The Living's Easy
...or, at least, easier: on time, animals, boredom, and seizing the moment.
Like magic, the bright orb of the sun peeks out from above the horizon at the same time the cats decide to pierce the morning silence with their orchestral wailing. I hear my mother get up out of bed to drag her feet and unsuccessfully stifle a yawn so she could appease the hunger they are so skillfully adept at communicating. In the cats’ general direction, my mom grumbles the same pressing question as always –– “Don’t you know it’s 5 in the morning?”–– only to be met with same chorus of aggrieved wailing because they’re cats and the answer is always “no,” though on a much more fundamental level the answer is “nobody cares.”
After they lick their bowls clean, their complete disregard for the early hour is only further illuminated as they celebrate their full bellies by splashing around in their drinking water, which they’d spilled onto the floor. Then their tails bush up like felt baseball bats and the house’s furniture and walls suffer the indignity of cat scratches and heavy landings. Then they groom each other in an adorable display of peak cat-sibling-cuteness. Then they sleep in absurd positions that draw me to my yoga mat. Then, suddenly, the afternoon silence is split by more crying, prompting us to all jump and confusedly look at the numbers on our phones to confirm that it is indeed their time to eat, as if their yowls signified anything else. The cats don’t know what time it is, they just know they’re hungry.
As Alan Watts wrote in The Wisdom of Insecurity, “instinct rather than anxiety seems to govern their few preparations for the future. As far as we can judge, every animal is so busy with what he is doing at the moment that it never enters his head to ask whether life has a meaning or a future. For the animal, happiness consists in enjoying life in the immediate present.” For people, happiness is thwarted by an inability to live life in the immediate present, as our lives are generally scheduled for us–– Western society lacks a life-affirming conception of time, which means instead of trusting the natural trajectory of our days, as animals do, we are organizing them in response to the demands of a system intent on exploiting our lives for the monetary benefit of corporate executives. As Mary Retta reminds us, our mode of documenting time using a mechanical clock is relatively new and used as a tool to ensure our time is optimized for the best productivity levels. She says, “[t]hese are constructions that whiteness created to ensure our lives were ruled by the arbitrary. You will go to school from age four to eighteen. You will be in class until 3 PM. You will work until you are 65. You will earn $15 an hour…How much is 60 minutes of survival worth to you?”
It’s impossible (or extremely difficult) to answer that question because in our cultural lexicon the words “worth” and “value” have such strong monetary connotations, especially in regard to time, that we can’t grasp an alternative way to measure the weight of an hour in our lives. Another question could be: What would happen if there were a shift in our conception of time? Maybe the “magic of mundanity” would reveal itself, but most likely the punitive pressures of a demanding schedule would be lifted, turning what are currently everyday stressors into opportunities to, as the animals do, experience life in the immediate present.
While it’s true animals are more instinctually driven than humans, and that this could help explain our differing relationships to time, it’s not true that humans are so different that we’re above living life immersed in the world as it occurs to us in the moment. The Native Americans understood this perfectly, believing “time to be a part of the natural cycle of life… that there was a correct time or best time for everything and that nature itself would send the signal to let a person know when that was.” The birds letting out chirps of warning as they peck up1 crumbs of bread my friend has tossed at his feet remind me of restless car rides in which my sister and I would bicker over the armrest in the backseat until our parents directed an irritated warning of their own at us. I saw a video of cows celebrating the meeting of new friends and for the rest of the day the memory of my best friend and I reuniting after years in some hotel lobby in Amsterdam sweetly lingered in my periphery. Once, in a bar in Prague, a Swedish nurse told me one of the last things a patient with dementia forgets is their mother, which brought me to drunken tears as I pulled up an article detailing the intractable bond enjoyed by mother elephants and their baby calves.
In the animals’ lives I see mirrored back instances of my own, instances of emotion and connection and nostalgia; I don’t see the numbness of a slow long shift spent playing solitaire on the computer nor do I see the frenzied distress of counting each minute a train you need to be on has been delayed. Not that idle drudgery isn’t an unavoidable part of life–– we’d probably have to deal with the mundanity of societal obligation regardless of whether we followed an anarcho-syndicalist social order or had stubbornly refused to progress past the agricultural revolution–– but I am saying that our experiences of these commonplace events would be altered if we weren’t beholden to a capitalist conception of time.
One of the teachers with whom I work is retiring after more than four decades teaching, and, though she excitedly details her envious plans–– painting, traveling, visiting friends, enjoying the beaches of Alicante–– she also expresses an anxiety for the responsibility of filling the endless hours of retirement. It’s the age-old anxiety that has plagued almost all of us as we ponder our future, and one that is sourced from our inability to ponder life without a schedule to commit to. When the only way we conceive time is through how productive or exploited we can be, the unknown amount of time stretching before us is domineering and can bear down like a weight, tainting our thoughts with a stressful uncertainty.
