#458： In Praise of Wasting Time
Episode Stats
Summary
Your time on earth is finite. Once you use it up, it is gone forever. Thus, on the Art of Manliness podcast, we talk a lot about how to maximize your time, how to use it more effectively, and to be more productive. But is it possible to be too concerned about managing your time should you also make space for chunking out all the to-do lists and schedules, and just kind of be idle? My guest today would say yes, his name is Alan Lightman, a physicist and writer, and the author of the book In Praise of Wasting Time.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast your time on earth
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is finite once you use it up it is gone forever thus on the a1 podcast we talk a lot about how
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to maximize your time how to use it more effectively to be more productive but is it
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possible to be too concerned about managing your time should you also make space for chunking out
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all the to-do lists and schedules and just kind of be idle my guest today would say yes his name is
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alan lightman he's a physicist and a writer and the author of the book in praise of wasting time
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today on the show alan forwards the sort of counterculture argument that intentionally
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wasting time isn't advice but a virtue we begin our conversation by discussing what alan means by
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wasting time and then get into how wasting time benefits our psyches creativity sense of mental
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self-reliance and even ironically enough our productivity we end our conversation discussing
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the difference between chronos time and kairos time and how wasting time allows to spend more time in
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the latter state after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is wasting time
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okay alan lightman welcome to the show nice being on the show breath so you got a nice little book
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out called in praise of wasting time which is based on a ted talk you gave before we get to the book i'd
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like to talk about your background because i think it's really interesting you are you have a physics
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background but you're also a novelist you write poetry you write essays and so it's not a combination you
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see too often i'm curious how did that happen well i was very interested in both science and and the
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arts from a young age i built homemade rockets and fired them and i wrote poetry i did science projects
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and i was editor of the the school literary magazine i didn't see anything unusual about having
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interest in both the science and the arts i do remember that my teachers and friends and and even parents
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uh tried to push me in one direction or the other but i resisted those
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yeah it sounded a lot like we had walter isaacson on a while back ago talk about da vinci
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and da vinci was the same way he combined both arts and science together
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well i think that he achieved a little bit more than i have in my
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life well let's talk about this book in praise of wasting time because that's a provocative title
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and we'll talk about our perceptions of time and our emotion towards it but what got you
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thinking about hey maybe instead of seeing wasting time as a bad thing maybe there's some value to that
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what what was the impetus well i for for many years my wife and i have spent our summers on an island
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in maine a small island it it doesn't have any roads or or on it it doesn't have a ferry service
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to it it doesn't have any bridges to the mainland and when we come here we unplug
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and my wife is a painter and we've noticed that our uh creative activities our creative spirit is
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not having to do lists not having a schedule every day
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and i have been alarmed over the last 25 years to see how the pace of life has increased
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and people don't give themselves time anymore just to let their minds wander so uh both for positive and
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negative reasons i have tried to orient my my lifestyle in such a way that i had periods of
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time that were unstructured and unscheduled so i mean guess what do you mean by wasting time
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because you know doing art that doesn't seem like it's a waste of time is so i'm sure there's
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a specific what there's something you're trying to get at when you say wasting time yeah well that's
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it's it's it's a good question and i think that i mean by wasting time is spending time that does not
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have a a goal that is is not directed it's not scheduled spending time in a way that allows your mind to
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wander and there are many activities that that fit that description it could be going out to dinner with
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friends or it could be taking a walk in the woods or it could be just sitting quietly by yourself in a
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chair but i think that part of of wasting time in the way that i think of it is is being free from
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external stimulation i think that that we that especially with the internet and with the smartphones
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that we we've been overwhelmed by an avalanche of external stimulation and information and it's it's
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very hard to and under those conditions it's very hard to hear your own self think to get in touch with
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your own inner self so i hope that that gives you some idea of what i mean by wasting time it's a
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combination of of unplugging from the external world and spending time in a way that is unscheduled and
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unstructured and and not goal-oriented gotcha and what i love about the book you get into sort of you know
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a broad broad look of how our perception of time has changed over history and particularly how technology
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uh advances in advances in communication technology has changed that perception of time yeah walk us
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through how has advances in communication technology changed our perception of time well the the pace of
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life has always been regulated by the speed of communication because the speed of communication
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determines the speed of business transactions and everything else in the middle 1800s when the telegraph
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was first invented that was a high speed communication of the time and i think there was a there was a
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a physician named beard dr beard i can't remember his first name who who wrote an article about how people
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were suffering greater anxiety because of the the higher speed of of life and he was referring to to the
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the telegraph which was like three bits per second of speed and the middle around 1985 when the internet
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first became public and available to most people the speed of communication was about a thousand bits
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per second and today it's about one billion bits per second so we can see how the speed of communication has
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increased increased the speed of life everything is faster i mean even walking speed is faster about
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a decade ago the british council did a study of the walking speed in 35 countries and found that in the
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just in the last 10 years the speed had increased by 10 percent so everything is faster and i i think that all
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of that can be tracked back to the speed of communication and do you think beard was on to something that
