We Love Wasting
We adore abundance
Only for a moment, let’s accept that saying ‘I have no time’ is the same as saying ‘I have no will,’ It’s an exercise I do with you with this article.
I have a day job, old parents to look after, and a family with a 16-month-old baby, and I face challenges all that implies, as you probably do.
On the other hand, my mental environment is the Western mindset based on wasting as the primary indicator of well-being. And this is an overcomplication because it echoes distractions as the primary escape strategy from challenges.
‘I have no time’ are the few words that express that escape strategy by a reasonable excuse. It’s reasonable because we — as Western citizens — are constantly busy. No matter what we’re engaged with. We’re busy. Full stop. Yet, it’s an excuse as far as we can afford to waste time in leisure. Think: Are you really busy all day?
I asked myself the same question. And this article is the answer I’m writing in my spare time. I started writing these words early in the morning using my phone while my baby was sleeping near me and my wife was having breakfast before commuting to work. I’m continuing writing before my day job, waiting for the medical examination, and so on.
When reading what I’m jotting down, I realize I created time to write by avoiding wasting time. What if I started my day by reading socials? It’s just an example of a straightforward way to lose the chance of writing this article and sharing that another way is feasible with you and me.
Waste as well-being
Rich people can waste and stay wealthy. That’s a fact. Consequence: when I tire, I feel rich. That’s a misunderstanding.
I’m not a capitalism expert, so take my words as a humble opinion. I think capitalism needs as many people as possible to spend money, even money they didn’t have. This mechanism creates a balance between consumerism and poverty.
Poor people desire to be rich and consume as much as possible for this aim. But, since they consume more than they can afford, they get poorer while striving to feel rich.
When I say ‘poor people,’ I don’t think of money. There are rich people with little money and poor people with a lot of money. But there’s a difference.
Despite their money, rich people get rid of waste and are efficient. This is the difference. And this is why rich people can waste but don’t.
Will as awareness
Any culture is an almost inviolable cage for the people who live in it because it’s also where every feeling and thinking finds a foundation. Look at a culture like the restaurant menu: you can choose what to eat from a pre-determined list of possibilities. A culture is such a restaurant menu. Who sustains and defends the culture is like the chef who decides the menu.
Regarding well-being, in our Western mindset, there’s only one leading choice: abundance up to waste. Yeah, there are some minimalism trends, but honestly, is it relevant?
Our menu is full of non-essential things that everybody is educated to deem necessary, at least from a social perspective. But the social dimension of life is so pervasive that it flows into every other aspect.
The key to opening the cage door is the awareness of being in a cage. When you know you’re in captivity, the will to freedom can dissolve the cage by simply appointing it. Sure, you must accept the discomfort of admitting, ‘I’m a prisoner,’ and that’s one of the most insurmountable obstacles.
Very often, our will is silent because we have no words to invoke it and no awareness to feed it.
Time as a measure
The existing amount of money in the world is ideally limited but so huge that it’s as if it were unlimited. Instead, time is more evidently limited: 24 hours a day, nothing more.
Time is a measure of what your will can aspire to do. A lot of time is many possibilities, little time is a few possibilities, and no time is no possibilities at all.
Being limited, time is an excellent measure of waste. Often, we visualize time as an arrow, ‘the arrow of time,’ to highlight that time has a direction, which, again, is a measure of purpose. When there’s no purpose, the direction goes into nothing, which is the perfect representation of waste.
As a writer, when a day goes on without writing, I measure a wasted day. But you can apply this measure to whatever purpose you have in life. Set a goal and a time horizon to achieve it, then measure the distance between your will and that purpose: the distance is the time you waste by doing things that move away from achieving your goal.
We’re so used to time that we don’t care. Our Western citizens’ education focuses on things we can buy, and you cannot buy time. Sure, you can pay people to save time, but it’s a saving, not an increment. Nobody can buy time.
Final thoughts
When you switch your will off, waste arises, and time goes into nothing.
Look at the people crammed in shopping malls, where, especially near Christmas, there are so many people that if a pin falls there, it does not arrive on the ground; that expanse of the poor — as mentioned above, money has nothing to do with it — is the fresco of waste and the absence of will.
Consumerism is rooted in waste, and we are based on consumerism, so waste is our way of life, and advertisements are our fake will. Consequently, we lose the feeling of time because it measures our lack of purpose.
When a civilization loses its purpose, it’s on the path of a transition towards something different that can be the rise of a new worldview. Yet, the past is always the ground of the present and future, so the coming new should start from our loss and build upon it.
