In Defense of Wasted Time

posted at 11:06 am
on Jan. 31, 2008

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I’m not the first person to say this, nor will I be the last, but I think wasted time gets a bad rap.

I really don’t get that much of it these days, and I miss it.  I’m not just talking about things happening faster—like email instead of mail or microwave instead of ovens.  I’m talking about how, nowadays, no one has to twiddle their thumbs and wait any more.

In fact, when was the last time you even heard about someone twiddling their thumbs?

Twiddling’s as obsolete as the vinyl record.  But that’s not what I’m talking about today.

I’m talking about waiting.  I used to have to wait quite a while at the doctor’s office or the dentist, but they seem to have gotten their appointment booking under control.

I used to have to wait to get my oil changed, but that’s so fast now I can barely read a section of the newspaper.

And I don’t have to read the newspaper because I have an iPod and I can listen to podcasts or any of my favorite songs.

While waiting for the bus, I can also listen to my iPod, but I don’t wait for the bus because Google now has transit schedules integrated into Google maps, and Google maps is available on the iPhone (which I plan to get).

I don’t have to sit through commercials because I have TiVo, and I don’t have to spend much time on hold because I can email my problem to a company.

I don’t have to wait for film to be developed because cameras are digital.

I don’t have to wait for the light to change because there’s a button I can press.

I can renew library books online, and reserve them online.

I don’t have to wait at customs if I get a Nexus pass, and I don’t have to wait at the airport if I check in online (yeah, this is a bit of a stretch, but still), and I don’t have to wait to renew my car registration any more, either.

Even travel—where you used to have to sit on a train for days, you now sit on a plane for hours—and on that plane, you can watch movies, make phone calls, even (any day now) surf the Web.

Speaking of travel, I’m headed to DisneyWorld next month, and I read that they might have a new line-up process that sends you text messages when your spot in line is at the front of the queue, so you can meanwhile be off spending dinero in their gift stores.

* * *

But besides my ability to list things, what does this all mean?

Well, I used to use time spent waiting to think about things.  Things I didn’t have to think about at any particular time, or in any particular order.  I could think about my family, my toes, my next ten meals, my retirement, why fruit starts out all different colors but all turns brown, the girl sitting across from me who keeps leaning forward and whether she shouldn’t have ordered the soup, the word “tigether” as it relates to groups of tigers, my cat Maggie, string, the French, whether I need a hair cut, and the invention that’s going to make me seven million dollars.

Instead, it seems like I spend all my time thinking about what I’m doing at that moment, and what I should be doing, and what I should be doing next.  That’s it, just those three things.

Waiting, especially long stretches of boring waiting, were a way to clear the palette, cleanse the mind between bouts of heavy thinking.

So if any of you need a passport renewed or something equally mundane, please let me know, as I have a backlog of thoughts that need thinking.

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