These Golden Hours

Æther Spoon!

Description

Shivers 1These Golden Hours“You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.” - Ja mes M. Ba rrie, Bri tish PlaywrightIt is said that in some cultures, time passes more slowly. In reality, from the peoples of northeast Indiana to the peoples of Tongatapu, time passes at the same speed for every person today as it did a thousand years ago. Ea ch person has a mere twenty-f our hours, a mere 86,40 0 seconds per day to plan out their daily activities. In these minutes we plan our daily activities to squeeze time and have our unexpected events; attempting to use time saving devices has become a way of life for us. H owever, this has become a problem. Society as a whole has become a matter of us budgeting our time to fit every decision we make, making sure our golden hours do not slip by us – nevertheless, as Ba rrie states, some are only golden because of the fact that we let them slip by. In short, the reasons why we are budgeting our time and given the illusion that time is perpetually short is because we are attempting to recover our golden years, which are wasted by budgeting time and worrying over time being perpetually short.“Though I am old enough to have discovered that the dreams of youth are not to be realized in this state of existence yet I think it would be the next greatest happiness always to be allowed to look under the eyelids of time and contemplate the ...

Informations

• Publié par: Ficir
• Nombre de lectures: 28
• Langue: English

Extrait

These Golden Hours

Shivers 1

“You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by;

but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.”

-James M. Barrie, British Playwright

It is said that in some cultures, time passes more slowly.In reality, from the peoples of

northeast Indiana to the peoples of Tongatapu, time passes at the same speed for every

person today as it did a thousand years ago.Each person has a mere twenty-four hours, a

mere 86,400 seconds per day to plan out their daily activities.In these minutes we plan our

daily activities to squeeze time and have our unexpected events; attempting to use time

saving devices has become a way of life for us.However, this has become a problem.

Society as a whole has become a matter of us budgeting our time to fit every decision we

make, making sure our golden hours do not slip by us – nevertheless, as Barrie states, some

are only golden because of the fact that we let them slip by.In short, the reasons why we are

budgeting our time and given the illusion that time is perpetually short is because we are

attempting to recover our golden years, which are wasted by budgeting time and worrying

over time being perpetually short.

“Though I am old enough to have discovered that the dreams of

youth are not to be realized in this state of existence yet I think it

would be the next greatest happiness always to be allowed to look

under the eyelids of time and contemplate the perfect steadily with

the clear understanding that I do not attain to it.”

-Thoreau,Journal

It is said that the golden years of our lives are our youth.Those carefree years (other

than while we are at school for those twelve hours a day) where one can run (but not with

Shivers 2 scissors), play (just not around that metal playground, and make sure you are back by six or else you won't be back in time for soccer practice), and be with friends (although one must

never talk to strangers) are a great boon to our whole livelihoods.We start our days eating

breakfast on the run while we go to our first activity [Faster, 148], but at least that is better

than working fifteen hour days [Faster, 204] right?In actuality, however, this is a falsehood.

We start out our days years in advance, with the concept of parents not planning their child's

activity tantamount to treason.

This is an abstraction of our futures as well, with every moment of every day planned

out. Dayin and day out, each one of us know exactly what we will do, where we will do it, and

how much effort it will take with little regard for what it really is.The child, on the other hand,

is perfectly content to sit and play with their blocks and run outside with other children.We

view children's activities as a sort of quaint concept that must be merged and evolved in to the

mainstream of society years down the line, but perhaps evolved isn't quite the right word.In

fact, this author believes that it is the children whom we should emulate.

It is said that children are keen observers, being able to note in great detail most things

about their life around them that adults do not.They will also adapt to their surroundings

rather well and learn frighteningly fast the ways of their new life.Thus in this way one can

postulate that Thoreau is, in fact, a child.Not in a literal sense, of course, as a child cannot

hope to be able to live by themselves for a long period of time nearly self sufficiently, or slay a

woodchuck to eat, or to aid ice cutters out along the pond.However, the other things Thoreau

does in hisWaldenindicates more of a child like mentality in his innate curiosity and

observations. Thus,in some small manner,Waldenis quite a bit like attempting to return to

the golden years of childhood; those often forgotten years where today we relegate our

children to the mundane and routine Thoreau purposely goes against.

Shivers 3 There is an older concept often referred to as the “Promise of Technology”, or the idea that technology is a means to the end of lengthy work weeks and the beginning of a new era

of leisure.One could spend time with their family, do the things they want to do instead of sit

behind a desk all day long or work in a factory, or whatever method the person does to obtain

financial security.Obviously, this concept never came to fruition, as otherwise we would have

people taking three month long vacations in a ranch in Texas, and part of the reason is

because we've accelerated our society, asFasterstates.

This utopic society, however, is oddly familiar.Days with little required work to do, lots

of leisure to run around and play...it is the society that modern society does not let our

children partake in!In fact, not only is it the natural tendencies of our younger members of

civilization, but it is also the exact method that Thoreau used inWalden. Thoreauused a

period of time a day during planting season to do essentially nearly all of the required work he

had to do to survive on his own (barring daily maintenance tasks such as eating, repairing

damage, chasing away people that kept chattering away his precious golden years), yet

averaged out over the course of the year, his “work week” would be around ten hours per

week. Somecurrent employees of a major video game publishing company have regular

weekly schedules of eighty hours per week and “death marches” of one hundred and twenty

hours per week [ZDNet 1].These people in the key age group of young adults are having

their “golden years” worked right out of them.All for the promise of not wasting away their

golden years.Ironic how the proverbial “slacker generation” [Trinity, Generation X] is the

same one that has just slaved away through quite potentially their finest hours.

