This article is an “x minute read.” This curious data point is nestled up near the headers on a lot of websites now - The Wall St. Journal, Medium, etc. It is by no means ubiquitous, but it feels conspicuous. It wants to be seen. I am not, however, exactly sure what it is trying to communicate.
My best guess is that it’s a best guess of how long it will (should?) take the reader to read the article in question. Instantly though I wonder what else is packed into it, what other possible signals it might be sending. Maybe it is also:
A bet? Can you read this article in less than the time shown? Can you come out ahead, extracting all the useful knowledge, and click the buzzer (link to the next article) with time to spare?
Informational panhandling? Spare 3 lowly minutes for a poor article.
In the context of endless web 3.0 tokenization, it signals a price tag, a gas fee, representing a toll, valued in minutes? E.g. A three-minute article will cost you 3 attentions?
A speed minimum for responsible information consumption? A suggestion to actually take that much time to read the thing instead of distractedly skimming it while switching between three other open tabs and looking at Facebook on your phone?
Is it a satirical meta-commentary about the shelf-life of the average article on the internet?
A challenge to the ego / self-esteem; e.g. am I stupid or something if it takes me longer than the posted time to read it?
The old bait & switch, designed to suck you on on the presumption that reading the article is a relatively low investment, but then - as is the case with every article - it links to a dozen other contextual articles, each taking several minutes themselves to read, and so by the time you’re done the “5 minute read” has actually, by the formidable combination of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach and insidiousness of the sunk cost fallacy, ballooned to 38 minutes of your time? (Not unlike the “build your own burger” option, where the base $8.95 cost ends up being $26.43 by the time the individually-inexpensive options for kobe beef patty (add $3), fried egg ($2), applewood smoked bacon ($3), etc. are all totaled up.)
Is it honestly trying to respect the reader’s time and enable them to conscientiously plan how to spend their attention budget? Someone somewhere has spent 15 minutes making a spreadsheet detailing how they will spend the next 45 minutes reading online content, with some personal weighting that assesses overall personal relevance by taking into account duration, topic, source, etc., etc.
A way to quantify the regret you feel afterwards, and wish you had spent the time doing something else?
And how is it determined? Just by word count? Some weighting of subject matter and word count? Does it take the reader’s native language into account? Was a comprehensive latitudinal study conducted, with experimental and placebo articles, in which readers of various levels of educational attainment, and comprising diverse social, racial and gender backgrounds, read the article while being timed by highly calibrated and synchronized high-precision clocks, and then tested on the amount of retained knowledge, i) immediately after, ii) 24 hours after, iii) one year after, and from this a special formula was derived to maximize duration, subject matter, and retention? What if instead of time, it was expressed as a function of the reader’s salary or hourly wage? (“You will earn $27.23 by reading this article.”)
This Article Will Self Destruct In 3 Minutes
Personally, I try to ignore it because I feel it is at best a meaningless metric, and at worst a potentially manipulative one.
Simply by priming us to look out for the time-to-read data point, just simply being aware of it gives it a non-zero weight in our subjective read-or-not decision matrix. It hints that the article is presenting itself as more of a simple consumption good rather than worthwhile information, as filler. It screams to me, “this may not be the article you want to read, but it’s the one in front of you, and the one you have time to read!”
The “problem” is not so much one of matching relevant articles to the time one has available, which is arguably a decent idea, but instead that a consequence of establishing a paradigm of “efficiently” determining how to cram as many articles as possible into the available reading time is that it simply gives more credence to chewing than to digestion, consumption minus contemplation. Prospectively it is a model of: “I have five minutes to kill; give me some bullets.” Aka: How can I avoid thinking for those five minutes.
It is a model that is useful for the person whose prior conference call adjourned at the 52-minute mark (cue the annoying moderator, “well, if nobody has any questions, I’ll give you all 8 minutes of your day back,” (as if it had been in escrow, as if they were handing us back our change following a transaction…)) and needs to kill a few minutes of nether-space before the next call starts. And/or to skim during a “bio-break.
This of course assumes that online news browsing isn’t already a time-killing activity. In reality, I suspect that is largely already the case. The actual engagement level of most internet news is very low, characterized by bored, disinterested skim/scrolling, a baleen-feeder drifting lethargically through a school of krill, mouth agape , collecting headlines. An attempt to read any article is met with an initial wall of resistance to be overcome - without an immediate hook, the mind wonders, “is this what I should / want to be reading? Did I click the best possible article?” Maybe the diligent scrolling and attendant wear & tear on our clicking/tapping fingers is born out of a noble sense of “duty” to feel informed, but… at the end of a long day, if you close your eyes, retrace your steps, and can you actually remember each article you read when you try to recall?
