Take advantage.
That the subway trip is not in vain: take off a few emails.
And in the elevator, don't look thoughtfully at the light that jumps from floor to floor: respond to those messages that sting in your pocket.
Wait in the cafe where you've been watching people go by?
No way!
It's time to send audios about work issues.
Even the pillow no longer signifies the placidity of the final point: now it is one more support to consult overdue documents.
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There are those who classify all these daily sequences as a clear reflection of the current times that have put life under the tyranny of efficiency.
The system engulfs each activity and translates it into terms of profitability or production.
More than money, following the famous mantra, now time is a possibility to catch up with the series that is being talked about, to be aware of the latest political scandal or to prepare a new and uncertain project.
It seems that not dedicating it to something communally useful or economically lucrative makes it not worthwhile.
Against this discourse there are already voices that proclaim the need to stop.
To rebel against the mandate of what is profitable.
It is not, although it is related, to rise up against social networks and their way of vampirizing our hours, nor to attack that anglicism that is enunciated as FOMO (acronym for
fear of missing out
, which is, in general terms, the fear to miss plans).
The goal is to drop that endless to-do list and breathe.
Being aware of our limitations, of the impossibility of fulfilling all our wishes and dedicating time to unpaid work, such as observing butterflies or lying down.
British journalist Oliver Burkeman is one of the promoters of this movement.
In the book
Four Thousand Weeks.
Time Management for Mortals
(Planet), he muses on “the efficiency trap” and how the urge to cross experiences off a list overshadows his enjoyment.
The problem, he argues, is that you never have all the satisfactions covered.
When you set a goal and achieve it, you go for another.
An endless spiral that is often compared to the typical image of the hamster in a wheel.
Capitalism, Burkeman opines via email, doesn't allow us to stop to think.
And so there is something "subversive" about "stopping, pausing and reflecting," he says.
The catch, adds Burkeman, is not just that we have too many “tedious” things to do, but that there are “too many” options in general, even exciting ones.
And that takes us away from what is important.
Either for a matter of comfort (we leave for later what we believe to be of greater magnitude) or because we are afraid of committing ourselves to big tasks that would make us discover our limitations.
It is added an environment full of stimuli and that urges omnipresence.
"One of the consequences of this fallacy is to live mentally in the future, pending rewards that never fully arrive," he says.
Canadian writer Joanna Pocock, for her part, does not see productive as negative when it consists of contributing something to the ecosystem, but she is suspicious when what it means is oiling the machine of consumerism.
Capitalism, she notes, Pocock, would like us to monetize everything from our time and labor to our natural resources.
The author of
Surrender
poses an ingenious tongue twister as a conclusion to this phenomenon: "I think we are trapped in the tyranny of efficiency until someone can monetize inefficiency."
The conjecture is not so crazy: the system has swallowed from the essential to the most ethereal, turning everything into a product with a price on the lapel.
There are still creases in this voracious jaw.
The writer Miguel Ángel Hernández has found them in a hallmark of Spanish identity: in the essay
El don de la siesta
he raises this custom to the trench, to a refuge against acceleration.
“I don't know if it's an act of resistance, but at least it is an act of unproductive pleasure.
It is a way of curbing the drive to do.
In the end it is about that: to find tactics of temporal sovereignty”, argues the author, “the instantaneous, the radical here-now, devours us.
And it has been achieved that we don't stop, that we don't 'waste' time”.
Perhaps it would be better if life were the protagonist, life life, not the ideology of life
JA González Sáinz, author of The Little Life
Even the supposed rest intervals are “productivized”, comments Hernández.
"We consume more advertising than ever in history (one ad for every three photos on Instagram, for example, or one for every two videos on YouTube) and, at the same time, we are generating information about ourselves, data that is used and marketed."
Leisure, which the Royal Spanish Academy defines as "inaction" or "total omission of activity", has mutated.
And it no longer provides that free time that each one owned, but translates into gobbling up content or suffering from anxiety.
“Quantity is more important than quality in order to 'stay up to date'.
Always on the
time line
, never out of date”, summarizes Hernández.
According to the time use survey (EET) of the National Institute of Statistics, both men and women reduced by half an hour a day the amount dedicated to social life and entertainment between 2003 and 2010. Women, furthermore, reduced those minutes even more by dedicating more to housework.
And in a report on the leisure of young people between 15 and 29 years old, prepared in 2019 by various entities, it was stated that 74.6% choose technology (chat or surf the internet) in their spare time, compared to 22, 7% who prefer to go out at night to dance or drink.
Everything is quantified and there is no longer room for "private strikes", explains the philosopher David Le Breton.
"As Cioran once wrote, they have stripped us of everything, even deserts," adds who has written an ode in prose to the exercise of walking in his work
Walking Life
.
“Humanity is in a hurry or, better yet, beset by time.
Zapping is becoming an essential way of relating to the world, of playing with the surface so as not to choose and multiply experiences without ever committing”, weighs the philosopher, who advocates breaking that loop.
Le Breton reasons that, despite everything, there is a "narrow" margin for individual manoeuvre: "We are born in a society that guides our behavior, our values, but we are always the actors of our lives, in a critical, reflective position, to for better or for worse, before a world that is never a destiny”.
JA González Sáinz, author of
The Little Life
, a trilogy about the reordering of interests as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, clarifies that thesis: “I don't know if it's important to 'be the protagonists of our lives';
That seems very peculero and very advertising to me.
Perhaps it would be better if life were the protagonist in us, even if it only had a decent, worthy role.
And if life had that role, life life, not the ideology of life, well, maybe we would take more and better measure of things”.
Not even the coronavirus and its confinements have managed to loosen that ballast.
On the contrary: with teleworking, the time limits have been blurred and answering emails, sending audios or typing messages is not a reflex action, but a paid gesture.
“The prioritization of what was important was a mirage during the confinement and the worst days of the pandemic.
We came to value a possible transformation.
But we have returned to the same place.
If possible, in a hurry.
We immediately forget the catastrophe.
We get used to everything too quickly,” says Hernández.
Burkeman agrees and is committed to psychologically "separate" from external obligations.
Understanding that being overwhelmed by taking on too much will not bring calm is one of the principles for “building the most meaningful life available to you in the situation you actually find yourself in, rather than dreaming of a meaningful life in a parallel universe.” that you will never visit.”
For Hernández, it would be necessary to "find an efficient formula to flee, because to take it as a method would be to fall into the trap of efficiency."
His solution is to find "cracks, moments, instants, intervals" where to place "pebbles in the wheels of the system."
"The narrow limits of freedom of movement and the demands to protect oneself and others have deprived us of many activities that no one thought so important, such as having a coffee on a terrace or going to the theater," emphasizes Le Breton, referring to to the hardest months of the health crisis.
Everyday behaviors that were considered banal have become sacred, he defends.
Because in the end, as the American artist Jenny Odell notes, in a world where everything is valued for its productivity, nothing costs more than doing nothing.
That dolce far niente
what the Italians (from another era) would say and that the yoke of efficiency has worn off.
In a train car, where the landscape is avoided, in bed before sleeping or in that elevator where the only distraction used to be a mental countdown.
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