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this increased speed in communication even back then when it was three bits per second now it's a billion bits it
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causes anxiety in people are we seeing that manifest itself i think that we have people are are rushing around
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more in terms of of the measurement of stress less people have done studies of of college students and found that they are
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definitely under greater stress than they were 25 years ago there was a recent article about a year ago that
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came out in time magazine actually the cover of time magazine in the u.s uh that documented the the
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increase in anxiety and depression among teenagers and some sociologists and psychologists analyzed that
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tried to try to try to find the reasons why why depression and anxiety were increasing among young people
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and of course there there are many factors but but one of the key factors was the pace of life and the fact that
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teens are plugged in all the time on twitter and instagram and snapchat and facebook and they're all they're
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afraid of of losing out of not keeping up with their friends they see all the activities that their
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friends are doing and they see it at a high rate of speed and they have an anxiety about about not keeping
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up uh there's actually an acronym for that that a psychiatrist friend explained to me it's called fomo f-o-m-o
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which stands for fear of missing out and so i think that the the we see here the results of the the
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increased pace of life and the interconnectedness the hype i would call it hyper connectedness of our
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society and besides the increased anxiety you also highlight research that shows that young people
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these days are less creative than say young people 20 30 years ago yes there was a study done by a
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researcher at the college of william and mary a few years ago that used a standard test for creativity
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that's been used for for 40 or 50 years and found that since the the early 1990s which was near the
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the beginnings of of the of of the internet that creativity was decreasing among young people
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and and this test measures creativity by a number of ways for example seeing a couple of objects and and
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being asked what what kinds of of uh of activities can these objects be used for what what tasks can they
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accomplish or get getting part of a story and being asked to complete the story those are just a couple
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of examples of the things on the creativity test but it's really not surprising to me that the
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creativity has decreased because i think that that the creativity requires stretches of unstructured time
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gustav malar used to go walking in the in the countryside for several hours after lunch when he was working on a
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piece of music and there they're there they're various examples of of people doing their creative work when
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they are uh unplugged when they are separating themselves from the the rush and the heave of the outside world
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and just listening to their inner thoughts gertrude stein the writer used to to take drives in the
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countryside get out and just look at cows when she was working on a piece of writing to uh the the unconscious mind
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uh is is involved with the creativity and and we we have lots of evidence that that a lot of our thinking
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happens unconsciously and the unconscious mind does best when it's not being poked and prodded
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by the outside world when when it's just given time to to go up through its its secret hallways
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and solitude and silence yeah and i think you also highlight research i mean and i've seen this as well
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whenever we are bombarded by external stimuli our attention gets focused on that laser pointed that's
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all we think about we all the only thing we look at and as a consequence we don't have this like i think
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they call it the default mode that our brain goes in when we're not really paying attention to anything
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in particular and in that default mode that's when like ideas in your head start swirling around and
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mashing together basically yes yes so let's talk about this creative process and like how you've used
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you know quote-unquote wasting time unplugging just unstructured unscheduled time how's that played out
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in your life like what do you do you're a writer you've uh you know you wrote uh einstein's dreams
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did you come up to any any situations where you you know hit a wall and then you just basically decide
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you know what i'm gonna unplug i'm not gonna have any expectations of uh of getting something done i'm
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just gonna go sit or walk and let my mind wander well yes that that happens that happens many times and
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it happened when i was when i was in my scientific career as well as my writing career because science
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is a creative activity as well but a lot of times the the solution to a problem will come
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not when you're attacking the problem head-on but when you're doing something else that might be
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unrelated to the problem at all taking a shower or taking a walk um i remember that i was uh working
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on a a novel some years ago and i one of the characters was not coming to life and i kept
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struggling and struggling and struggling and and trying different things with the character and i just
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couldn't make the character come to life and it was killing the entire novel and and then i remember
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i was i was just taking a walk one day and i started hearing dialogue from the character different
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dialogue than i'd heard before and and suddenly i understood her in a much deeper way than i had
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before uh and i think that that that that that my subconscious mind had been trying out different
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pieces of dialogue for this character seeing which one opened up which one led to her heart
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led to her soul and finally there was just one piece of dialogue that that that rose to my conscious
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awareness awareness that made her come alive for me and i understood something about her that i hadn't
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before a very similar thing happened when i was working on a scientific problem about long ago when i was in
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graduate school and i've been beating my head against the wall for six months trying to find a mistake
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that i had made and then i woke up one morning feeling like i was floating and i rushed to the kitchen table
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where a bunch of my pages of calculations were lying there and i i suddenly realized the mistake that i had
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made and it wasn't from going from one equation to the next or pounding on the problem it was something that
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happened that happened unconsciously and i think that they just they're just many many examples
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those are a couple from my own life but many examples where the the unfettered mind the unconscious mind
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is able to accomplish things that the the schedule driven time driven mind cannot but of course there