I admittedly often come up with large gaps when trying to recount my online grazing for the day. I may vaguely recall having “read” 26 minutes’ worth of articles, but unless I got up and took a walk and spent at least a few minutes processing that material, I typically lose an embarrassing amount of it. Things go in one eye and out the other. Growing up in the computer age, the hard drive is a prosthetic memory bank - why remember when it when we can hit ctrl + s? Our head is literally in the clouds. Knowing how to “access the hard drive” via googling the thing we want to remember replaces the process of actual memorization, allowing us to store some metadata in the form of the topic, some context, maybe some truly interesting data points. Later on when a friend or co-worker says something that jogs our memory about the article, most of the time the response is something like, “oh, yes! I read an interesting article about that the other day! It said that… hmm… I don’t remember the details [option here to a) risk misstating, and/or b) pulling out phone to look it up, or c) saying “I’ll send it to you later” and then forgetting to send it if “later” isn’t within the next five minutes. The contents of the article are not kept in onboard memory, we only recall that we had some interaction with it. I suspect but cannot prove, in many cases the article itself is not actually al that interesting until its relevance to a future conversation makes it interesting.
So a worthwhile question to ask - who is consuming what? Are we consuming information, or just getting consumed by it? To the extent we’re just consuming media for the sake of consuming it, for the sake of being responsible informed citizenry, perhaps a better way to think about it may be to look at how much we’re taking in relative to our own “media metabolism”, and try to evaluate what is actually retained & interesting vs what is just “empty calories”. Trying to consume 5,000 calories of food when one can only process 2,000 only leads to digestion. So why shove 300 minutes of information into your brain if you can only realistically process 45? I don’t want to suggest that fastidiously counting calories / minutes, but to the extent that content can’t be actively recalled for a conversation, let alone may ever be relevant for a conversation, it’s more like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter and forgetting where 98% of them are hidden, or if they were even hidden at all. If, consumption and recall are out of whack, odds are good that there is some overconsumption. Possibly the majority of internet news is the equivalent of a handful of pork rinds.
Buckets of Minutes
The entire history of human development is, in some ways, the history of argument - of understanding the power of words to shape human action through the evolution of ideas. Knowledge is power, and the medium of knowledge is language, words. To the extent we relegate ourselves to being passive conduits of information, consuming without reflecting, we just pass along the party line, adding nothing to the discourse (likely subtracting from, it given the very real fidelity loss experienced between our poor recall / proclivity to recap the gist of the content). Further, to the extent that this becomes habit, we become accustomed to not thinking, to not digesting any content, and simply going through the motions of appearing informed.
This essay is ultimately about containers, primarily containers of time, and how we engage with them. With regard to the time-to-read metric as discussed above, the paradigm is one of filling negative space, X, with some kind of content, Y. In this case, the negative space is the time we are looking to fill. The complementary positive space is the duration of the article(s) read in that time. As time-to-read establishes an efficient & quantifiable means of matching the confines of X as closely as possible to Y, we can heroically maximize intake, which is to say, minimizing “spillage” & “underfilling” the container.
As stated, however, intake is not uptake, and much of what follows here are musings on the various types of media we consume, what we ultimately hope to get out of them, and a little bit of what they get out of us.
Blinkist and You’ll Miss It.
The Media Queue is a container, itself measured in containers - songs, shows, movies, and days, weeks, months, even. I won’t profess to know how must people live from a material standpoint - whether the average American still has a lot of physical stuff. One things is for sure though, even the most ascetic minimalist probably has a queue. If you have internet access, you have a queue.
The queue is our bag of holding - a gateway to a pocket dimension of lifetimes worth of content: podcasts, YouTube videos, playlists, saved articles, audio (and physical!) books, recipes. It grows faster than we can possibly keep up with it. And alas, we have but one life to live, and scant minutes to spare.
It is an extension to some degree of our identities. It also represents a lot of fluff - the on-demand/zero cost model of most content makes it easy to bloat the queue - “oh that looks interesting,” “I may build a yurt in the desert one day”, “I’ve always wanted (as of the last five minutes) to learn Portuguese, I’ll start this 15-hour course tomorrow.” Our eyes are perpetually bigger than our stomachs. The queue often expands to comical proportions, and can take on the oppressive feeling of a presence, a specter of a task we aren’t attending to. Every one hour increment of haystack is bound to have a needle in it somewhere, and in the modern age, anxiety about not having enough time to consume all the media we want is itself a source of stress. So it’s not surprising we seek out ways to distill the insights and trim the fat.
