Doing Time
A collaboration with Blurbs’n Blobs magazine.
Accelerating speeds of development, production, and consumption are at odds with the devaluation of the everyday person’s time. Tethered by a relentless future, which will not even serve us, our time is a currency in a greedy, oppressive economy. Our every second has become almost entirely a place of exchange for freedom. In the face of these grandiose developments, the worker’s daily time has lost all meaning. In fact, we demean it ourselves. The more we work, the more we desire modes of distraction, the less energy we have to enact revolutionary change, the more we work and consume to forget our powerlessness.
In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson analyze metaphors as conceptual frames that form everyday thoughts and actions. They suggest that “our conceptual system is largely metaphorical,” and “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” Within the metaphorical concept “Time is Money,” we conceptualize and experience time as a “limited resource” and a “valuable commodity” Thus, expressions of time “refer specifically to money (spend, invest, budget, profitably, cost),” “to limited resources (use, use up, have enough of, run out of),” and “to valuable commodities (have, give, lose, thank you for).” These “metaphorical entailments” create a concrete system that completely envelops our lived experience of time in the modern world. We experience time as an expenditure, and units of life as something that can be squandered or well-invested, creating a constant tension between time and money, between wasting life and living it.
“Time is Money” already stands as a strained metaphor to live by, but what happens then to our lived experience of time when the disequilibrium worsens? Between 1990 and 2020, the median household income increased by 125% in the U.S. The federal minimum wage increased by 90.8%. The median home price, often used as a measure of the cost of living, increased by 198%.* These numbers suggest that the time-to-money ratio has become completely lopsided throughout the past 30 years. Within the lived concept “Time is Money,” the average working person is experiencing time as a currency that is losing its value. Our measure of life, already seen as a calculated expenditure, is depreciating.
This slow depreciation that renders the worker so unimportant exists in contrast with everything that makes the world so grand and swift in our day: ostentatious construction, the cranking news cycle, the threat of climate change. Outside of our personal lives, the world is a churning machine of increasing stakes; it never stops, it doesn’t wait, it doesn’t stutter or hesitate, there is no limit to it, and no end. While our every second, minute, and hour is worth less and less and less, plagued by a mechanical pressure of productivity, facing a sort of inflation, there’s never enough of it. The common thread is a sense of endlessness, an endless game of tag between time and money; the less time we have, the more we treat it as a commodity, the more our life becomes a medium of exchange, and managing it, a job. And the world won’t wait, and you don’t have time to fix anything. Everything has become so much bigger than our everyday lives. Nothing could be less impactful than the average human hour. Somehow, this contrasting experience of time, the striking difference between the big world and our small lives, forms the most perfect, forgiving subject.
Mark Fisher defines capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Within this sense of endlessness, “Action is pointless, only senseless hope makes sense.” This widespread feeling that action is pointless is a product of a collective acceptance of the status quo. We are now, more than ever, aware of our economic oppression and of being a part of the masses. Often, we find reassurance in being a part of a common struggle, generationally or economically. However, it’s not the same class consciousness or connectivity that has led to revolutions in the past, but one that leads to subservience. It’s a connection and awareness that turns shared struggles into a collective joke. Our hate for capitalism has become utterly mundane and trivial; our frustrations are limited to catchphrase critiques, online political commentary, or academic discussions, which all fade and resurface routinely. We come to think of our life, time, and energy, our disgust and revolt, as benign as it is treated. Unflinching global development exists in tension with our individual feelings of dissatisfaction, finitude, and exhaustion. It is a time when change is a thing of the past, the coming and going roar of revolution is a tease, and all that is left is progress. “How long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”
We have reached a point where understanding has given way to acceptance, and academic abstraction has yielded no conclusions or solutions. Actually, we know so much that the mission seems insurmountable. The dominating coping mechanism of the masses is distraction. The little time we have, we often squander by trying to distract ourselves from our tiredness and exhaustion through entertainment. “Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again.” We do have a small say in our own lives. We do have a little time to ourselves. And if revolutionary change seems insurmountable, if community-based change is so difficult, maybe we need to recede back into fixing our revolutionary spirit in our own modes of living and consuming.
Sophia Ghoneim (Blurbs’n Blobs)
Personal, scrappy, and diary-like, Blurbs’n Blobs is a feminist magazine dedicated mediating the gap between writers and readers, as to well as creating intimacy between strangers. Tinnitus reads it and loves it!
You check it out browsing blurbsnblobs.wordpress.com or searching for @blurbs_n_blobs on Instagram.
sources:
* In the U.S., the median household income was $60,000 in 1990, $58,800 in 2010, and $68,010 in 2020. The federal minimum wage was $3.80 per hour in 1990, $5.15 per hour in 2000, and has remained at $7.25 per hour since 2009. The median home price was $97,500 in 1990, $169,000 in 2000, $221,800 in 2010, and $336,900 in 2020.”
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_102.30.asp?utm https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_102.30.asp?utm https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS?utm
Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff, Marc Johnson, 1980
Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher, 2009
Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 1947
