It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it*
The only thing that belongs to us is time, said Seneca, yet today it seems that there is a time for everything, except for having time.
Life is often tiring and weary: we work without rest, making us hostages to productivity and efficiency, budgets and targets, competition and leadership; affections experienced in a hurry, between one deadline and another, with the regret of what we would like them to be; an expectation of rest and enjoyment but forced to deal, with eyes on the clock, with a schedule that leaves no room for the unexpected.
We live “in real time”; we have a present of rapidity and convulsion; we use e-mails, not the post, we read the news (we scroll the headlines, yes!) on the internet and not in the newspapers; we go to the supermarket and not the shops; we take a shower, not a bath… We no longer have time for anything or anyone, not even to order and prioritise what we have to do, let alone be intimate with ourselves.
Conditioned to respond to stimuli that come to us from the outside, we adapt and convince ourselves that nothing can be done to escape this situation.
Time thus passes in the relativity and unawareness of our destiny, at least until, suddenly, things happen that light up the ineffable, the inevitable.
Who’s to blame? Who is responsible for this epoch characterised by superficiality in relations, the falsity of mass media, the messianic wait for salvific technological revolutions?
The culprit is still at large and is wanted in order to understand the mechanism and limit the damage.
Someone to ask about the current and convenient image culture, about the paucity of sounds and concepts that afflict interpersonal communication mediated by digital means, about the general difficulty in being able to express an emotion, about a feeling with words that can still communicate meanings beyond the obvious.
Our old hearts tied to existence will continue to beat in the hope of a solution that explains to us how to use the time we have wisely, day after day, without encountering yet another setback.
Quick, quick. There’s no time!
* Lucio Anneo Seneca, De brevitate vitae