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there there there are many other values of of quote wasting time besides creativity uh i think
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one of the and you can stop me here if you don't want me to go on no keep going but i think that
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that that that we need unplugged unstructured time to to explore our inner self and consolidate our
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self-identity and i know that sounds mushy and sentimental and trite but we need time to think
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about who we are and what's important to us and where we're going our values and we need time to
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remember things that we've done in the past and and reevaluate those with new experience and all of
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that is part of of what i call consolidating our self-identity understanding who we are and you
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can't rush through that you can't do that kind of mulling and thinking when you're you know sitting in a
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in a dentist office waiting to go in and you've got 15 minutes to read a magazine or think you can't do
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that when you're answering emails or uh when you're sending out twitters you you need time to where
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there's nothing that you have to do and you're just letting your mind wander and think about what
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it wants to think about i mean too often we're we're directing our minds to go from a to b and make
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this appointment and make that appointment answer this phone call we're not letting our minds wander
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freely and part of what we lose there is not just the ability to be creative but the ability to
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to understand who we are we need to constantly evaluate who we are because we have new experiences
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every day we have new decisions that we need to make and and and all of that is part of our self
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identity and we need quiet solitude for that kind of of thinking we're going to take a quick break
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for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show now that home that point really hit home uh
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with me because uh it reminded me of the book the lonely crowd by david reisman written back in the 1950s
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and basically he said that the american middle class was shifting to they're becoming other
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directed beings basically they they got their sense of identity by looking what other people were doing
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right and like social media particularly i think has amplified that or the internet because whenever
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you have an opinion oftentimes the first thing you do is like well what do other do other people think
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the same thing so you get on you know you google whatever you try to find something on reddit that
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says you know agrees with you or disagrees with you and yeah i mean it i find myself doing that
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and at the same time like man i just want to think what i want to think right not not care what other
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people i mean you have to care what other people think there's like a balance but i feel we've gone too
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far yeah well this is this is part of that fear of missing out the fomo syndrome that is causing
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increased anxiety and and depression and teenagers that they're constantly checking with their friends
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and with to see what other people are doing and they they don't have the the self-confidence
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to just know what they're doing and so honor their own decisions in their own life we we just we're we've
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developed a a a manner of living a a lifestyle in which we require constant external validation and
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the the the internet that makes that so easy to do to check and see what other people are doing
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yeah and i and i guess that that just increases the anxiety right because you you post something
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on your kid you post something on instagram you think you think it's cool but then no one else
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everyone just ignores it or they comment about it make fun of it and you're like oh maybe i shouldn't
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do that thing but that's sad if that happens right so i mean besides unplugging besides you know i
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guess you've done things where you go for walks i mean what are some other ways we can waste time
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i mean you mentioned in the book playing is a great way to waste time but what kind of play are we
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talking about here are we talking about video games structured sports leagues are you talking about
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something else to me play is is is anything is where you're where you you um i guess sports is an an
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interesting in-between case because when you're playing sports you you have a goal usually to to
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defeat the other team or defeat the other player so a sport event can be recreational it can be something
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that's relaxing but but it can also be something that's very stressful and and competitive so i think
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it depends on how you play the sport what the outcome is in in terms of your your your your mental
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state of being but for me play is again when you're engaging in that in an activity that that that doesn't
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have a goal that is uh entertaining pleasurable unstructured uh i think that what i would add to
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to to when i when we talked about what how do you define wasting time and i i said i thought it was
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spending time any time where you don't have an uh a goal you don't have a schedule if you want to make
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play a subset of that broad definition i would say that play is all of those things plus
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something that's pleasurable gotcha so uh that could be a lot of things it could be
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art i mean that's the type of play you kind of just mess around do what you want music could be
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playful there are a lot of wonderful ways to waste time i think that that wasting time has gotten a
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very bad rep that that we feel guilty especially in this age of high productivity we feel guilty when
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we're not doing something that is manifestly productive and i think that part of that guilt
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goes back to our our puritan origins the people who came over from england and scotland the pilgrims
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part of the puritan ethic was that it was actually sinful to be idle that that was what they call
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wasting time being idle being idle is not doing productive work it was actually a sin against god
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according according to the puritan ethic and i think that that mentality even today you know 350
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years later i think there is still deep in our culture and our cultural ethos this idea that that
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wasting time or being idle or not doing productive work is is is sinful right but i mean there's also
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in christianity a culture in some sects of where you waste i mean you kind of waste time like they
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have festival weeks where they do things that we typically don't think of as productive as resting and
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eating and celebrate yes i i agree but so but so so that kind of dimension is running a counterpoint
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with with with with the other dimension which is that being idle is sinful so uh i i think that uh
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yes that that that christianity does recognize the the festival weeks i mean there's the sabbath
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also one day a week but the rest of the time we're supposed to be at work and laboring in the fields
