Ticktock, Ticktock

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

            In the 2016 movie Arrival, linguist Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is called upon by the military to help communicate with enigmatic alien visitors who have mysteriously arrived on Earth. During the translation process, Banks slowly pieces together meaning from a language that is almost entirely alien to any type of human discourse and ultimately discovers the key to understanding the alien race and their reason for visiting Earth is in the underlying conceptual framework of the alien language: the perception of time. 

            As she comes to understand the new culture, Banks begins to think, and to perceive, reality as the visitors do, and, as a result, all of time becomes revealed to her. She sees her future as if it were a film unwound from a spool, as clearly as if it were the present or the past. Even though this newfound knowledge reveals incredible heartbreak and pain in her future, she embraces it, recognizing both its inevitability and its inherent value. She chooses to live it all—good and bad alike—to its fullest.

            In one of Maria Popova’s recent weekly blog posts, “Brain Pickings,” she reflects on Seneca’s treatise On the Shortness of Life, in which he expounds not only on the limited amount of time granted to us in this life, but on the ways we utilize—or misuse—this precious resource. 

            According to Seneca, many of us don’t recognize the value of this most finite of resources: “You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply.” 

            While this may be somewhat understandable, if not entirely excusable behavior, for young people—who do have more time, we should all know better. Seneca is right. How many of our hours are spent hunched over a video game console or scrolling through channels on our remote control? How much time is wasted hanging out and doing nothing? 

            This of course begs the question of how one lives life to the fullest. How can we eke out every iota of value we have in the modicum of time allotted to us? What’s the most important activity we could engage in? Supporting family? Improving our understanding of the human condition? Bettering the world? Creating art? Seneca states that the study of philosophy, that the acquisition of knowledge, is the only worthwhile endeavor, that it is the foundation of human understanding. Of course, Seneca was a little biased, being a philosopher himself. 

            Perhaps the best way to address this question of a life well lived is to examine the values exemplified in Western culture. The lives of significant historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, or Jesus Christ might help add insights to the values our society prizes, but so might the examination of more infamous figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, or Genghis Kahn. It’s a puzzle: one could argue that all of these individuals lived their lives to the fullest. But which is more important to us, the enrichment of humanity as a whole, the aspiration to create a world in which understanding and love are paramount, or a vision in which ambition and achievement—at any price—trumps all? 

            We live in a society that puts constant demands on our time: work, school, social obligations, and filial duties, to name just a few, are necessary drains on our schedules. These are activities essential to our existence, but are they activities that truly help us grow and aspire us to be the best people we might be? Seneca would say no, but he didn’t need a nine-to-five job in order to exist. But even within the parameters of our social framework, what constitutes a good use of our time, and of a life well-spent? Is creating a gargantuan corporation like Amazon more important than teaching kindergarten? Is volunteering in a free clinic on the South Side of Chicago more worthwhile than being a professional NFL quarterback? 

            Of course, there is no right answer. We have the right—and the privilege—of living our lives as we choose. If one sees more value in attaining personal goals than working for the betterment of society, the more power to him. And vice-versa. What Seneca warned against, however, was not the life goal itself, but those factors which pull us away from it. Procrastination, petty amusements, and work to benefit employers’ whims and needs instead of our own are wastes of our time on this earth. 

            And, according to Seneca, time itself is not the end, but a tool to achieve our ends. Annie Dillard put it quite well in her great work, The Writing Life, “How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

            What is it we seek from our time on this Earth? What is truly important to us? And then—ask yourselves—how often do we really work toward attaining these goals and how often are we distracted from them by the luggage of our everyday routines: lawn work, binge watching, or lounging? How much time do we have? How much do we waste? What is it that we are doing with our everyday lives? Do we spend our days as we really want to or are we caught in a web of routine and repetition?

            As Henry David Thoreau wrote in his seminal work Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

            There is an immediacy, an urgency, in Walden’s work. He understood that time is not on our side, that our time on this planet must be spent wisely and well that to discover one has not lived is the greatest tragedy of all.