Personally speaking, this stress prompts me to “get my life together” by creating a painstakingly strict ten-point plan which I almost immediately abandon because it’s built to satisfy a hypothetical future version of myself rather than address my present needs. Besides, the timeline of my life has never been recharged by the strict adherence to a demanding schedule, but rather through the contemplations of leisurely boredom; through (sometimes unbearable) moments of quiet and stillness, I was able to acquire at least a minimal degree of self-clarity which I used to guide my next course of action.
Not incidentally, we’ve been conditioned to equate high productivity levels with some kind of moral good, whereas we generally view a state of boredom as a state of failure. With this outlook, it’s no wonder it seems so much simpler to just abide by a busy schedule designed for us by our superiors, rather than confront the socialized anxiety inspired in us by the potential boredom inherent to long, empty swaths of time. As Maria Popova wrote for The Marginalian, “we treat boredom… as something to be overcome and grown out of, rather than simply as a different mode of being… [British psychoanalyst Adam] Phillips adds… ‘boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval…It is one of the most oppressive demands … that [a person] should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.’”
Boredom is a transitory state that can be used to determine more fulfilling desires, which is threatening for a society in which we’re meant to be predominantly consumed by a flurry of productivity. Reclaiming one’s time is a clear stand (and, as such, a violation) against this insidious design and therefore must be discouraged by any means. As the saying goes, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” which encapsulates the Protestant work ethic as good as any, though the actual identity of the devil has always been left deliberately vague, encouraging us to draw a conclusion about the supposedly natural correlation between laziness and evil, productivity and good. As if excessive work and productivity are the only ways to be a good person; but what if the devil that idleness attracts is just the seductive whispers of our unvoiced desires or the tempting vision for how we’d like to live our lives? That only sounds devilish to people intent on reducing us to mere laborers, but liberatory to those of us who want to live a life in which we can prioritize our own needs and wants.
There is no clear picture or promise of what a society with a more generous conception of time would look like, which unfortunately creates an opening for the argument that all young people want is to live a life of whining, of laziness, and of entitlement. I hate this argument not because it’s so clearly stupid, but because it suggests the only valuable labor a person is capable of doing is risking one’s life in an Amazon factory or enlisting to kill civilians overseas. It depicts an unfair image of people that runs contradictory to those who (luckily) occupy my life–– who cook me pasta when I come home crying and hungry, or who helplessly circle LAX so I can see a familiar face after traveling. But on a societal level, I think the best counter to that argument is community action: the brave people protesting Atlanta’s Cop City, the TikToker who cleans the houses of those with mental illness for free, and the people who stock the community fridge with free food for those who need it, are a few examples of human labor with an inherent value, even if it’s not a monetary one.
People have always had to perform labor–– according to Engels, our hands evolved the way they did to match the demands of our labor–– and will continue to do so if we want to survive as a species, but our recognition of that labor has been so thoroughly warped by the pressures to abide by a strict schedule of productivity. Our conception of time has devalued the necessity of leisure, of stillness, so we’re often left disconnected from our desires and the vision we have for our own lives; unlike the animals, we’ve elected to dismiss the present, instead choosing to consume ourselves with how to best optimize our futures for maximum productivity. From the moment we’re born, the time we have to be productive has been dwindling and we’ve never been allowed to forget it, compounding the anxieties of life with arbitrary regulations and expectations of how we should live and shepherding us into arduous work from which only a few profit. If people were given the time to decide exactly how they want to live their lives and were free from the pressures to settle for an exploitative job, then more people would opt to participate in work that can actually fulfill them. When people, free from exploitation and the rigors of a profit motive, are instead driven by a desire to see themselves and others prosper, that’s when the true blessings of life and its abundance of time are clear to see. Achieving the right to this type of labor would of course require a complete reconfiguration of society, but acknowledging an alternative way of living is always a decent step towards that goal. In the meantime, we can still try and enjoy the present.
A few weeks ago I was tanning in a garden with a boy, both of us reclining on lawn chairs while the birds pecked away at the bread crumbs thrown at his feet. I didn’t have to leave to catch a train for 23 more minutes, and to fill this time he was sleeping and I was doing nothing. But inaction doesn’t always mean no action, and I watched the garden transform as I truly took in the big, green, juicy, heart-shaped leaves which, escaping my notice, had utterly swallowed a tree that was completely barren a few months prior. I noted how the vibrant fuchsia of the paper-thin geranium petals created a saturated contrast against the cloudless azure of the sky and how the long blades of grass in the unevenly mowed lawn danced along with the light breeze. From the nearby beach I could hear the sound of the ocean gently return again and again to graze the shore’s surface. I couldn't care less about the shortening length of my existence. With such utter peace and calm, it was clear then that 23 minutes is actually an eternity if you let it be–– one that, as I’ve learned from personal experience, can be enjoyed even more when you take your sleeping lover’s hand and recline further so the sun could warm your face.
hahaha lol