As in Einstein's Dreams, time seems to be a central theme in Mr. Lightman books. And for good reason. We live in a world governed by time; we are always busy, trying to accomplish as much as possible each day, having left no free time for our inner selves. We do not see as often our friends because we have apps to keep in touch, we shop online, we are addicted to internet through all available means. The author points this out because all this daily rush brings no benefits to us.
Among the issues presented in this book are:
- Depression and anxiety rising in young people due to addiction to smartphones and social media;
- Increased stress overall in population due to increasingly fast-paced society;
- Dramatic decrease in creativity in children and other problems, all these based on research done over the years.
There are numerous studies presented here which should raise awareness toward all above problems.
Every day on my way to work I see people with the eyes in their smartphones, not even looking where they step; they write messages even when walking. But when it comes to meeting face to face, things get awkward; I think we are slowly becoming robots.
Wasting time is a metaphor, of course. The author is trying to show that having free time and spending it free from internet, news, work, is to our benefit. The brain needs this kind of relaxation. Spending time with friends and family face to face, walking in a park, having a small vacation in a remote place with no access to media is what our body and mind needs after a day/months of work.
It’s a small book but it’s sufficient to make you ponder on your daily routine. And maybe afterwards, to find some time to waste - I definitely try to waste as much as I can :D
>>> ARC received thanks to Simon & Schuster/ TED via NetGalley <<< 9781501154362 4.30pm yesterday Start reading page one.
4.31pm Tablet makes noise. Stop to check email.
4.35pm Continue reading page one.
4.36pm Check phone, may be a test message.
Well, it would be easy enough, evidently, for most people’s diary of reading this book to go like that. But I, and most people who are important to me, aren’t like that. We hardly ever turn on our phones, if we do, we forget that they are on, get the text message days later. Don’t have smart phones.
I suspect Alan Lightman will never have the right audience. People like me don’t live in the way he rues. The people who might get something out of it aren’t going to. In fact, he pretty much concedes that it’s a do as I say, not as I do book. He did get a smart phone, later than other people, and was addicted within days.
One of the things I love about having a proper computer, with a proper screen, is that it’s in its proper place. It isn’t part of me. It’s part of the room it sits in. Very occasionally it goes on a trip and reappears in another part of the world, part of another room. Never part of me. Going to my computer is a conscious act and this keeps addiction to a minimum. When I do go through periods of sitting there, ‘wasting time’ it’s for a purpose, pretty much that which is, after all, the message of the book. There are some things one can look at in a sort of Zen way, if you like, whilst sitting on a computer, whilst one’s brain is in the background, figuring something out. It can be calming, it can be a way of pushing stress away. I collect on Pinterest pictures of green. Perhaps for a person living in the middle of a European cityscape with no chance to take the daily meandering rural walks as a child Lightman wistfully refers to, these take the place. I hope they aren’t just an addiction.
But I spend substantial periods away from my computer too. Lightman doesn’t talk about cooking, but much of the ‘drudgery’ involved is mindless, exactly the sort of time one’s mind can transport itself. Washing up, chopping, stirring. One of the reasons I resist using machines to do the work of chopping is that it would take away that time, it would replace it with ugly noise and forced concentration. Lightman also doesn’t mention knitting, the Zen of nice white women who are wealthy enough to do knitting for the process without concern for the time taken. A privilege we have, that our mothers didn’t, who knitted furiously to get that jumper we needed ready for the moment.
I walk everywhere, unplugged. There was a period in my life when I listened to music while walking, but I seem to have left that long ago. I have never driven so the anger and stress of that appallingly wasted time has never been part of my life. On public transport I read. Or stare out the window. Or knit. Contemplate.
Time – of course it’s our enemy in the end. We will run out of it. But on a day to day basis it is not my enemy, it has little to do with my life. When walking, if presented with the shorter path which has the pollution (in every respect, especially noise) of motors or the peace of the pedestrian path, the latter is taken almost every time.