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is actually that's the the actual phrase in the bible laboring in the fields and but what's what's
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interesting though that we talk about it it's being so productive all the time can be counterproductive
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in the long run yes yeah it's an interesting irony there so i mean like i i think all of us can figure
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out ways to be you know wait waste time on our private life right just unplug where you spend an
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evening just not doing anything taking a walk playing with your kids etc but how did would you make this
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case to say your boss say hey you know i need i need an hour and a half where i'm not doing anything
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so i can think and mull on this problem we've had that's i mean that's a hard case to make because i
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think a lot i mean the problem in the business world is you know what gets measured is that whatever
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you know what's that saying what gets measured gets done right yeah so we're measuring productivity
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emails answered etc slacks answered so it ends up we don't actually end up being productive yes well
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it's it's a great point that you raise and a very important one and i think in the last 10 years that
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a number of businesses in the us and other countries have actually experimented with giving their employees
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some time to meditate and of course meditation is is only one form of unplugging but it but is one that
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has been explored and the business businesses that have have instituted this as a practice have actually
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found that it increases productivity when employees are given some time in the day to just be alone with
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their thoughts another case in point is is bell laboratories which is the research arm of at&t before
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at&t was was was broken up and bell laboratories at bell laboratories there was very little direction
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for the employees it was just they were allowed to they were given laboratories and they were given
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equipment and they were allowed to follow their own research interests without a designated project and
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many great discoveries came out of bell laboratories for example in around 1950 the transistor was invented
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which came out of bell laboratories and the the irony there is is giving the employees these are you know
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employees in science and technology sort of unfettered free time to just invent and explore that they
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actually brought great wealth they actually brought great wealth to at&t because the transistor is one
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example has led to to all kinds of technology uh almost everything that we have today started with the the
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the computers and the internet started with the transistor so i think smart businesses have have
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have have learned that giving your employees some free time to to just explore pays off it pays off monetarily
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people are just more productive when they have some time to themselves to let their minds wander of course
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their minds are wandering on things that are related to the company but there's no project there's no schedule
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and what i love how you ended the book you you talk about this distinction this distinction i've read
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about this before but i like how you fleshed it out in ancient greece you know they had two conceptions of
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time first was chronos time and then there was kairos time what what's the distinction between the
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two those two types of time chronos time is time measured by the clock and and they did have clocks in
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ancient greece they had sand clocks and water clocks it's it's regimented time 24 hours a day 60 minutes
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in an hour 60 seconds in a minute and so on and and life is governed by the clock and chronos time
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kairos time has nothing to do with clocks it has to do with human life and and human events its
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movement is measured by events like like marriages or love affairs or meals or the births of babies
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significant events you might have you know a few days pass with no kairos time passing at all with no
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significant events so i i think the ancient greeks considered their leisure time to be kairos time when
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they were not on the job when they were not working when they were just spending time eating or with
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their families or taking walks uh that was all kairos time and they realized that there needs to be
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a balance between chronos and kairos yeah i i think for me like kairos time are the things are those
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moments i remember right whenever you're sort of letting your mind wander and you start thinking of
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memories like those weird little memories you never thought you'd remember in the moment but
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they come up for whatever reason like those are for me like our kairos moments yeah and and those those
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moments probably don't come up to you while you're busy sending and receiving emails right no they don't
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it's when i'm right before bed or i'm driving in the car or when i yeah when i'm not doing anything
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when i'm wasting time right yeah yeah so alan this is this has been a good conversation where can
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people go to learn more about the book and you know your your quest to let people waste more time
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well the book is published by simon and schuster and it's just called in praise of wasting time
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and i just published an essay in the washington post they have a a section called disinspired life and
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there's an essay there that that talks about this i think that that i am certainly not alone at all
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in my concern about the frantic pace of life and i think that there there are other thinkers and writers
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who are writing about this that there's a book called distracted by maggie jackson which talks about
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this phenomena the sociologist sherry turkle at mit has written a couple of books about the the
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danger of being on the internet all of the time i think her most recent book is called alone together
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so there there there are other people who are also concerned about this trend in our society to to
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live faster and faster and be more and more plugged in all the time well alan thanks for coming on we
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really appreciate it thank you brett thanks for having me on your your program my guest today was
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alan lightman his book is in praise of wasting time it's available on amazon.com check it out also check
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out our show notes at aom.is wasting time where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into
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to this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips
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and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if
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you enjoy the show you've gotten something out of it i'd appreciate if you give us review on itunes or
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stitcher it helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with
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a friend or family member who you would think would get something out of it as always thank you for
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your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly