Wasting Time Book Review

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Introduction

There was an alarming story in the press two decades ago that many mothers in an east coast town in the United States were expressing frustration. They had had it. They did not know what to do. Their children had to participate in so many extracurricular activities after school. The multiple after-school activities included piano, soccer, football, basketball, ballet dance, violin, piano lessons, swimming, reading tutoring, and martial arts practice and lessons.

Between rushing around and participating in these activities, the mothers had barely enough time to go through a drive through fast food restaurant window to grab some fast food which the kids quickly ate in the car as the mothers drove on to the next activity.

Once they arrived home late that evening, the kids had to do their homework before they went to bed. The families had no time to sit together to eat dinner. What was the solution? The town council apparently announced that everyone in the town had to pause what they were doing and go to the nearest restaurant and sit together to eat dinner between 6 and 7 pm. What does all this mean?

Most Americans including children live the so-called fast paced life in which they are multitasking; texting, talking on the smartphone, responding to ping notification sounds on their cell phone, anxiously checking email every few minutes, scrolling through the social media to make sure they are not missing out, watching tik tok videos, driving, attending to five open windows on the lap or desk top computer, listening to music on the cell phone, playing video games, all at the same time 24 hours every day.

On top of all of this, most citizens run around all day at a hectic pace from one activity to another including maybe 3 jobs and 18-hour days of stressful work either to pay bills or to maintain their rich lifestyle. Reports suggest that most Americans do not get the full eight hours of sleep. Since as recently as the 1980s, nearly everyone has no time to waste. How is this affecting our lives here in the United States?

Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time

In a few 9 short pages of his first chapter, Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time, describes visiting a village in Cambodia in Asia. The women perform all necessary daily chores and tasks in a relaxed manner with no consciousness of time. The author describes how decades ago he used to wander through the woods and play around ponds wasting time as a boy before arriving home after school, while growing up as a child in the United States. He contrasts those bygone early days with his life now hyper connected to the grid in the digital world. Every moment from when he wakes up, he is wired to the loud, addictive, and intrusive world of the internet which does not give his mind and senses time to rest.

“If we are so crushed by our schedules, to-do-lists, and hyper connected media that we no longer have moments to think and reflect on both ourselves and the world, what have we lost? If we cannot sit alone in a quiet room with only our thoughts for ten minutes, what have we lost?” (p.7) He asks the reader so many questions in the first chapter.

Lightman’s main argument is that we need to return to some of the practices from the period before the technology of addictive hyper connectedness when we had time to waste. We need time to rest, play, unplug from the grid because we need that wasting of time for our minds in order to think, rest, and be creative. We need time away from the loud hustle to just rest our brains and minds. The 90-page book has 8 chapters in which he addresses such topics as The Grid, The Rush and the Heave, Play, The Free-Grazing Mind, Downtime and Replenishment, Chronos and Kairos, and Half Mind.

The Book Reviewer

The reviewer grew up in Zambia or Africa in villages in Southern Africa 65 years ago in 1960. He now lives in America in the western developed world. He looks back and realizes the timeless life in the village that he enjoyed during his childhood was so precious and gratifying for the human soul. That lifestyle is characterized as Kufwasa among the Tumbuka people of the Eastern Province of Zambia.

The introduction of British colonialism in the then Northern Rhodesia and the school introduced some significant social changes. But the changes were not enough to destroy the primordial lifestyle of living in a traditional village world of timelessness. There was resistance. He lived through rapid urbanization, westernization, and now the internet technological grid. That wasting of time in Zambia and elsewhere is slowly shrinking and disappearing. This applies to the world in general, including the rest of the Third World which used to be a bastion of resistance to the western rebuke and criticism of wasting time because of underdevelopment.

Lightman briefly explores the changing nature of attitudes to time in history and how wasting time is related to the most creative of the human minds, especially inventions. In discussing how the nature of time is different in the Third world, I was perplexed at how the author does not discuss or mention the nature of wasting time in the giant and largest continent, that is Africa. It has such a complexity of cultures and history of time.

Recommendation

I highly recommend this book if you want to explore and understand why our contemporary stressful lifestyle might be responsible for a wide range of social pathologies including psychosomatic illnesses, the lack of creativity among children, college students, and adults. Many people today experience high levels of depression, anxiety, suicide, divorce, dysfunctional families, political conflict, decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, emotional stress, social alienation which causes loneliness, isolation, attention deficit syndromes among children, crime, being victims of war and violence, lack of attention for the poor, low incomes, and unemployment.

Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi: Simon & Schuster Publishers, TED Books, 2018, 90 pages, Hardcover, $16,99 (K403.80)