We want to understand what rhythm suits us, to find time for ourselves in the daily race … We want, but almost do not believe that this is possible. Why are we not doing anything?
“It’s not so much what I do that makes me tired, but what I don’t have enough time for,” many people complain about this. And no wonder: almost each of us has ten lives in one – family, career, love, sports, travel, culture … And there will definitely not be enough time for anything. Why, because we try our best?
We value action too much
The paradox is that it is our efforts to be in time everywhere that lead us to a state of eternal time pressure. Thanks to high technologies, the zone of our possibilities is becoming wider every day. Make an appointment with a doctor, pay for classes and buy tickets online … We no longer entrust this to others, because you can do everything yourself. “Just do it” – just do it! – this famous slogan could become the motto of our era. “We identify with action, and that makes us suffer,” notes psychoanalyst Sylviane Giampino.
We become impatient, including in relation to ourselves, and demand quick – and preferably high – results, including from ourselves. “Capture, mastery, struggle, conquest; faster, higher, stronger — these are the categories of our civilization,” explains tanatotherapist Vladimir Baskakov. “In terms of energy, it is predominantly yang, masculine energy. To restore balance, we do not have enough “yin”: being in silence, peace, there are not enough spaces of emptiness and transition in order to subjectively experience our life, to abide in being.
We do not give ourselves time to think and experience, and therefore we no longer belong to ourselves and do not remember who we are. And this is necessary in order to feel like a subject of your life, and not an object that, against its will, moves from home to work, from a meeting to a store, and in between does many more things on the run.
We need inner space
There is another reason for the feeling of lack of time: “we abandoned the rituals that marked time in traditional societies,” notes Vladimir Baskakov. What are the consequences?
“We turn out to be unprepared and experience as a surprise the most important events, such as birth, death, marriage, and every time we have to re-search for their meaning, independently inscribing them into the canvas of our life, and this is a difficult and often impossible task for an individual person, to which we are also largely unprepared for.” As a result, much seems to slip between our fingers without being meaningful, felt, and ultimately lived. So our life is alienated from us.
Between depth and excitement, we choose excitement. It’s our way of forgetting our mortality
This “fluidity” is analyzed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: “In our liquid modernity, the world is cut into separate slices, the life of each of us falls apart, like crumbs, into a series of incoherent moments.”
We join first one, then another set of ideas and principles, not having time to assess their authenticity or illusoryness, durability or ephemeralism. Our self-image becomes more fragile and gets lost in actions whose meaning is erased. The loss of meaning reinforces the feeling that we do not have time, “because the sense of time is a psychological space,” Silviana Giampino explains. “And only understanding that there is meaning in what we are, what we experience, what we do, could give us a sense of this space.” But when we have a choice between depth and excitement, we choose excitement.”
Why is this happening? What makes us refuse to plunge into our own depths and draws us into the feverish whirlwind of the outside world? This is our way of forgetting about our mortality: the pursuit of new achievements and impressions allows us to get away from thoughts about beginnings and endings. But the psychoanalyst emphasizes: “The less we think about our mortality, the more the fear of death grows, which requires that we drown it out with constant activity.”
subjective time
“Pure duration” – the experience of time that is reflected in our consciousness – does not consist of successive and independent moments, but rather of their merging. This concept was introduced by the philosopher Henri Bergson.1. Beings and the Universe “last”, that is, change, transform in time; it is thanks to the changes around us that we realize that time is passing.
As in a melody, each note gives rise to the next and is inseparable from the previous one. And at every moment of our life we are the resultant of all our past and future moments, previous and future changes.
Sigmund Freud comes to the same point of view2. For him, each subject has its own history – a mixture of its repressed past and the embodied present. But the psychoanalyst went further: he discovered the unconscious, where objective time does not exist. There past, present and future can overlap and even mix.
We hope to conquer time
How to get out of this vicious circle? The first temptation is to organize your time. Become a time management specialist, turn to a coach who will show you “how to”. But this is a mistake. “The rationalization of time destroyed individual and collective time, which was self-regulating in a natural way,” says Silviana Giampino. “The more rationally we approach time, the more we shorten it and the more it eludes us.”
If we subordinate it to the voice of reason, it first reassures us: everything is finally under control. But it reduces our sense of responsibility and makes us more vulnerable. “As a result,” the psychoanalyst adds, “we no longer trust our ability to slow down, rest, or speed up when necessary…”
Growing up, we were often required to abandon our own rhythm in order to fit in with those around us: “Hurry up!”, “Hurry!” or vice versa: “Wait, calm down!”, “Not so fast!”… How can we regain this ability?
“Become one with the work to be done,” suggests philosopher Michael Groneberg. “Because here’s the amazing thing: when we take our time doing one thing, pushing aside everything else, we manage to get out of our accelerated existence.” Example? Dive into the water: when we move into another space-time, the frantic rhythm of everyday life no longer has power over us, and its artificial nature is revealed to us. Or a game. “To play,” continues the philosopher, “means to enjoy the person we meet or the activity that captivates us completely, without reducing them to an object from which we want to get something.”
In a word, bring a little carelessness to our actions. It is a way to live in peace with our time, which, no matter what happens, we can never buy.
1 For more details, see Yu. Novikov “The concept of time in the philosophy of A. Bergson”, Space and Time, 2011, No. 1 (3).
2 Z. Freud “Psychology of the Unconscious” (AST, 2007).