In your spare time

So I read a great little snippet recently that really hit home - specifically with regards to what I've been feeling over the past few years about my attention span and the quality of the things I consume online. "Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. ... If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just save the hours and read the Substack post? All the more if the information is outdated or questionable for one reason or another. But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It's a machine for thinking. And "all machines," as Thoreau once said, "have their friction." The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us. It's not about the wisdom we glean. It's about what wisdom we grow." — Joel Miller Don't you just flipping love that? A book is a machine for thinking! So that means that the act of reading is what actually then allows our machine (more commonly referred to as a brain) understand, interpret and ultimately embody that information - which makes trying to cut corners on that process seem rather absurd. Think about something like Blinkist - whose primary value proposition is to save its users time by giving the gist of a, say, 500-page book in a 15 minute audio clip - a book that would ordinarily take days or weeks to read. Their value prop, whittled down, comes to this: "Perfect for curious people who don't have time to read." I appreciate that life can be busy and that sometimes it feels like there are a million things to do. Thing is, when it feels like there's no time to do the things that we want to do and the solution comes in the form of cutting corners to more efficiently do these things, something probably gets lost on the way. It makes me think about how one might talk about the things that they have to do in-between the things that they really want to do - or put differently, what they do in their "spare" time.

"Spare time - the time when one is not working" I think that's such a disrespectful way to talk about time - that "spare" time is essentially the residue of the productive moments in life. Life is the thing that is happening all of the bloody time. That's what life is - a series of inter-connected moments that contribute to keeping that very same life alive. These sorts of turns of phrase affect the ways we think about and value things in the world. So to continue to refer to what is probably our most finite and valuable resource in such a flippant way feels like a diss to life itself. There is no such thing as spare time. Time is all there is. I hope these words find you well wherever you are in the world.