Have you ever been stood up? Left to dangle at the end of an appointment? Felt like your calendar lied to you or like you missed the memo? Dastard of feeling, innit. A prickly one, poised to pop all your delusions of importance and relevance. Leaving you feeling more defeat than if you’d caught a bullet in a duel.
It’s high time we spoke about… time. And egocentrism. The subconscious idea that the world revolves around you. Where the people around you are stage hands in a you-production. The ideological extreme of individualism and egoism. The ideas that your personal integrity is important, and that you should put yourself first. Individualism has been a perspective-of-choice for people since the coming of market economics. Where the collective is a morass that the individual has to successfully navigate, and that the morass has to respect the individual’s journey. Enter; egoism. That tells us that it is not only okay to prioritize your own well being, but that it is a necessary defence against those in the morass you care for that would drag you down. When an aeroplane loses cabin pressure, we are subject to instructions to put on our own oxygen masks before helping others. For what good help can you afford other people if you’ve fainted due to hypoxia? Self-help guides and feel-good mummers often cite egoism as a form of self-preservation in relationships with other people. To protect your from being cannibalized by toxic friends or lovers. Egoism doesn’t preclude that you think about the welfare of others; simply that you prioritize yours first.
Sounds reasonable, non…
Which brings about egocentrism. Where not only your integrity, your preservation, and your ascent through the morass of the collective come first, but the people around you are there for your benefit or hindrance. That the people around you are a function of you, and not independent bodies on their way through the marshes. That their resources are taps and handholds which are there for you to take advantage of.
And what resource do we hunger more for in our private, privileged, western society lives than time?
As mentioned in previous columns, we have been told that we can do everything. We can work, we can advance, we can marry, we can build houses, we can breed children, we can pursue hobbies, we can be artists, we can party, we can cultivate a garden of friends, we can Netflix and chill, we can do lazy Sunday brunches, we can walk on the moon, we can become presidents. We are supposed to be able to do whatever we want to do. That is what we were promised, non?
But the advertisements never mentioned that if we don’t limit our scopes, we’ll fail at everything. There’s simply not enough hours in a day for it all. Which is what makes time so important to us. Prioritization got lost in translation, and now we’re meant to do everything and we find that we don’t have enough minutes to do it in.
Which brings us back to missed appointments. Because how can you be expected to drop everything, from life partner chores to house construction near-misses, just because another person is waiting for you at the drop of a clock? How can you prioritise that another person is waiting for you when your job has a project deadline that a customer is waiting for? Why should an employer respect that their employees have preceding engagements when they’re to fix your shit for you? How can any single one prior commitment take priority when you have so many others clamouring for your attention? You; the star of the show.
These dismissals are a natural evolution of individualistic performance standards in a world without potential limits. As far as philosophical diversions and perversions go, the slip from stoic egoism to panicked egocentrism was a statistical inevitability. It is a thin line between putting your time and your ambitions first but allowing for the importance of someone else’s, and casually forgetting that other people live under the same constraints of inhumane potentials and promises as you do.
But inevitable doesn’t mean acceptable. It simply means that we have to put in an effort to oppose it. To put in the work so that the pursuit of our goals does not turn into a casual disregard for others’. That the optimization of our own time does not take liberties with the time of those around us. That we do not, through disregard or carelessness, become a nuisance to the other people struggling through the swamps.
It’s a balancing act. One of increasing difficulty the more we pursue the potentials of privilege. Which means we have to take off our blinkers every once in a while, step out of our bubbles of the ego, and look and behold at what we have wrought around us.
/Sebastian Lindberg 21/9-2021
WastedWords 