forging a better relationship with time

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never turns off. If attention is finite, a 24/7 society fights to expand the surface area of waking time to capture more of it.

If a problem arose, it was typical of my Italian friends to shrug their shoulders and say “Boh”—an untranslatable word that means something like “I have no idea what to say or do, or what you want me to say or do, so I’m just going to make this funny sound and move on with my day.” You can see why this might be great for entrepreneurship or... See more

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.

value practice over perfection.

Digital gardens believe slow time is beautiful. They are designed to support us in reclaiming our time rather than being organized by it. Digital gardens reject the information highway for the clock where minutes are the lengths of easeful breath.

“The time you spend is really spending time,” he said. “It isn’t wasting time. Then one has to find within that spending of time an allowing oneself to just not feel you’re wasting it if you’re just existing for the moment. Just exist.

Getting older is a relentless process of paring down. Getting older is an exercise in letting go. Let go of anger: “I’m at the age now where you just—you’ll die.” Let go of fitting in, of going up to Rao’s with important people. Let go of other people’s opinions: “That doesn’t mean you don’t take advice and you don’t discuss and argue, but at a... See more