時間に追われる現代人

Modern people are forever chased by time.

In a society that prizes efficiency and productivity above all else, time has come to be seen as a resource to be managed, saved, and converted into money.

Such a view of time, however, is by no means universal.

Before mechanical clocks became common, people lived to the rhythm of nature, rising with the sun and resting at dusk, and time was inseparable from the life of the community.

When modernisation divided time into uniform units and the reward for labour came to be measured by the hour, the relationship between people and time underwent a fundamental transformation.

Given the demands of industrial society, the shift was arguably unavoidable; the price paid for it, however, was not small.

Forced to live by the hands of the clock, we have come, at some point, to feel something like guilt at waiting, at standing still, at passing time to no purpose.

A blank in the schedule is treated as a gap that ought to be filled, and even the interstices of a journey are spent staring at a phone screen.

And so modern people live inside a paradox: surrounded by more time-saving technology than ever before, they complain of a scarcity of time as never before.

The key to escaping this paradox probably does not lie in further technological progress.

What is called for is a change in our very stance towards time.

As philosophers have long pointed out, the experience of time well spent is determined not by quantity but by depth of quality.

Everyone, surely, has known the few minutes spent carefully brewing a cup of tea to feel richer than a whole day rushed through.

To resist a society bent on speed and deliberately choose slowness is not mere nostalgia but a positive undertaking aimed at recovering a life worthy of human beings.

Without ever asking what the time won by all this efficiency is actually for, we chase speed for its own sake — and it is surely about time we noticed how empty that is.