So while on a fundamental level, I hate the idea of Blinkist. Its “destination over journey” model outsources critical thought in a lazy, discourse-constricting way. However, it is admittedly a practical & necessary service in an age of constant demand on our time, and in which the body and brain are pulled in a dozen different directions at once. Multi-tasking is the order of the day. Time dedicated to “cooking”, “cleaning”, or “hygiene” is now potential territory to have some media on in the background (or is life being moved to the background?) to make mundane life tasks not only more bearable, but to dig out from under the backlog of our unconsumed media. Plus, podcasts and tv shows we can consume in 1.5 or 2x time! Why can’t we read in 2x time? (To be fair, some studies show that retention is about the same (we are not good at retaining things “consumed” in speeds beyond 2x. Yet.).
Perhaps one day very rich people will hire personal stenographer / assistants to watch shows and listen to podcasts or music for them, to give them more personalized Cliff’s Notes version and whether they would have liked it or not. Perhaps, if you’ve considered whether you need to quit your job to catch up on your backlog of unconsumed media - after all, like the articles everything features posted run / reading times, so you can tell down to the minute how long it will take you to get through it all. (assuming I accept no new submissions in the meantime) - you could be that entrepreneur? Professional media watcher (at the time of this writing, google searches for “professional media watcher / consumer / queue manager yield no job postings”).
It may even be a fun job. I feel like the way to grow a muscle - the mind - is to use it; to take the time to read the thing and make connections, have the experience, clash it with other ideas & experiences, take out some subjective experience that resonates. Collecting bullet points is like saying there is one authoritative take on the thing (the Blinkist’s); how can you even argue with it if you haven’t read it? Isn’t the whole problem with everything that there are sides to argue, so many “authoritative” takes, and formulations & takedowns of the “steelman” argument that it is difficult to decisively feel one way about anything? These are the cracks that the liquid of personal nuance needs to drip into and inhabit; it is a slow, glacial process, but one I feel is crucially important for the evolution of argument.
Two people “discuss” a book - both are informed by Blinkist. Can they even have a meaningful discussion that isn’t just agreeing on the broad established bullet points? The idea is just to provide the key concepts to apply to other things in life (and look smart at parties, I guess). But perhaps in a world where media intake becomes increasingly oriented toward passive consumption, the need to argue, to read, process, remember and make complex & unique arguments, to actually think for yourself, is perhaps something of a liability at worst, or a charming & quaint olde thyme hobby, like knowing how to churn your own butter. If you don’t even have time to read, obviously you don’t have time for travel. Pre-experienced vacations are the next logical step. Why stress out about taking time off work and packing when somebody else can go there and tell me how it was, what there is to see, what it smells like, what the sun and warm wind feels like on your skin. Post to Instagram under your account. In fact, a pre-lived life would remove a lot of the hassle from living. I’ve only got 80-ish years here, hurry up and give me the gist of it. (I think that makes me sound old.)
But narrowly picking on Blinkist just exposes my bias as a person who considers the act of sitting down with a good physical book to be one of the great pleasures of life. The Blinkist model is neither new nor unique to Blinkist; it is absolutely ubiquitous. Nearly all our news sources, political & media analysis podcasts is basically just Blinkist writ large - an outsourced digestion function providing analysis of happenings for the viewers/listeners who did not witness an event, but who want to know how to think about it. As “lazy” as it may feel (to me) for books, we rely on this model for virtually all the media we consume. We can’t otherwise. These news reports & podcasts are themselves part of a vast ecosystem - competition for other Blinkists, other prosthetic digestive systems - a self-propagating, centerless, and endlessly expanding web of subsequent or preceding pseudo-events; e.g. a planned protest occurs (itself a response to something), and from there you get the on-the-scene immediate news coverage, and live tweet storms, the real-time hot-takes, the hot-takes on the hot-takes, the “how responsibly/irresponsibly the media covered the story” takes, others chiming in on what the “smart takes” are, the next-day “dust is settling/this isn’t what we thought of it” takes, the one-year anniversary takes, the “why dredge this up a year later” takes, etc., etc. Each reaction spawns its own reaction, fracturing off in infinite directions, into memes, beefs, propaganda, - never-ending, but all pre-digested analysis, sometimes, twice, thrice, ten-times digested… when you think about it, actually, the way we consume media is really like a giant iteration of human centipede. But forgive me, father, for I have digressed.
