In “How To Do Nothing,” Jenny Odell recalls a performance piece by Finnish artist Pilvi Takala which involved her posing as a marketing trainee at accounting firm Deloitte and doing nothing but sitting at her desk and staring out of the window.
None of her “colleagues” knew it was art and became increasingly uncomfortable and irritated at the sight of her wasting time and, apparently, getting away with it.
It seems that wasting time is only OK when we do it secretly.
Like most parents I have felt anxious about screen time, but for the most part it’s my own that bothers me and not my children’s.
My daughter told me she often falls into what she describes as a “TikTok hole” where she can lose a couple of hours presumably watching videos of people cleaning their windows or falling over but the palpitations her revelation gives me are just my own Jungian shadow revealing what I fear in myself.
Someone I followed on Twitter, before I stopped using it to avoid a stress related heart attack, seems to spend all of her time tweeting.
The last time I looked she had written 98k tweets.
I worked out that if a tweet takes 15 seconds to write she has spent 54 working days composing short reflections on her lack of luck with men, not to mention the time she must have used replying to all the men who don’t like her opinions.
The irony of even making this calculation was not lost on me.
Checking my phone I see that my screen usage is down 32% since last week but still averages over 3 hours a day.
Some of this is legitimate but what really worries me is that I’m averaging over 90 minutes on social media. I don’t even like social media.
I’ve also spent ten minutes looking at the clock app apparently.
Putting my phone on charge in the kitchen so I won’t be tempted to pick it up I stare at the tomato plants through the doors. They are so bushy that there is no chance of the fruits ripening even if the sun does decide to shine.
I think for a moment about taking the secateurs to them but decide instead to have a quick nap after all the thinking I’ve done about wasting time.
Later, at the dentists they make me wait 15 minutes past my appointed time.
I get disproportionately frustrated and decide that when it gets to 25 minutes I’m leaving and will call, making no attempt to hide my disgruntlement, to reschedule.
Then, in a moment of sobriety, I ask myself why I think hanging around for 25 minutes plus the drive there and back will be in some way salvaged by my having nothing to show for any of the time I’ve used up apart from a slightly darker mood.
I check the clock on my phone again.
While I’m waiting I work out that 90 mins of social media use is equal to 360 tweets each day.
At that rate it would only take me 272 days to waste the equivalent of 54 working days on Twitter.
The hygienist is ready for me and apologising for the delay.
Social media is mostly full of people telling us how good or terrible their lives are and, in that sense, there’s nothing much to learn.
Ursula Le Guin once wrote,
“An explorer who will not come back or send back his ships is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”
I have been spending too much time with adventurers and I need to reconnect with the explorer.
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