colleges, conservatories, institutes, and graduate optometry schools. Yet for all that, he had never taken a single college degree. He had come close several times—he would have received his Bachelor of Arts in History at Utah State University if he had just finished his physical education requirement and paid off his university parking tickets—but instead he had hired on to the Sterne College library as a janitor with nothing more than a high school diploma from the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria “José Vasconcelos.”
While in real life I have (barely) managed to take college degrees, as I approach Pánfilo’s real age I feel more and more like him.
Photo credit: TaxCredits.net
It is only now that I am halfway or so through my life that I feel some understanding of that phrase “time is money.” As a kid I always regarded it as one of those cartoonish shorthands TV writers would use to establish that a character was a successful businessman. I was not particularly interested in money, and so the phrase only served to make such characters as Mr. Slate from The Flintstones and Mr. Cogswell from The Jetsons unattractive to me. But it has dawned on me slowly over the last few years that if time is money, money is also time. Independently wealthy people may have the same 24 hours per day that I do, but they are much more able to spend their 24 hours doing only what they feel like doing. That so many of them spend their time working phenomenally hard, as though they are driven to it, suggests to me that there is something more to the “time is money” equation that I am not getting, or that perhaps they are not getting.
One of the internet wanderings I’ve made in the last few years that has had the most value for me attempts to quantify just how much money an hour is worth. The page is here at the excellent site clearerthinking.org–answer a few questions about how much you make, how busy you are, and how much you’d charge to do certain kinds of work, and the site will estimate for you just how much you should value your time. I learned a lot about myself after a few minutes at this site: it helped me realize that I’ve been way too willing to take on extra work in my job, and way too reticent about hiring out jobs like housecleaning and yard work. I have a long way to go to adjust my life so that I’m optimizing the number of hours I spend on preferred activities (primarily unpaid work like writing), but the site has really helped me understand just how much an hour is really worth to me.
The Subway Test 