Yes, this essay is also digested material, suggesting ways to think about things.
Marinate.
Say a piece of artwork in the corner of a gallery catches your eye. Something unnamable draws you to it - as you get ever closer, you look over - who created this entrancing thing? On the tag, under the artist’s name and the title of the piece, it tells you that this piece is a mixed media assemblage, created in 2017, and that it is rated as a “3 minute gaze.” You pull out your phone and, after dealing with the Instagram & Robinhood notifications displayed on the lock screen, and taking a minute to remember why you pulled out your phone in the first place, set the timer for three minutes and proceed to experience some art. The timer goes off. You are now more cultured, by an increment of one art, than you were three minutes ago.
(I try to avoid reading anything about a piece until after, and sometimes not even then, I’m done looking at it, especially the little descriptive card that suggests the artist was making a “bold commentary on climate change” or contemplating suicide at this point in their career.)
Writing, art, television, media in all forms - even internet news articles - obviously do not affect us in within discrete windows. There is the time that we spend engaging with them in their native forms, and then, there are the encapsulated ideas, the little pills of their essences we swallow and which stay with us afterwards, the burs and barbs, embedded in our skin, in our minds. The part we internalize then breaks down further into the subsequent active and passive modes of internal engagement, the active involving our conscious, deliberate scrutiny in which we collide other ideas and perspectives into them, like an atom smasher, trying to crash them apart, or discuss them with others, attempting to discover what feelings, insights & connections are within. Complimented by the approach of the subconscious passive mode, the one who leaves the thought to stew silently in some nameless cell at the bottom of the mind, pacing back & forth, seemingly forgotten until it cracks and cries to confess some secret, as happens - seemingly in a flash, out of nowhere - while in the shower or folding the laundry one day.
But, as incredible & mysterious as the workings of the subconscious mode are, one of the main points of this essay is that we cannot rely on them alone. To return to the “mind as muscle” metaphor, I - certainly not a cognitive scientist - find it hard to believe that we can just fill our brains to the brim with mental cement mix and expect anything solid to form unless we give it some kind of scaffolding or rebar to cling to. The act of massaging the information, of pondering it for a bit - even if it feels like we’re getting nowhere, reaching no new conclusions - primes the subconscious at least a little to continue that work. To just jump from one thing to the next, without waiting to see how it makes us feel, or invest some time pondering over it, to completely disregard post-processing is to let that deliberating ability atrophy; we’ll still distill something from the content we consume, but without setting that scaffold for the subconscious, it has no direction, no way to prioritize.
Media and culture are endlessly fascinating - every song, book, article, piece of art, food, whatever - they all function like Legos. They can be combined, placed side by side, and it’s the ways in which we try to put them together and make sense of them, in some attempt to navigate and interpret our world world, that yields the endless possibilities though any single piece may be “boring” when viewed in abstraction. The point is that nothing exists in abstraction; it is all connected to something, and often that something is not entirely obvious, or altogether counterintuitive. Every thing in our world is a potential gateway into a million other things, a million other worlds. So much of the fun is colliding them up against each other and seeing what happens.
Realistically though, do we really have time to sit and analyze every single bit of media we encounter? Of course not. Much that we consume seems like ephemeral fluff, may be chemically inert, or not yield great insights. The shelf life of a tweet or average news article may be measured in minutes. But there is often something there, and just getting into the habit however, of analyzing, and tearing these things apart, looking at them from different perspectives and contexts, is broadly speaking a valuable one. Sometimes we may not know what to think of it until we encounter something subsequent to it that makes some explosive connection.
It is often difficult to determine on the surface what is worth spending time on vs what to discard and move one. Ultimately that is a subjective decision, but one can develop strategies based on interests and what one hopes to get out of an experience. Time & attention are scarce, and there is only so much we can take in and then allow reflective time for post-processing. With so much to choose from, it is easy to worry about spending time with the wrong things. I would argue this is precisely what makes it easy to find things - there is so much to choose from. Go with your gut, listen to what resonates or sparks interest with you and not what other people are do, and don’t be afraid to invest a few hours in a topic only to have it lead to a dead end.
Queued Pyramid.
