It’s all about filling ‘The Time’

In Indian philosophy, there is a school of thought that says – ‘Time consumes us’ and not the other way around. We, as just one of the species from a countless variety under the ether, have trouble passing Time. (Time nahi pass ho raha as we would often hear people saying wryly). That is the reason we are always looking for something – an activity – to pass that Time, to fill the Time with an outside distraction. As if the cyclic day and night pattern needs to be consumed at all moments.

From the modern way of living, we have inherited the dichotomies of personal and professional – always a thin line getting further blurred with each passing day, especially because of technology.

We fill Time with whatever personal and professional lives we hang out with– friends, family, relationships and school, college, jobs respectively. Needless to say that technology, now, constitutes a big chunk of that Time in both the realms.

I, however, wonder: How did people spend Time when technology didn’t exist as we know it today?

What did they do on the personal front? Probably a similar outlook: friends met (under a tree, by a river, up the hills), families talked (more often), relationships interacted more freely without a status baggage. On the professional front the skills may have differed – farming, hunting, masoning and other medieval ways of sustaining livelihood.

Which part of the lives men earlier lived is then replaced by technology? Besides the morning cleansing routines, the breakfasts, the luncheons, the dinners, authentic herbal tea in unfinished pots, a walk to the farm by the bread winner, a woman’s long march to fetch water from the river, the household chores and [good] night sleeps, which are the activities that technology took over!

What did people do to fill the Time that is now occupied by technology? One that comes to mind is: GOSSIPING. Perhaps, people gossiped more, one on one. Perhaps, they murmured more against the likes of Socrates who refused to fill The Time with unyielding activities. Who preferred solitude over scandals! Or maybe people schemed to cement the structures of patriarchy, of religious divides, of caste and racial differences and so on.

The fact remains that in every epoch of this entity called Time, people were fond of distractions. Distraction from their own selves, from reality of life, from sensory hollowness, from the abyss within that mankind carries since Adam and Eve ate that apple. And in pursuing that distraction, little good and a lot of bad was done. The wars that we are witnessing have not happened overnight. It is the result of that ever burning desire for distraction.

Is it really then right to blame technology for everything? Haven’t we always found ways to distract ourselves?

Isn’t it a natural tendency of man – to look for escape? Technology is just a replacement activity that resonates today. Before we would even realize, something else will take its place. Because distraction demands new.

It is but the genius of Mark Zuckerberg and others before him to come up with something – an activity – that fills the Time in a manner never known to mankind. Daily routines that men spent in solitude are now encroached.

But, we chose it as have people who came and went before us. It has been our choosing.

The good thing is: we can choose to change our choosing. That is the freedom that has no “reasonable restrictions.” That is a supreme “natural right”.

How we pretend to consume Time is changeable. But the cycle of Time consuming us has always been certain. And it is so at this very moment.

 

PS: I chose to write Indian philosophy for a reason, for the purpose of philosophies is same, practice may be different.