Relationship with Time

The way of the tourist is to consume; the way of the pilgrim is to be consumed. To the tourist the journey is a means. The pilgrim understands that it is both a means and an end in itself. The tourist and the pilgrim experience time differently. For the former, time is the foe that gives consumption its urgency. For the latter, time is a gift in... See more

We very often do not have the time to create what we need by ourselves. It’s reasonable to ask who on Earth is expected to return our emails or make our dinners while we wile away our time crafting. We’ve increased the distance between ourselves and the things we need or want—and also made for ourselves a steeper learning curve for meeting our own... See more

Look at how we’ve changed the capturing of the passing of time. Before we rewired our brains to connect personal with commercial, down time as wasted opportunity, we used to talk about our accomplishments as memories. We remember the marathon we ran, the little moments that made that day feel so significant. That marathon included training, but we... See more

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them... See more