We don't have time, we are time. | Friday Footnotes #4

Footnote #4 is based on a passage from 4,000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

Friday Footnotes is a weekly newsletter where reading and reflection meet real life. This week’s newsletter looks more like a traditional essay. Consider it a long footnote on the quote below. There are a few important updates below the essay.

“ . . . there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the word: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when." -Oliver Burkeman

I spend at least forty-five minutes per day pacing in the hallway outside our second bathroom.

It’s a daily ritual, broken into multiple sessions, with the last usually taking up the majority of it, just before I fall asleep. My three-year-old daughter can use the restroom alone, but she likes to be accompanied. She’ll announce to the room, “I need to go potty,” and wait for me or her Mom to walk with her. Then, as if she’d been trained at an etiquette class, she steps onto her stool in front of the toilet, looks me in the eye, and waits for me to sit on the edge of the bathtub. Only once I’m seated does she sit down, straighten her posture like a little empress, and say, “Daddy, I need some privacy.”

She asks for the door to the bathroom to be “almost shut.” If I sit down outside, she says, “Daddy, come in here a second.” If I walk away, or talk to someone in the other room, or use my phone too obviously, the same thing happens. She doesn’t want me in the room, but she wants me present. This used to annoy me a little to be honest, but now I kind of love it.

From the time we can speak, we're conditioned to view time as a commodity similar to cash: something we can save or spend, to be used wisely or wasted. These little sabbaticals in the hallway used to bug me, but they have become a sweet, meaningful reminder that I do not own my time, and I get so much more by giving it away than trying to conserve it.

Parenting isn’t the first time I found that relinquishing control of my time actually gave something back. I used to wait tables under a manager who said, “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” I resented it—we were paid through tips from customers, not wages from the restaurant for cleaning. But I found that the more I surrendered my time to the needs of those I worked with, the more smoothly my shifts went: I had more fun and made more money.

An enormous amount of modern life is predicated on the illusion that we should—or even can—try to completely master our time, that we can dominate our to do list, that we can get sovereign power over our clock and our calendar. In reality, we don't have time, we are time. You are a series of moments chained together, not someone with a series of moments to master and put in the bank. Not only is this kind of mastery most likely impossible, but even if it were possible, it would be supremely alienating. Almost all of the most worthwhile things in life—love, friendship, community, success—come with a little bit of sacrifice. You turn over some of your control of your time to other people.

I currently work one half day a week alone at my family's bookstore. Usually, it's pretty busy and I spend most of the day waiting on customers and doing little odds-and-ends projects. But lately, as life has been busy, the store has been a little slow and I've used some of these shifts to catch up on little administrative chores or casual reading.

This most recent Sunday, when I showed up, my Mom was already there. She said that something got messed up and she needed my help finding dozens of orders. Aside from carrying boxes of books, this is the most strenuous type of work the bookstore has to offer: walking all over the store, climbing ladders, squatting, crawling around to meticulously check title after title on shelf after shelf looking for books people ordered online that, in this case, someone hadn't been able to find yet.

I’d been looking forward to my “chill day,” and my mom saw the disappointment on my face when she asked me to get to work. I’d even made plans to leave early—plans I hadn’t told anyone about. I took a breath, let go of the quiet day I thought I’d earned, and started combing the stacks for online orders. I kept at it until a quarter past the end of my shift.

Being part of the bookstore is a huge part of my identity. Training as a waiter prepared me well for every job I've had since then. Being a father brings me great joy. But even big swaths of time when I'm doing these are things I don't "feel like doing."

Meaning is an inherently retrospective phenomenon. For most things, you don't realize what they mean til they've passed or are mostly over. If most people are honest with themselves, many of the most meaningful experiences of their lives come when they sacrificed, gave of themselves, and did not have the supreme control over their clock and calendar we've all been conditioned to want. The problem is that right before and during these experiences, the opportunity to do something meaningful often shows up as something you "don't feel like" doing.

Perhaps the recipe for a meaningful life is to have a very strong idea about who and what matters to you and to worry a lot less about what you feel like doing at any given time. Paradoxically, by relentlessly trying to control our clocks and calendars, and by trying to prevent others from controlling our time, we may be inadvertently closing ourselves off from some of the most meaningful experiences life has to offer.

Because most nights, if I could choose, I would probably go collapse in bed and read a book or scroll my phone and rationalize that my daughter and I would do something the next day. But years from now, when I look back, I will treasure the nights I got to talk to my daughter through the bathroom door.

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What’s one thing that made your life meaningful this week?

This is a newsletter where reading and reflection meet real life. Share something you read, or thought about, or that happened to enrich your life in the last two weeks.

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Updates and Links

Changes to Friday Footnotes

I started Friday Footnotes to write every week and collect notes on what was going on in my life and what I was reading. It’s gone well—so well that the last issue was way too long. To keep things digestible, I’m making a few changes:

1. Posts will be in the same format as this: longer essay with links etc. at bottom.

2. No more “Friday,” just “Footnote #,” coming out at the end of each week, with the possibility of more.

3. Each post will be a “Footnote” on something I’m reading (or have written before) similar to this one.

4. I’ll be revising and republishing old essays in this format, so if you have a favorite let me know!

From the archive: Courage and Moonshots

My essay Courage and Moonshots was rediscovered by some people this week and got a nice bump in views. I worked on this for nearly a year but it didn’t get that much love when I published it. But I love it and believe there’s still an audience out there somewhere for it.

Before going down this rabbit hole, the boldness of Fedorov’s ideas was what entranced me. The thought of Fedorov scraping a living together in 19th Century Russia as a tutor in a library, having visions as big as resurrecting all of humankind–it was just too much for me to be able to go on grading papers, washing dishes, and clearing my email inbox. It was too grand. I imagined him a spindly man with wild eyes possessed by visions of an immortal proletariat spread across the galaxy. I envied his imagination, his boldness, and his certitude.

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