There is nothing special about any of this, they are choices we all make. Many choose to be plugged in so that they don’t hear the trees as they walk along the lake. Many choose to take a photo of their surrounds, rather than look at them. Many choose to evaluate their lives through the competition of Facebook. In the case of time, I’ve often been accused of having the time to spare, to for example, cook properly. But I make that choice. The person accusing me of it spends a lot of time watching football on TV. They don’t see the choice as they cook indifferent meals for their children, butchershop marinated meat, supermarket chopped vegetables. On the one hand, I suppose it is something I give people, cooking properly for them. On the other, for much of the process I get the possibility of the sort of time Lightman says he wants, but can’t give himself. Not really. He doesn’t even convince himself properly, let alone the rest of us.
rest here:
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- Oh wow!
- Oh wow!
- Good morning, Happy Chat Beast!
- Feed me! Feed me!
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- I'm so happy! Are you happy, Goodreader?
- Aw noo! Ah doon't have enough likes!
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Winner: the Internet 9781501154362 چقدر کتاب خوبی بود.این ۱۰۰ صفحه دقیقا چیزیه که باید به تمام آدمای این جهان مدرن مزخرف شتاب زده یادآوری بشه.یادآوریِ اینکه آروم بگیرن.
دست از دویدن بردارن.بجای نشستن و تو گوشی بودن،فقط بشینن و به اطراف نگاه کنن.به جای با ماشین و جت جابجا شدن،از طبیعت در حین پیاده روی لذت ببرن.به جای ساعت مچی بستن و روزی پنجاه هزار بار نگاه کردنش،با ساعت بدنشون هماهنگ بشن و آزادانه روزشونو بگذرونن.
آره.تو این دنیای مدرن مزخرف این غیرممکنه.چون کارمون چی میشه؟قرارمون چی میشه؟درس هامون چی میشه؟کلاسمون چی میشه؟دیرمون میشه!بد میشه!وقت نمیشه!
ولی حداقل میشه.
میشه که روزی نیم ساعت گذاشت برای آروم گرفتن.برای ساکن بودن در محیط.برای فرار کردن از فرار کردن. 9781501154362 اتمام در دوران گذراندن کرونا و قرنطینه..
۱۸ مرداد ۱۴۰۰
ساعت ۲۱:۱۶ 9781501154362
In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks.
We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with “extras.” Our university curricula are so crammed our young people don’t have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in “wasting time,” of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks.
Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-driven lives, and examines the many values of “wasting time”—for replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all. In Praise of Wasting Time
کتاب کوتاه و خیلی خوبی بود در ستایش اتلاف وقت. و نه اتلاف وقت شاید. در ستایش زمانی رو به هیچکاری نکردن اختصاص دادن. و این هیچ کاری نکردن رو توی کتاب میگه و میگه چه فوایدی داره و توی زندگی امروزی که هرروز هفته ۲۴ ساعته مشغولیم چه چیزهایی رو از دست دادیم. 9781501154362 The novelist, physicist, and MIT humanities professor argues that it is only with unstructured time that we can rediscover our true identity and recover our carefree childhood creativity. This work-as-play model goes completely against the modern idea that time is money and every minute of life must be devoted to a project. Lightman’s sharp, concise treatise ruminates on the cultural forces that have enslaved us in the West to productivity. In short, he blames the internet, but specifically smartphones. He insists on the almost mystical benefits of free time and solitude, which he calls “a gift to our spirit” and an opportunity to “repair our selves.”
