On 'Spending Time'

I recently watched ("Politics is a language war")[https://youtu.be/4pPNV_B-Hpc?si=y0SfS2teO0uKptn3] by Zoe Bee. It goes into detail about how metaphor pervades every part of our lives and dialogue. How we talk about every subject is peppered with metaphors which really influences how we percieve the subject.

The one I really stuck on was how she discussed time.

"Time is money". This is how we are taught about time. We "spend" time, we "invest" time in people. If we have a friend who lets us down it's a "bad" investment. But I think that this really colours how we see the world and it's oppontunities. I think if we reframed things to "experience" time it might make a big differenece.

My partner has recently pulled me up on how I deal with situations with our son. I'm fairly selfish in a lot of ways and if I'd rather be doing something else it colours how I deal with any particular situation, I get testy and frustrated and don't really give him my best. I feel like I'd rather be "spending" my time doing something else. But if I reframed the metaphor and decided to "experience" time it might make things better.

I think this is really exaserbated by a lot of social media and the general hustle culture we're exposed to. How often do you just do one thing, without being in a podcast or YouTube video, Listening to music or something else? We're almost required to do 3 or 4 things at once to "make the most" of the time we have.

Every moment of time is one to fully experience, it doesn't matter what we're doing we should be fully emersed in the moment. Experience everything about it, if we'd rather be doing something else then maybe we should.

I once had a good argument with someone over how I used my time. I used to do a lot of my own maintenance on my car, mainly to save a little money. Their argument was that while they could maintain their own car, they'd rather spend money to let someone else do it so they could do something more interesting with their time. They fortunately had a second job doing route setting at a climbing wall so they could easily just earn a few hundred extra for a day's work to cover the costs. I didn't, and there was nothing I could do that would be worth it. The job I had didn't have voluntary overtime and I didn't have any skills that I could reliably leverage to make it worth while.

I understood their point, but in the end I was stuck doing my own maintenance but it did give me something valuable, experience. Doing that work meant that when my timing chain needed replacing I wasn't really phased, or when it started leaking oil I just jacked it up and worked the problem. The experience of using that time to learn that skill made me more self reliant and less bothered when things went wrong. I don't think of it as 'spending' my time well, but I just look at it as a worthwhile way to experience that time.

Travelling is another one, I try really hard to not plug in and I make conversation with people when they seem receptive. I've had great conversations with religious people about their faith and community, retired people recounting their lives and careers, perspectives on being a woman in software for the last 30 years, students studying media and travelling around the country. Or just sitting with my own thoughts for 30 minutes trying to figure out what I want to do next. I'm experiencing the travel, looking at the country side, or the industrial areas of Birmingham, thinking out the history of what might have gone on at a building that has clearly not been used for 30+ years.

We should spend less time, and experience more. Don't think of investing your time in friends, but build experiences with them. Maybe that experience is just a night at the pub, or over a board game. Just emmerse in the moment, take it all in.

Spend money, not time.