Life, to me, feels as though it is becoming increasingly scheduled, cordoned-off, and time-bound. Indeed, “setting boundaries” has become the de facto advice for managing relationships of all stripes - all of which feel like they are subject to a relentless drive to define them in quantifiable, transactional terms that ask them to continually justify their existences, their claims to scarce time. Everything is conditional, uncertain; everything feels like it is in a state of constantly auditioning.
There is a bizarre expectation that, as our bodies pass the fence from one nice round-number temporal pasture and into another - after 8 hours of healthy sleep, 45 minutes for work out, 30 minutes for this call, 60 minutes to spend on this project, 30 minutes for lunch (how is it 2:00pm already!?!), another 60-minute meeting, grocery store time, etc. etc. - that our minds will follow in lock step, present and engaged with the task at hand. It is one of those weird fictions, like the model of man as the ever-rational homo economicus, that everybody knows is fiction, but we continue to build models & plan based on it being true only because otherwise there is no functional model that isn’t total chaos or noise. How would you even plan for the fact that, for at least 80% of a meeting, people are looking at instagram, checking email, wondering if they can fit in a quick dog walk after this - nobody is present; we are all zoned out, our bodies in one time zone, our minds in another.
My challenge to myself was to slow down - to spend more time richly engaging with less. To render the concept of a “five minute” read absurd. To cut loose the weight of my queue and, like the moment of setting foot past the threshold as you head to the airport on a trip - entering the mindset of, “if I didn’t pack it, I don’t need it” (and also fighting the urge to over-pack to begin with)”. As suggested, solutions here are subjective & entail trade-offs galore. Part of the “solution” involves surrender; reconciliation of the “duty to be informed” with the impossibility of being informed.
Realizing that the “x minute read” is arbitrary - if you’re actually interested in the subject - make the time, or that the media queue can be deleted entirely without negative impacting your life, is entirely within our power. We can slow things down and experience more of the flavor in our media diets, which entails not only consuming things more slowly & deliberately, but taking the time to digest them accordingly.
I avoid the news almost entirely now. After almost a year of seriously limiting my news consumption, I really don’t feel like I’m missing much, and have a new appreciation for just how little any of it changed the patterns of my daily life. Cutting those calories out of my diet has given me the bandwidth to concentrate on more (subjectively) enriching material. The most important things make it to my eyes & ears one way or another, and I’m still able to hold conversations with other people without betraying that I live under a rock.
This is also to suggest that my media metabolism is likely way different than yours - I am something of a slow reader; the insights and connections very often do NOT come to me as I read, each word and sentence is not a gestalt, fusing my current worldview and corpus of lived experience with the new implications, links, and universes therein on the fly. I am not that kind of computer, alas, as much as I sometimes wish I was; the kind the modern world seems to demand. The best reads will leave me feeling like I’ve been jumped; I’m shaken, tired, my head is woozy, and actually feel a little dumber, or humbled, rather, a little stupefied. It is only after I shake it off, go out for a walk or a hike and start to turn it over in my mind, (ideally discuss it with others) that those connections start to be made.
Over the course of hours, or days, I’ll often revisit the same topics on multiple walks, recaps through my notes, attempts to recall. During that time, the fidelity of the original text is lost; I do not have a photographic memory (also, alas), and I have to rely on my notes, broad concepts, and mostly actively trying to recall the content to really solidify it. It very much helps (me) to try to explain it to people. And by that point, of course it is mixing with, marinating in everything else that may be swimming around in my conscious / subconscious during that time, emerging as who knows what, or in what direction.
It is maybe outmoded in that it is not terribly efficient, there is no guarantee the investment of deliberation will pay off. Even if it does yield some unique insight, is that really worth anything? Was it worth the time? Depends on your outlook, again. Personally, I appreciate what it entails very much. Everything ends up being not just a conversation between me and the author of a particular piece, but a conversation featuring a polyphony of voices in which I might not even be the center, or even a participant, but a vessel, the host who makes the introduction - “Mr. Wood, have you met Mr. Fisher?”
That is the way I think most of our brains actually still work, and that there is a giant trade off involved between trying to “stay current” on the one hand, and being able to do any processing beyond the surface level of the information we’re continually bombarded with in the digital mass media age. It is why we rely so much on prosthetics, on outsourced digestion. I feel somewhat conservative suggesting that it causes our own abilities to deliberate and think for ourselves to atrophy, rather than accepting that the all-you-can-eat approach as being “just the way we do things now”; different, but not necessarily any better or worse.
