John Griffin column on time .. . it references Mike's column!

Dear MF, I thought you might be interested in this column which ran Sunday in the Honolulu Advertiser where I used to be editorial page editor -- JohnG

Whether we realize it or not, time has become a major issue in all our lives.

So I smiled, albeit sadly, reading an Advertiser story last Monday. It began:

“In the last 20 years, working time has increased 15 percent by some estimates and leisure time has decreased 33 percent.”

It’s not that I disagreed with the story’s call for better time management (although that’s only part of the problem). I have friends and family who fit that hectic profile.

No, I was smiling at how wrong I was in the 1970s and beyond writing editorials saying how society must prepare for cuts in the workweek to 30 hours or less.

(Former Advertiser editor Buck Buchwach used to joke back then that he was all for a 30-hour work week – if we could get the staff to work that much.)

Nor was I alone in my view. Big thinkers all over predicted shorter workweeks. As late as 1995 economist-activist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book titled, “The End of Work,” which I cited in a column on the civic society (as opposed to just business and government). He said the new technology would mean fewer jobs, and that society must adjust with measures like higher status for volunteerism and shorter workweeks.

Look what happened: Americans with higher-paying jobs are working longer hours, super-long in high-tech areas like Silicon Valley. Poorer Americans often take several jobs to make ends meet. In Hawaii, our long 1990s recession added to such pressures.

Instead of cutting the number of jobs, the new technology has rearranged many and helped add more in a burst of national prosperity. We have grown the national economic pie, even if many people get pieces that are too small.

But what intrigues me most is not so much the new economics as the changing concept of shrinking time.

Most people think of time as a constant, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, etc. You can read it on the clock and the calendar. But we have also felt the pressures of not enough time or the boredom of time on your hands. So it’s well to think of different clocks.

Back in 1987, the prolific Rifkin seemed more right in a book titled “Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History.” Its point was that the biological and physical rhythms of the natural world were speeded up, first by industrial age timetables and now even more so by the information and computer era. The result is a form of social jet lag or rat race that at the least needs more consideration.

Many of us have long cited the adage that “Time is Money.” Some also reversed that to “Money is Time,” a view I embrace in retirement.

Now some are saying that time is replacing money as the true currency of our millennium realm.

A free-lance futurist named Michael Finley writes about this in a web column this month, suggesting we are in a hyper age where faster defines better.

“Technology – microprocessors, packet switches, broadband lines – caused time to speed up,” he says, adding:

“Cycles used to include generous amounts of ‘white time’ – time when nothing happened and no one minded that nothing happened. There would be white time during handoffs, during transportation, while things were in the mail, or while people ‘thought it over’… We usually described it in pejorative terms – delay, doldrum, drag.

“But those cycles have compressed, like radio ads that have had the silence between words plucked out: Do-it-today…When all the white has been whited out, we will live in a simultaneous world, and technology and time will fuse into a single, seamless, instantaneous moment.”

I doubt if it will come to that. Finley himself quotes Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, as saying life must be lived forward but it can only be understood backward. He adds:

“Perhaps there will be a great rebalancing up ahead, when the pendulum swings back toward reflection, and graybeards – and whatever the female equivalent of graybeards is – will have laurels strewn before them instead of Grecian Formula.”

I scan that horizon, having given up GF years ago in favor of thinking back, living ahead, and feeling for those fighting the Time Wars.

(The writer is a former Advertiser editorial page who contributes regularly to the Sunday Focus section. He can be e-mailed at johntgriffin@hotmail.com)

The other day I saw a TV ad for some company (can't remember which) that had the tagline: "While you're thinking, the competition is doing."

"Ah," I said to myself, "but while I'm thinking, the competition probably is doing the wrong thing because they didn't think."

What's happening in business and in markets today is misleading. It's easy for the young hotshots to look good when investors are willing to throw tens of millions into dot-com companies that have never have made a dime and have no immediate prospect of making one. But sooner or later (I'm inclined to think rather sooner than later) the bubble will pop, and those investors will be saying to themselves: "Hmm -- maybe I should have thought about this a little more."

In the long run, people who think -- whether they're young or old -- will always beat those who don't think. Wars, poker games and business competitions are not won by those who steer by guesswork and reflex. Fogeys like you and I may take comfort in the certainty that thinking will be back in fashion someday.

B.M.

"No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier

"Editors want everything to fall into a neat little box, and your stuff doesn't do that. You don't write merely about technology, you write about what technology means to us and how it has changed us. I like it." -- John Boxmeyer, St. Paul