If anything, it’s a fissure we should welcome and even strive to create.She had pulled out of a string of gigs in 2010, citing ill health
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Empty time is not a crack we always need to plug. That might mean taking a lighter course load (don’t be afraid to drop a class Week 3!) or not continuously reaching for our phone. But we should try to not fill up every second of our daily schedule. We do not need to stop challenging ourselves intellectually. It asks what is left of us when we stop trying to fill space and time - a particularly worrisome question for Stanford students who often think of ourselves in terms of our accomplishments.īut as the new academic year begins, as the excitement and stress of our frenetic quarter system gradually pick up, I think it’s worth embracing the occasional silent moment. Silence forces us to “endure our thoughts,” to borrow a phrase by the poet Wallace Stevens.
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And that discomfort is articulated when we take out our phones during any unplanned free moment. That discomfort can be seen in Stanford students’ tendency to take on more classes and commitments than we can handle: we’re more afraid of empty time than we are of a bloated schedule. That discomfort can be heard when we feel compelled to break the silence of a dinner table or when someone eventually answers a professor’s question after a long lapse. We are happy to waste time so long as we feel we are spending it.Įight centuries ago, the poet Rumi wrote that “your entire life was a frantic running away from silence.” Before the printing press, before the Industrial Revolution, before the internet, Rumi lauded the value of emptiness even as he expressed humans’ general discomfort with it. The fear of doing nothing is greater than the fear of doing the wrong thing. But in other ways, digital addiction is the perfect fulfillment of a mentality that abhors empty time. If we really wanted to make the most of our time - whatever we believe that entailed - we probably wouldn’t endlessly binge TikToks.
Spending hours on our phones mocks any view of time optimization. In reality, however, most of us would acknowledge there are frequent mismatches between what we say we value and the things we actually do. But it shares a common thread with the outlook of the ambitious that time is something to be optimized.Īll optimization means is that people who see time as something valuable will theoretically spend that time on things they think are important. This mindset reflects a different view of how time should be optimized. That means spending more time among family and friends. That means climbing a mountain instead of a corporate ladder. To them, limited time should impel us to fill up our schedule with what’s truly important. Other people are scared of wasting time by being overly ambitious. For example, the 14th-century epic poem “Inferno” warns that “the man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life will drift past him like a dream.” Alexander Hamilton, we are told in the famous Broadway musical, “ day and night” like he’s “running out of time.” Ambition in these cases seems like an attempt to conquer time by effectively using it - as if one can spite the clock by working around the clock. That’s true regardless of different perceptions of what constitutes value.Īmbitious people are scared of wasting time by being complacent. When time is characterized as a scarce resource, we become obsessed with extracting as much value from it as possible. Go, go, go! Chase the horizon, even though the sun will set regardless. Who knows how much time you have left? Every second you’re not doing something is an opportunity. Robert Herrick’s famous 1648 poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” tells us to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”ĭo stuff now, Horace and Herrick said. The Roman poet Horace suggested that we must “pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one,” a phrase we know today by its shorthand carpe diem. Time has long been thought of as something that must be spent wisely and never taken for granted.
Smartphone usage reflects a longstanding uneasiness with silence that we should try to overcome. But the fear of idle moments that makes us turn to our digital devices predates the digital age. Like a potent gas, technology can dull our senses as it expands into the smallest crevices of our daily lives. I overuse my phone partly because smartphones and social media are designed to be addictive. I plug in every crack of empty time by reading news articles, emails and Tweets. Waiting for my dentist appointment several weeks later, I scrolled on my phone. Standing in line to buy cupcakes this summer, I scrolled on my phone. Perhaps, like me, you instinctively reach for your phone.
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