Discussed as part of an essay on wasting time for the Los Angeles Review of Books. 9781501154362 To be fair to this slender book, if I had realized that this was merely a book version of a TED talk, I would not have picked it up, as that is not a genre that appeals to me. That being said, Lightman is an appealing writer, and I like his advocacy of play as a source of creativity for children and adults. I am convinced by his suggestion that the brain needs more fallow time than our neoliberal, networked, hyper-segmented schedules generally allow. Though he gestures to capitalism's role in this reduction of time to money, his point is not really to assess the structure or source of this busy-ness but rather to urge to the individual a new sense of mindfulness, wandering, and play. I was particularly struck by his example of a psychological test where participants were given a problem, then allowed to play Tetris (or some other video game), and then were asked for answers. The participants who did this--rather than go directly to the solution--scored better on creativity than the participants who were just given the problem to solve. This seems right to me. So much of my creative thinking and problem solving goes on while I'm doing other things--from taking a shower to cooking a meal to talking to myself. Lightman laments that contemporary life allows less and less space for that kind of absent-minded ratiocination.
You're probably thinking that this is fairly obvious. And yes, basically, Lightman says what we've all thought and many op-eds have insisted: smartphones are taking over our brains and our leisure time! The pressure to make every minute count makes our brains noisier and our ideas poorer. He has some additional data and anecdotes to add but basically--and this is one of my bones to pick with the TED talk genre--he is confirming what we already sense to be true.
Finally, my biggest gripe with the book is that Lightman doesn't acknowledge how gendered this is. I mean, never mind that he's implicitly worried about privileged people who are overworked--not the stresses of poverty or systemic racism, which would also make it more difficult to daydream, wander, and play--it also doesn't seem to occur to him that geniuses who get to take three hour walks to let their minds run wild probably also has someone else to make their meals, keep track of their appointments, mind their children, do their laundry. And that someone else, up until very recent history (and often even now!) is usually a woman. When my mind drifts, it drifts to the several tracks of tasks that need to be accomplished at work, in my home, and for my daughter. That mental space that is supposed to lay fallow, problem-solving and day-dreaming, is occupied by the responsibilities that are unevenly accorded to women in our culture. Even Lightman's one example of the woman genius, Gertrude Stein, had her partner, Alice B. Toklas, arranging the cows for her in picturesque scenes. There always seems to be someone to take care of the domestic work, the mundane details.
Lightman's vision of mental freedom is predicated on a nostalgic fantasy of implicitly masculine autonomy. He celebrates his wife, a painter, and his granddaughter, discovering prisms, dance, and more, so I'm not saying that he's intentionally excluding women from his vision of the virtues of idleness, just that his very sense of unhemmed liberty and unfettered mobility reflects his experiences growing up and being educated as a white man. A Room of One's Own would be good companion reading (but then, it is for just about anything). 9781501154362 I often feel resentful about time and how certain activities take my time away from things I feel are more important for me. As ever, it’s about trying to, as much as possible, feel as though we are saying yes to more of the right things and no to less of the wrong things and focus on the things that align more with who we want to be. I agree with Alan Lightman, in that we do have a problem with being too busy, too distracted, and in 2020 we no longer see the value in ‘wasting time’ - every minute needs to be accounted for, and as our work becomes more profitable, we reduce the amount of time we spend on activities that are purely for fun. Lightman reminds us that we need time for free thinking, that some of the smartest minds of the past 100 years spent a lot of time on their own seemingly ‘doing nothing’. “We often lack the time and space for personal reflection. We lack the metal quiet and privacy to create a necessary inner stability…without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.” Here’s a thought - we don’t really know anything anymore because we don’t make the time to understand how we feel about what we know. In other words, we do not value thinking time. That’s everything from staring out of the window, day dreaming, going for a walk, to sitting on a park bench with your thoughts. 9781501154362 It is a mess and ripetitve! A lot of words to say that you need free time to recharge yourself and to be more productive and creative in the future. Thank you Alan!
He makes a lot of confusion among the concepts of creativity, productivity and resting of the mind. He correlates these concepts to the idea of wasting time but the links make no sense.
And then......He starts talking about Mindfulness and a beautiful and simple concept as wasting time starts to become a bad idea. 9781501154362
SUMMARY In Praise of Wasting Time
