“he asked two children why we eat breakfast. One of them said it’s to get energy for the day. The other said we eat breakfast in order to eat breakfast. Which of those children are you?”
TJ asks, “What do you do while you eat?”
“I was able to sit there and read about the food I was eating. I was very productive” a friend recently recounted.
Basking in the improvements to his life brought about by the ownership of an iPhone, it was recently described to me how our time has now been made so much more useful, indeed productive, by being connected, through our phones or other such devices. This friend of mine was able to learn all about the Korean food he was eating while he was eating. I suppose that one is not to be condemned for wanting to learn, but looking deeper, to the underlying set of ideas about time, and how we ‘spend’ it, we see quite clearly that eating is itself not something that is ‘done’ but rather is idle time, non-productive time.
I myself just finished dinner during which not only did I read, but I had on the basketball game – needless to say, my attention was rarely attracted away from the newspaper I was reading!
We live in an age of movement, and much as this ethos has helped shape the material and thusly the mental life of the city, it has also had a very definite hand in the production of the modern, urban individual . We live in a time where sitting still, idling if you will, is a particularly virulent form of modern day sin. (Re)quoting Allan Watts again, because I think this gets at the fundamental issues facing us and our culture of accomplishing:
“To the restless temperament of the West, sitting meditation may seem to be an unpleasant discipline, because we do not seem to be able to sit ‘just to sit’ without qualms of conscience, without feeling that we ought to be doing something more important to justify our existence. To propitiate this restless conscience, sitting meditation must therefore be regarded as an exercise, a discipline with an ulterior motive.”
To paraphrase: In this culture, eating is often described and indeed understood to be something of a chore because we cannot ‘just eat’ without feeling we should be accomplishing more. To assuage our need to accomplish, eating becomes a means of ‘staying healthy’, of refuelling, something to be ‘accomplished’.
We rarely do nothing but eat. It is almost always done while doing something else, it is a bother and inconvenience rather than one of the most basic, and indeed, central acts of sociability that helps build and strengthen bonds and trust, a ‘collecting ritual’.
Cooking likewise.
It’s a chore, something to be made more convenient, and avoided if possible.
Sleep, a luxury enjoyed only by the lazy. We’re just too busy!
What, though, are we too busy doing?
We live lives of constant activity, and of continual distraction that have so disconnected us from each other, but more importantly from our most social and connected selves, that we often don’t even consider the simple, mundane, and routine activities and events that provide coherence to our daily existence to be activities at all. At least not productive ones.
Accomplishing has simply become an end. No longer can idle time simply be that, idle. We’ve bought into a set of assumptions about how life should be lived that have privileged the world of work, of accomplishment over the singularly human activity of contemplation.
“How is an iPhone going to improve my life?” I asked a newly converted proponent.
“Now,” he exclaimed, almost jubilantly, “you can check your email while standing in line at the grocery store!”
And so we arrive at the logical conclusion of this need. Even when there is nothing else to do, even that last bastion of the line-up, waiting for our turn when you used to have nothing else to do but wait, to think, to be – truly nothing else left to accomplish, has been absolved of its sinfulness. That idle time can now be productive time, time we can finally use to do something.
Thank god for that.
