The Big Picture

Life's fast and it's getting faster. We travel faster, we communicate faster, the food is faster and we live in a culture that makes us deeply regret every minute we waste not being productive or not fulfilling some personal pleasure; time is money and we're fools when we're wasting either of them.

_{Image by Alexander Gerst - source:}

This is one of the saddest things to believe, both as an individual and as a society; to really believe that hedonistic pleasure and material wealth are worth your time, when time is the only real scarcity in life. Or it should be. It should also be the only uncertainty in life that matters; you never know when your time's up. Money is the only thing we can make as much of as we want, even more than we want; it's a crazy thing to compare the both of them in a saying that pretends to speak some truth about life. Yet most of us are forced to believe this crazy idea.

But life's fast and time is money. So everyone needs to spend as much time as possible to make money... My father was the only person with a job when I was growing up, and it was a simple job; with that one simple factory job he managed to feed us all, me, my sister and my mother, own a car, pay for a small family vacation every year, AND on the side get a university degree in law with which he later started his own little law-firm. Society back then wasn't as fast yet, and regular blue collar worker's income grew with the growth of the economy. I'm not saying everything was better back then, but some things were.

We still had time back then. We didn't always have to rush to the next thing, whatever that next thing was. We didn't all have to find a job for ourselves, so our parents had all the time in the world for us; they actually felt guilty if they had to leave us with our aunt and uncle for one day. This must sound alien now; day care centers are understaffed and have huge waiting lists. Mommy and daddy have to work to pay the rent, and they'll have to work extra if they want to pay for the overpriced school books. I remember the words of Kurgan in the movie Highlander: "It's better to burn out than to fade away..." He was wrong, but we still listened:

_{Highlander Kurgan Church Scene - I Have Something To Say}

Nowadays it's common practice that both parents have to work to make ends meet, and if the kids want to have an education beyond high-school, they'd better get a job too. A vacation? Don't think so, not this year. A car? In my father's day everyone got a license as soon as they were of legal age to drive. Those days are gone; I got my license when I was 35 years old, both me and my girlfriend have a job and so does my son; we manage, but all of our schedules are always full. Now that my girlfriend has lost her job, nothing is certain anymore and I'll have to work more hours, at least until she finds a new job. IF she finds a new job. As parents we didn't have as much time with our one kid, as my parents had with both their kids; there it is again, the only scarcity in life...

I ask you step back, zoom out, see your life in the big picture of human existence on this planet, and ask yourself; is this our nature? Have we naturally evolved into "homo rapidus," or is it something else that imprinted the belief that "time is money" on our collective soul? Did we freely choose to abandon the idea that the family is the cornerstone of society, in favor of the idea the every family member has to pay their individual due for the right to exist? Why not try to reverse the saying? "Money costs time." Isn't that the real truth? We're homo sapiens, not homo velocitas. We are "knowing", not to be hasted because knowing costs time, and time is scarce.

I'd like to leave you with an extreme feat of zooming out and capturing the biggest of pictures in one small video; bill wurtz compresses 13.7 billion years in less than 20 minutes in this video. I think it's brilliant. He spends about four and a half minutes to cover everything from the Big Bang until humans started settling down and growing their own food, so there's more than fifteen minutes left to cover all of human history up to and including the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. If you watch it, I hope you'll notice why the seeds for believing that "time is money" were planted approximately four and a half minutes into the video... In any case, please enjoy this very enjoyable small big picture:

_{history of the entire world, i guess}

P.S.
You may have noticed that I've been slacking off when it comes to responding and commenting lately, and I want to apologize to all of you for that; you deserve better and I hope I'll be able to turn this around soon.

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