But just what ARE our golden hours, anyway?The views vary widely, of course, but it

boils down to an important question that was asked of the Time's Fools class - “What is a

good use of our time?” [Wilson]The author's personal answer was simple – anything that is

Shivers 4 done, yet does not have to be done.In this view, we see that our good uses of time are the ones that we have tasks that we accomplish at our leisure.We cannot plan leisure, we cannot

dictate the exact minutes and seconds of this.It is a spur of the moment event, one that we

can merely look back upon years in the future and say, “now those were the days...”Our

golden hours are what we as people make of it ourselves, whether that be quality time spent

with loved ones, time alone on a beach hearing the waves crashed in, or even just sleeping.

This is an event that is slowly being deprived of the future generations, starting with those that

entered the last Baby Boom and continuing through to the generations just being born today.

We are literally working the fun out of our lives, draining it of that very golden essence that we

pride ourselves on saving up.Even the notion of “saving time” is a fallacy – with each time

saving step, we waste more time.

“525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes - how

do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in

midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?”

- Lyrics of Seasons of Love,Rent

How do we “waste” so much of our time?We have the same 525,600 minutes as

Einstein, after all.Simple – we do things.Everything we do not because we want to do it is a

waste of time.This does not dictate that it is an unnecessary waste of time, but merely that

the expenditure of time is undesirable.Is watching television two hours a day a waste of

time? Ischatting and hanging out with friends four hours a day a waste of time?Is spending

two weeks writing a five to eight page paper discussing the effects of time a waste of time?Is

working a menial job for an equivalent wage a waste of time?Is sleeping ten hours a day a

waste of time?It all depends on society's viewpoint.Taking it from a stereotypical middle

Shivers 5 aged chief executive officer's point of view, everything save working that job is a waste of time. Societyhas sadly failed this person if that is their honest point of view.From the point

of view of a professor, perhaps sleep and writing are the positives in an otherwise wasted

period of time of the student.This too is a flawed perspective.From the student, perhaps the

watching of television and the job are peaks in their day.In the point of view of a child, talking

with their friends and enjoying themselves greatly outranks everything else done during a day.

Indeed, that is probably the most honest point of view out of any of these – that things that are

“fun” are more important than the things we fill our day with.It all depends on how one

measures a year in a life.Our society as a whole is used to the hustle and bustle of daily life,

where men work 7 to 5 jobs, women work 7 to 5 jobs, kids are in school from 7 to 5, and after

that 7 to 5 burst, no one has enough energy to actively enjoy themselves with the hours left

before they drift to a blissful slumber.

Of course, this leaves out a very important parallel – that we as a society are not only

crushing the lives of those that are young, but crushing our own.North Americans as a whole

view Europeans as a whole as “lazy” for only having a 36 or 39 hour work week.Europeans,

in turn, find other countries lazy for similar reasons.Why is this a bad thing?Is the point of

life to merely exist and work for some nameless body labeled our boss, or is it to enjoy and

better oneself?If you ask the random person on the side of the street, their answer to why

they work is to survive.However, said person will be completely baffled as to what else one

would do – and when pointed out to them that they work many hours a week for little reason,

they stand there stunned for a moment or three.

Each generation has a stronger “work ethic” burnt in to their brains.Although

constantly referred to as lazy or slackers, each post-WW2 generation ends up working harder

and longer than the prior, for little reason.Technology is such that one can easily work twelve

Shivers 6 hours per week, be paid more, be more efficient, and have the world not stop just because the billions that inhabit this planet are not working non-stop.There are others who see similar

things. Inthe bookNeuromancer, Gibson refers to a few people as “salariman” (literally

“Salary Man”, but in Japanese), and they are treated with scorn.Other writers of utopic

societies write about not having to perpetually work, including Thoreau himself inWalden.

What can be done about this?In short, stop wearing that watch.Apportioning time

and analyzing each second of every day does nothing to help us have our leisure time – in

fact, if we truly looked at our daily lives second by second like society demands, “[the] process

would reveal itself as fractal and recursive.” [Faster, p164]Live life as one wishes to live.

This does not mean emulating what Thoreau did at Walden Pond, but merely doing what one

wants to do.Analyze what one needs to do and eliminate time sinks that society places on

us. Thenext time one asks their supervisor for a raise, instead ask for the same salary but

fewer hours.These are, of course, lofty dreams of the author, and probably not entirely

possible. Thereis, of course, one means to this end that would work:teaching the new

generations that one can use technology to give them more free time.Letting them go out

and play, and not have to worry about things as much.With each new generation like this, we

reverse the trends that have been present for over fifty years.With each new generation, we

no longer need axioms such as Benjamin Franklin's “Time is Money.”We can exist merely as

we wish to be, putting forth a minimal amount of society-enforced work, to finally be able to

stop, look back, and realize that we have not wasted our golden years.We let our golden

years slip by on purpose, to see that they really were golden, and not worry about “saving

time” by spending it.

References Thoreau, Henry David.Walden. BeaconPress, 2004. Gleick, James.Faster. VintageBooks, 2000.

Thoreau, Henry David.“Journal” Unpublished.

Shivers 7

Rent (1996 Original Broadway Cast).“Seasons of Love” Track 1, Disc 2.Dreamworks, 1996.

“For Developers, it's not all fun and games”, ZDNet.com,http://news.zdnet.com/2100-

th 3513_22-5457274.html, 2004.– November 18

“Forgotten Generations - Generation X”, Trinity University,

http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/socpsy01/forgotten/x_generation.htm

th Wilson, Michael.“Time's Fools” - October 26, 2005

Onymous, Anne.Interview with person on the side of the street (Park Avenue).Interview

th date, December 5, 2005.Requested to remain anonymous.

Gibson, William.Neuromancer. AceBooks, 1984.