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In the book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman talks about a concept of time that productivity writers rarely discuss: time as a network good.
Conventional productivity advice – and increasingly also general life advice – treats time as a rare commodity we ought to fight for and then protect from others. Being in control of our time is the ultimate key to individual freedom, we’re told.
An extreme example of someone who has managed to attain total control over their time and movement is the digital nomad. Having reached the pinnacle of personal freedom, digital nomads are completely detached from the rhythm of normal society. The daily schedule is theirs and theirs alone. And yet, many admit to living a desperately lonely existence. It turns out that having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.
Burkeman argues that the consequences of always prioritising control over one’s personal time, when applied to society at large, can be quite disastrous. A society in which people live out of sync with one another, one that lacks the shared rhythm required for deep relationships to take root, creates fewer opportunities for shared human experiences – arguably life’s greatest source of happiness.
“We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project – nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band – that takes place in a setting other than the workplace. …
“All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics – the world of meetings, rallies, protests and canvassing – are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronised population finds it difficult to get round to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected – alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. ‘Totalitarian movements are mass organiations of atomized, isolated individuals.’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
According to Burkeman, we too often make the mistake of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering some of our power to decide exactly what we do with it and when. As such, we ought to view time as a network good, one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it and how well their portion is coordinated with ours.
“The question is: what kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty – the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions... On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavours that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when.”
– Kai
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Apps & Sites
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Amie seems to combine your calendar, task manager and contacts into one centralised interface. The app is still in beta but is slowly adding new users from their wait list.
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“Tripsy is a trip planner that lets you share your itinerary with family and friends, receive flight alerts, store documents.” The service has grown up a lot since I first featured it in DD over two years ago, now sporting a full range of Apple apps to make your trip planning easier. Friends of DD enjoy a 50% discount on the first year of their premium tier.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Need to send a password or sensitive text note to someone online? With Privnote you can quickly generate a link with your note that self-destructs after opening or after a certain amount of time has passed.
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Quilt is an audio-based community describing itself as “a new kind of social wellness space to connect, share, and learn with others through daily conversations”. A big theme seems to be ‘self-care’. It’ll be interesting to see how such a space can grow without too many bad actors interfering. You can access their community guidelines here.
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Worthy Five: Deep K. Kailey
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Five recommendations by artistic director and cultural curator Deep K. Kailey
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A video worth watching:
Hetain Patel’s TED talk ‘Who am I? Think again’ is clever and innovative. How do we decide who we are? Patel’s observation on identity and language challenges you to think deeper than surface appearances.
A question worth asking:
‘Why are we here?’ Self reflection and introspection is needed to find true purpose, i.e. by which core values we are defined and a connection to an internal compass is made.
A podcast worth listening to:
Wolf & Owl, a podcast by comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Tom Davis. Funny, down-to-earth and heart-felt insights into a beautiful friendship/brotherhood as they talk about everyday stuff with zero structure.
A saying worth repeating:
‘Change is good. Transformation is even better.’ An internal transformation creates powerful external impact for everyone and is a fantastic place to inspire others to achieve greatness.
An activity worth doing:
Simran, a focused practice for the mind. Simran is a technique like no other: it eliminates thoughts and is the start of a journey of the mind, leading to peace, happiness and love from the inside out.
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Books & Accessories
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The age of weaponised humiliation
Cathy O’Neil, author of the bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction, has a new book out looking at the many actors benefiting and indeed profiting from our current culture of shaming and ‘punching down’. “A clear-eyed warning about the increasingly destructive influence of our ‘shame industrial complex’ in the age of social media and hyperpartisan politics.”
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On the front lines of the climate crisis
Travelling to twenty-six countries where people are dealing with the reality of our climate emergency in vastly different ways, Simon Mundy shows how the struggle to respond is already fundamentally reshaping our world. “Telling unforgettable human stories from six continents, this is an account of disaster, of promise, of frantic adaptation and relentless innovation, of hope, of survival, and of the forces that will define our future.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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I love the phrase ‘have a good one’ because it’s just like, whatever you’re having – a Monday, an existential crisis, an incredible mushroom trip, a murder fantasy – I hope it’s good.
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Food for Thought
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This is a very long essay devoted to friendships. Many parts feels raw and unfinished like a stream of thoughts, but it left me thinking so much more deeply about the relationships I have with my friends in this crucial part of my life. “This is, mind you, how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift. It’s the friendships with more deliberate endings that torment. At best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce. It doesn’t matter that most were undone by the hidden trip wires of midlife I talked about earlier: marriage, parenthood, life’s random slings and arrows. By midlife, you’ve invested enough in your relationships that every loss stings.” (Possible soft paywall)
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It’s easy to make fun of people who go out of their way to, for example, save a little insect from being stepped on. However, as associate professor Tema Milstein is highlighting in this short talk, we need more people to recognise how intrinsically linked our survival is with that of the rest of the natural world. “Westernised humans tend to believe they are separate from nature, which shapes thinking and actions toward the environment. But seeing the world with humans at its centre has massive ramifications – from climate crisis to mass extinction. What stands in the way of more of us remembering we are embedded in the natural world and its intricate networks?”
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A lovely, short essay by The School of Life making a case for adopting the Eastern view on happiness: “However hard we strive, it is logical that we can only be as happy as our minds are at peace. And given how vulnerable we are to mental disturbances, and how short our lives are, we should on balance almost certainly spend a little more time on our psyches and a little less time on our plans for a second home and a New York office. The West has produced too many unhappy playboys, and the East too many genuinely peaceful sages, for us not to shift our attention away from conquering the world towards taming our minds.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Hawaiian photographer Christy Lee Rogers has developed a unique underwater photography style that results in compositions comparable to Baroque paintings, boisterous in colour and complexity.
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The interplay of recycled brick, timber and concrete in the West Bend House not far from where I live here in Melbourne’s north offers a beautiful contribution to the local neighbourhood. While the original house, built in the 1850s, was not preserved, the street-facing aspect of the building drew significantly from the architecture of its predecessor and responds to the heritage character found in the street. A video profile of the house here.
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Using just charcoal on paper, artist Corran Brownlee creates evocative scenes of light and shadows. “Much of the scene remains hidden beneath a heavy layer of charcoal, inviting the viewer to look for answers in the shadows. The subjects themselves are lifted out of the darkness, as if projected from a dream. Often turned away from the viewer, they exist in their own world, unaware of our scrutiny.”
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Bacalar is inspired by the vernacular typography found on ‘colectivo buses’ used to transport people on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Geometric forms contrast with very thin details and reversed elements.
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Notable Numbers
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It’s estimated that the US imported nearly 790,000 electric two-wheelers in 2021, up from 463,000 in 2020. This makes e-bikes the best-selling EVs in the country, ahead of the 652,000 electric cars bought in the same year.
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New York resident Paul Slapikas said he made $64,000 in 2021 from bounties as a ‘citizen reporter’. Under the city’s clean air program anyone can receive a quarter cut of a $350 fine each time they successfully report an idling commercial vehicle to local authorities.
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According to research conducted by artist and computer scientist Memo Akten, by the end of 2020, mining an NFT took at least 35 kWh of electricity, emitting 20 kg of CO2. For comparison, sending an email produces a few grams of CO2, and watching an hour of Netflix produces around 36 grams.
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Classifieds
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Minimal | Writing + Notes is a meditation-inspired writing app designed for focus, non-attachment, open-mindedness, and quiet collaboration. Less clutter, more focus.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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