I have this little ritual that perhaps will sound minute and insignificant to others, but which is of profound importance to me. Every Friday, after I’ve finished with my workday, I unclasp the watch which has been my companion for some five years now, I set it on my night table, and I won’t put it back on again until I get ready for work on Monday morning. I understand that this is the luxury of actually having a weekend, which many people are not privileged to enjoy—maybe because they work in hospitality or some other industry that has them working “odd” hours, or maybe they need to work a second job just to get by. Maybe it’s both, but I digress. I do this as a symbol of freedom: that I am no longer bound by time or needing to be somewhere.
You know, historically, human beings didn’t work a 9 to 5. They would work when work needed doing. For instance, if you imagine an agrarian society, there’s no “busy work” to be done after you harvest your crops. Once it’s done, it’s done. Then you move on to doing something else. Not so in the age of hourly wages, or even salaries: now we have this idea that somehow employers are buying not only our labour-power but also our time. Time is, like everything else, a commodity that is bought and sold.
Contrary to what you might expect, my intention is stating this is not to imply some kind of grand conspiracy. There’s a lot of ways in which it makes sense for people to be at work within certain periods of time. For instance, in a hospital, when you might be needed on staff just in case someone comes in with a problem you specialize in. We shouldn’t complain about nurses standing around the ER when there’s no work to be doing. In fact, that’s a profoundly good thing, but it is good to know that they are if they are needed.
Contrast this with a lot of office work. David Graeber, one of my favourite authors, wrote a highly entertaining book called Bullshit Jobs, which was all about this idea that we equate time with money. Employers pay for your time, and even if you’ve already completed your work, you’re expected to remain at work, looking busy. And this, he argues convincingly with testimonies of people with these bullshit jobs, can actually be highly demoralizing—even dehumanizing! —since your purpose is essentially that of a garden gnome there to make the garden look pretty.
This isn’t just the west, either. In China, there is a similar phenomenon with white people or foreigners being recruited for jobs that require little work in order to make the company look more important or international than it really is. They’re called “white monkeys”. Amusing as this is, imagine that being your purpose in life. In a society where people are defined largely by what they do, your job is to be a monkey in a suit, sacrificing your time in a role that has no other function than to simulate a particular appearance.
However, I am not simply aggravated by the fact that this time is wasted and work indignified. What frustrates me is that time is commodified in this way to begin with. Consider a typical question you might hear on a Friday afternoon: “How are you going to spend your weekend?” Before a vacation: “How are you going to spend your holiday?” Or even in retrospect: “How did you spend your evening?” If you don’t have the energy to entertain any possible answer to these questions, you might reply, “I’m all spent!”
We talk about time and energy as if they were one currency among many. I’ve certainly noticed this internalized comparison within myself. Often, if I think in terms of my salary-qua-hourly-wage, I might ask myself if it’s worth the time it takes to do something, or if it’s cheaper to pay someone else to do it. When I look at prices, I think of how long it takes me to earn that money, and if that’s worth it. I might imagine the worst hour or so I had at work that week, and think about if it’s worth the time I’m spending, the energy I exerted, to purchase a certain commodity for my enjoyment.
A movie ticket, for example, costs me roughly half-an-hour of my time, and then there is the opportunity cost of going to see a movie, which puts my time spent at roughly 3 hours when you factor in the movie, popcorn, waiting times, and working for the money to pay for that experience in the first place. That’s just under 10% of my workweek. I would argue that whether you think in those terms or not is irrelevant: the simple fact is that when we equate time as money, as the old saying goes, we end up with a neurotic omni-capitalism wherein even sleep, rest, and leisure are products that you pay for in some way. Yes, some of these are the necessary costs of being able to live (e.g., sleep), but we can’t well write that off on our taxes.
I, of course, have harsh objections to the extreme levels of wealth that people can accumulate since, if you work like everyone else, it would be unthinkable to make billions of dollars. However depressing this might be, it’s not my focus here. Maybe some other time I’ll take up the question of time and staggering amounts of wealth. More important for today is this: how do we free ourselves from this bind where time is money? How do we reclaim our time for ourselves, instead of allowing it to be this product like any other? Or are we simply doomed to continue treating life like soft currency?
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