Our skulls are containers, and I try not to put any limitations on the activity of what goes on inside mine - I don’t want to limit a subject to a “10 minute read”. Accordingly, in the spirit of slowing things down - and this is of course ultimately a question of trade offs and priorities - I choose a containers of a more leisurely type. I prefer to sit down with a book for a cup of coffee, write an essay with a glass of wine. As a liquid hour glass, a cup of coffee is as good a unit of measure as anything else. It is ultimately timebound and finite, but it can expand and breathe in a way that suggests a boundary rather than enforcing an absolute one. I can sip at whatever cadence I choose - each paragraph, every other page, randomly - maybe what I read is so gripping, or I am so furiously underlining or notating that I don’t realize I haven’t taken a sip in several pages. It is a living, organic box, and dispenses with the the low-grade anxiety-inducing feeling that the clock is ticking, the approaching top of the hour that, by virtue of sheer awareness of it, takes my mind out of what I’m doing and into the next thing. The cup may be emptying, but like Zeno’s paradox, I can approach infinity with the last drop, if I want to. Or I can also chug the last quarter of the thermos. I can also control the amount of coffee in the (hour)glass to begin with. My container of “time” is one which signals “doneness” when it fills up instead by when it depletes. In the former, I know when I am sated; in the later, I may still be thirsty. If the clock is dictating my next move, I have to move on regardless of whether I feel full or still thirsty.
Of course, we don’t always have this luxury; the clock is always ticking, somewhere. I may have a work meeting in a “physical” hour, and try as I meant to stretch my reading time outside of the strictly chronological, there are consequences if those boundaries clash. But since the engagement for me is important, I try to give myself space, and that involves slowing down, and doing less.
A Timeless Quality.
The clock is a useful tool, but the older I get, the more I actively try to avoid looking at it altogether. I don’t want to navigate my life according to a strict grid of coordinates that is bolted down on top of my life and which dictates where I’m supposed to be, and what I’m supposed to be doing, and consequently, what I’m supposed to be thinking. I don’t want to have my thoughts whisked away or directed by it. I’ve realized that my favorite aspects of vacations - especially ones that involve camping - is the feeling that, wherever I am is where I’m supposed to be, and whatever I’m doing, is what I’m supposed to be doing. The absence of clocks (and mirrors) is a critical aspect of this groundless grounding; of gently riding with the current down whatever tributary it flows, rather than being carried from calm water to rapids at the whim of the river and the wasted exertion of trying to mentally paddle against it, by sheer virtue of the human fact that, when I cross the threshold from “work” to “leisure” (or, more annoyingly, from “work” to “grocery store” or “cook dinner”), my thoughts don’t pivot and switch gears accordingly, being 100% present to what I’m “supposed” to be doing. My thoughts drift, I am absent mindedly pursuing a task while thinking about the 10 more ahead that I need to do after.
Life has the potential to be as rich and complex and nuanced as we want it to be. The tradeoff inherent in trying to efficiently manage our time by scheduling everything according to rigid & arbitrary buckets will necessarily be the loss of complexity and the lowering of resolution and loss of nuance. The result is an exhaustive feeling of being scattered.
Containers are not perfect - my bladder may get full before my coffee gets empty. I may suddenly find myself humming the melody of a three minute song I listened to hours ago (and in giving it its “three minute listen” no longer had any obligation to it!!). The words of the five minute read article may surface in my brain like a stowaway crept aboard a ship. I may start losing focus before I get to the end of a chapter (another container). Sometimes I feel myself done with it before I get to the end. Some containers are restrictive, requiring more commitment, more a sense of knowing what we can accomplish, and perhaps a little element of pushing ourselves at the end. I can put down the book even if I am 80% done with a chapter. On a long hike, I cannot just put down the hike if I feel like I’m done with it on mile 8 out of 10.
Putting things another way, continual unreflective consumption, the act of killing time, is time spend not doing things you love doing. That the day is divided absolutely doesn’t help matters - five minutes here, eight there, another 15 free after lunch… just enough time to not do anything, and never a solid block of 120 minutes to get some writing in, sit down and really focus. Time is a luxury, and we do not live with the mindset that it is as scarce as it truly is - quality time with a refreshed mind, that is. Nurturing it involves creating that space, creating that time. Trying to write an essay, read a book, and get anywhere with it in those distributed 5, 8, 15 minute increments is an exercise in futility. If you think you can just cut off the mental flow mid-stream once it starts going and resume exactly where you left off an hour or two, a day later, try doing that next time you need to pee.