Reflections On Modern Time
A constant, regular ticking. — A world obsessed with time, schedules, and above all precision, will inevitably suffer the peculiar effect of reducing all life and all awareness to the vectors of temporality, namely an ever-growing dread of running out of time. For most people today, this fear — usually unacknowledged, even outright denied, but always palpable — is increasingly causing a kind of universal paralysis: a rejection of any purposeful activity, deep commitment, serious attachment, or painful effort, all grounded in a refusal to face the unbearable reality of our limited time. Like a child thinking that if he covers his eyes, others cannot see him, most of us in this nihilistic era live as though we are hoping that if we pretend our life is not drifting away, we shall somehow be able to remain in our light and superficial condition of thought and feeling forever. We childishly erase ourselves from life in its mature phase, in order to escape the adult responsibility of living. For, we implicitly reassure ourselves, one who refuses to live cannot die. That in truth the opposite might be true — that one who refuses to die cannot live — well, that is too uncomfortable for a child to contemplate, so let’s stop thinking and play harder.
Suggested by a student’s analogy between vast wealth and immortal life. — A man might seek great wealth all his life, working hard to get the “best job,” struggling continually to climb the ladder, to earn the most praise and the highest income, to develop his product or his business for the widest consumer base, while endlessly looking for ways to protect and expand his wealth. To the extent that his original motivation was the desire for wealth as such, that goal, to the extent that he succeeds in attaining it, becomes more and more of an obsession; and of course, since wealth is relative, the obsessed man will naturally feel that he is never wealthy enough. In addition, he might, if he has any self-reflection left in him, begin to wonder what this wealth is for. “I’ll never be able to spend it all, so gaining more now seems pointless, and as I get older, I realize that all this wealth will soon be left behind and become nothing to me. So what was this all about?”
Similarly, the man whose goal is merely to live longer as such, if he actually achieves this prolonged life, perhaps even endlessly prolonged, may experience moments of questioning the essential worth of his goal, and consider that all he has “earned” with his added years is time, which in itself is an empty and purposeless container that gains meaning only from how it is filled. “I have devoted all my time to merely gaining more time – now what could be a more futile waste of time than that? Am I not like a man who spends his life building the biggest box to hold the biggest treasure, but never gets around to seeking an actual treasure to put into the box?”
