Mental Maps Of Time
What did we lose when we got everything?
My mother sometimes mentions this old Italian proverb she learned growing up: “Hunger is the best sauce.” My dad and I poke fun at her over it; that it embodies a whole poor-Catholic mindset of embracing suffering, viewing pleasure with skepticism, not letting yourself have quite enough, etc. You know, if I starve myself, this mediocre food will taste amazing!
Of course, it doesn’t quite mean that. It means—to me—something much more interesting. That on some level, gratitude is tied to want or deprivation. Perhaps a certain amount of poverty is good for us. How else can you appreciate plenty? It almost feels like gratitude is a kind of coping mechanism for dealing with deprivation.
Kind of on this subject, we were talking about how when my parents were growing up, you only had three channels, and no tape recorders (let alone DVRs or streaming). There was less to watch, and if you missed one of the things you wanted to see, like your favorite Christmas special, that was it. You had to wait a whole year to see it again. There was something useful about this. It made special things special.
Of course, on some level, this is just Cranky Kong, who I’ve been riffing on lately when I bring up these topics about nostalgia for a simpler past, etc. You know, In my day we only had three channels, and about that many things to watch. We didn’t need any more than that!
But on another level, I think there’s something there. Maybe it’s just the grass is always greener, but I find it curious that I kind of wish I’d experienced that. You see this nowadays where some young people will say they wish there weren’t smartphones. They don’t mean they wish they didn’t own a smartphone; they mean they wish smartphones didn’t exist.
Why? Once a technology becomes widely adopted and part of the background of daily life, in some ways that choice has been made for you. By making the choice to own a smartphone possible, we meaningfully lost the ability to opt out. The mere existence of options—smartphone, no smartphone—does not quite entail what we mean by choice. The real choice would be to live in a pre-smartphone world, which is only possible in a limited and radical sense today, if at all. You can’t be Amish alone.
My dad disagrees with this; he emphasizes that of course you can choose to watch the Christmas special once a year, or make the special dish only for the holidays, or whatever. What do you mean, you can’t resist? Why does everyone else have to affirm your choice? It’s a classic conservatism that emphasizes agency and individual responsibility.
But even if that’s true—that you can arbitrarily and self-consciously choose to impose on yourself constraints that used to be unselfconsciously imposed on you, and that this is the same thing in the end—there’s another thing we’ve lost with infinite easy content and other kinds of plentitude. We’ve lost the mental map of time that distinguishes moments, days, seasons.
I have to note that this is sort of like the church’s liturgical calendar, or the old Catholic feast days. Aside from the actual spiritual aspect of these things, they ordered time. You could say they made time cyclical, which is how they’re often described, but I like to think of it as imposing a mental map on the year. It does some aspect of the mental work of living for you. It can help make life, as some say, liturgical. (That is probably, however, an overused word, in the same broad category as a word like “quaint.” I can’t remember who, but I saw an Evangelical writer say something to the effect of “You know guys, not everything is ‘liturgy.’”
You can glimpse what this mental map or ordered time was like, based on what’s left of it. There are still seasonal or holiday products, even if they’re available for longer than before (eggnog comes comes out before Halloween now, and I think I’ve seen it appear at Easter time, too).
They’re little things that distinguish this specific time from every other time. Imagine a world with a lot more of those things. You knew there were always more “landmarks” coming up. Every day and every week wasn’t just the same repeating empty time. The fact that shopping, work, school, and socializing were all necessarily physical, bodily, in-person activities (with the exception of phone calls!) also must have been part of this. We had a world richer in human contact, and poorer in material things.
How much of this is really true? Do we really want less? Do we want to be controlled a bit more, to have fewer options, to have order imposed on our limitless choices? Or is it only looking back that the deprivations of the past seem like a gift? Do we read a usefulness into them that was not experienced at the time?
I suspect this might be the case: that on some level this is all a mental trick or an illusion. We remember the childhood expectation, we look back with humor on the devastation of missing Rudolph, but no child at the time thought anything like “I’m glad this is only once a year, because otherwise it wouldn’t feel special to me!” Probably, no adult either.
It’s hard to say, really. Perhaps we would have never chosen to refuse the innovations that made these restrictions seem quaint, on the one hand, but that on the other hand they were in fact good for us.
This observation, from Christian housing advocate Andrew Berg seems relevant:
I believe the past 70 years of American history have been an unwitting example of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, which cautions against casually eliminating long-standing practices and traditions that may serve purposes you may not realize. Americans thought we all wanted to live alone in large, empty houses with white picket fences. It’s clear now that something has been lost, and moreover, the impact on housing prices and the overall housing stock has been significant.
He’s talking about suburbia and a wide sphere of privacy, but it seems to me that consumerism, suburbia, cars—more choice, more privacy, more comfort, more isolation—all work in the same direction. They are all things we are exceedingly difficult to affirmatively refuse, but which are probably not good for us.
I think about this point a lot, and I’m not sure public policy can say anything about it, but I’m not sure we can either. So much of it has to do with how we think about the past and the present, and not necessarily what either of them are actually like. What experiences do we have right now that we will only appreciate looking back in time?
And what, ultimately, does that experience of nostalgia over vanished things that formed who we are really mean?
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School is one realm that retains a sense of seasonality with its long summer break and the shorter winter and spring breaks too. Working a regular degular 9-5, I miss that a lot. The corporate grind just kind of stretches before you with the occasional 1-2 week break here and there. This time of year especially it feels like we should be relaxing a bit, but the pace doesn’t let up.
My job used to offer sabbaticals but did away with that as it grew larger, and even then you were only eligible after 7 years of service for a 3-6 month paid break.
This is so true! Now, I agree with BOTH your dad, your mom, but you also, in part. But please tell your mom that you truly appreciate her insight on this (even if you have mixed feelings about it) while you still have her!!! I mean this in all seriousness.
I think we maybe hit a sweet spot in terms of our use of tech as an interface with the broader world during the period from about 2007-2012, but then all destructive (of tradition and community) heck began to break loose with our digitel realm. I gave up my smart phone for a flip phone and a tablet a few years back. The tablet has smart phone functions except for calls and has a bigger screen, but is less convenant. It is portable but NOT pocket sized, which is part of the point!
While I too am nostolgic for them, the good old days before the world wide web I wouldn't want to go back to, but only because for many of us including my family we were pretty disfunctional back then, too, with a limmited worldview and didn't have the agency or broader horizens many of us now have far more access too. But I would love it if we didn't have smart phones! I would love it if far more people simply choose not to use them, or just not use them nearly as much and there wasn't such pressure to.
If life was good back in say, the 1980's for many, and its constrants valuable, they were allso a trap and badly limmiting for many. They kept far too many of us ignorant and delussional and limmited in our thinking in ways that were destructive. And we had TV (and magazines and such) which was mostly passive and which many of us spent far too much of our time with. Yet there was definately a good side for us, too, that has been lost! In being more easily creative and noticing and truly savoring more of the little things more intensely, being fully in the moment. And I still try to do that now, but the experiance has changed, and not just because I am older now. And I would argue that the digital zombydom or just otherwise very limmited but largely online existance (and often addictive online behaviors for others) that have become increasingly widespread over the last decade is a lot more destructive then the old limmits ever were.
The old limmits after all were not distructive in and of themselves, -they were limmiting yes but also often impowering, and simply reflected fully the actual physical social structure and and culture and envoronment and family and our own choices that we each lived with. Now we can escape, or at least pretent do, and while we CAN and many of us often do use technology to genuinely expand our world including its physical aspects to change for the better (and this at least is a good thing) I would say that on average, and sadly much more often, we are not inclined to use it well!