An idle waste of your precious time

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All battles are battles with time. There’s never enough of it. Or there’s too much of it, and because there’s too much you take up too much of it, wasting what little actually remains, which is the same thing as there’s never enough of it. If you had more, you could get done what you needed, except that if you had more — if you had enough — you might not even try, and pretty soon you wouldn’t have enough again. All you have is what you have, and winning that battle is only temporary. Time itself has more time than you do.

Time also now has¹ three dimensions, just like space. This is according to associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, whose recent paper not only explores the theory and postulates that space itself is a consequence of three-dimensional time but (unlike other theories of time) also offers methods to test and verify it. If Kletetschka is right, this could help physicists home in on a theory of everything that unites quantum mechanics and gravity, after which the universal simulation resets, with a new high score.

“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” Kletetschka told Phys.org. “Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”

A beautiful analogy! But what Phys.org explains, too, is that while the first dimension of time is what we normally experience, the second dimension is the potential existence of other outcomes — other timelines, in the sci-fi-inflected parlance of our era. The third dimension, meanwhile, is the “ability,” made possible I assume by sophisticated computer graphics, to cross perpendicularly over from one timeline to another while still experiencing regular, first-dimensional time.

In other words, this doesn’t seem to be the kind of multidimensional phenomenon you’ll ever be able to take advantage of with the right combination of psychedelics and advanced linguistics training. The occult metrics will remain beyond your ken. Kletetschka is just wasting your time, and three times as much of it as other scientists.

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I’ve been feeling the pressure of time lately. Not enough, too much, not enough, too much. To do some of the things I want to do in life means doing less of others, which is nothing new but still feels more acute. I’ve been running a lot more: Five days a week has become standard over the past two months, and that means five mornings a week that revolve around my getting out the door early, grinding out many many miles, most of them light (little distance, lots of time) but some of them strenuous (more distance, less time). The intensity and discipline have been paying off. The easy miles are dramatically easier now, the hard ones too. Every run is an experiment in space-time logistics — the compression or expansion of distance within a particular span of hours, minutes, and seconds — and at the end I’ve traversed six dimensions, though I often feel by the end that I can’t remember in which one I left my brain.

And when I’m not running, I’m climbing. Up the wall — or partway up — before I fall or fail or sometimes get lucky, gripping and shifting and willing myself higher on that z-axis till I’ve reached the goal, then dropping back down to snake my way through a different section of wall. Gravity, ugh. Losing battle there, too.

All of which is to say that lately, by the time I get through the workday and cook and eat dinner, I have been less inclined to sit down at this computer and write you an essay. But it’s not that I’m tired! I certainly haven’t been wearing myself out physically to the extent that I’m crashing into bed at 9 p.m. And my list of Trying! topics is as long as ever, and growing by the day.

Still, I’ve felt oddly unmotivated to do the most basic act of sitting down and making myself write. It’s dumb. I started this project almost a year ago in order to find out if I could do precisely that — if, after years of putting off till tomorrow the creative work of today, I could summon the energy and focus to get it done right fucking now. And I could! I can! I shall!

Maybe!

The past few weeks it’s been a struggle, Sisyphean sure why not, to make that happen. I’ve had TV shows to watch (none of them good), books to read (which I hope to report on soon), brain-rot apps that won’t scroll themselves (I’ve deleted Block Blast, thank goodness). Occasionally, I’ve even tried to spend so-called “quality time” with my wife and daughters, though the quality is often as measurable as the mass of a neutrino.

Reader, I have been wasting time. And I have been wasting time because, I think, I’ve been in a pretty good mood. I can’t say I’m happy with the world, but I am for the moment, all quotidian stresses aside, satisfied with my little patch of it. Things are okay. And because things are okay, in the face of this abundance, I have been choosing to do nothing in any way productive with my evenings.

If I wanted to get philosophical about that, I could say that it’s my way of asserting my humanity, my very mortality, in the face of unavoidable doom. With death on its way — at an amble or at a sprint, only Kletetschka can predict — I can take a small chunk of my life as my own, exempt it from the unidirectional passage of time, and not do a damn thing with it. It’s my choice and my triumph, just as Sisyphus accepts his fate in order to ignore his boulder. Time always gets you in the end, but maybe not this time.

More realistically, I can only summon the spiritual energy to make use of a certain amount of time per day. Lately, it’s been those mornings of exertion — they’re what I prep for during daylight and go to sleep anticipating. They fill up my soul. Or wait, do they drain my soul? Either way, they leave little soul for anything else. My brain, still stewing in whichever dimension I forgot it in, has a hard daily limit when it comes to things that matter. Past that, I’m all antimatter.

What I’ve learned in recent years, and what calms me when I start to death-panic about these wasted evenings², is that none of this is fixed. My avidity for fitness may suddenly, inexplicably wane, the capacities of my spirit and my frontal lobes expand. I might forget entirely about some crap streaming series, or I might finish the stack of books at my bedside. (Ha!) Or I might simply change my mind for no other reason than that I can — it’s my mind, after all. The boulder is only a crushing burden because I allow it. A slight shift in the quantum probabilities, and I’m on an entirely different timeline, having traversed more dimensions than I count with no more than a thought. 🪨🪨🪨

Over in The Atlantic, my own dear dad, Robert Gross, has an essay about the town of my birth — Concord, Massachusetts — and how its Transcendentalist fame derives in large part from its natural environment. Read all about “the distinct landscape created by Concord’s geological history” right now; time’s a-wasting!