After a long time of absence, I am back with a short essay that seeks to question the underlying assumptions in the discourse surrounding what constitutes a waste of time. The core idea is this. Some people might claim that things like spending a few days on a deep dive into the history of Lord of the Rings (LOTR) or walking everywhere instead of using public and private transportation are ways of wasting time. Another person might response by saying, that walking is healthy and therefore not a waste of time. In fact, the history of LOTR although fictional contains key insights about the impact of two world wars in the 20th century on literature and thus not a waste of time either. Until a short while ago I would try to construct similar arguments to defend ways of spending time that others thought to be a waste. I was wrong. Twice in fact, because I first thought I could show that wasting time is not bad at all but ended realizing that is very difficult to determine how to waste time at all – except under specific conditions that I will get to later.

The Current Discussion:
The thought that sparked this essay is that I rejected the notion that all time should be used productively and therefore reject debates around what does and does not constitute an unproductive or wasteful use of time.  The current discourse on spending time is mostly concerned with contesting which ways of spending time are worthwhile, and which are not. Time is a scarce resource to humans and so intuitively we assume that there are ways of wasting it or using it in the proper way. Reading, for example, can be a waste of time. Unless you read about important things (which may or may not be the history of LOTR). Then it is time used well. Maybe any reading is good because any text contains knowledge. But then again there are more efficient ways of acquiring knowledge. Maybe any reading is a waste of time if a documentary might supply me with deeper understanding faster. This discourse is incredibly unstructured as you can see so let me clarify a few core assumptions and then untangle this mess.

First, I want to mention that even to engage in the discourse implicitly accepts that time should not be wasted. This is some big burden shifting from people who claim that some things are wastes of time. By trying to show for each activity or lack thereof that it is not a waste of time is to accept that time can be wasted and wasting it is bad. But I do not want the burden of proof, I am happy to get it off my shoulders and let it be carried by people who think time can be wasted. So let us do just that.

For that to work we must either show that wasting time is not possible or that wasting it is not bad. The stronger the argument the better but ultimately it is fine if we manage to raise enough doubt on either of these two points. Then the next time someone says reading the history of LOTR is a waste of time we can reply “Is it though? Cause I think time cannot be wasted”. Then whoever made the initial claim has the burden of proving that time can be wasted or that wasting it is bad.  My initial goal was to show that wasting time is not bad but in the process of doing so I realized that it is not possible at all. To understand that we must understand how to waste something.  

Some Definitions:
To be able to waste anything, that thing must be scarce. For example, we cannot waste gravity. It’s there, we can use it or not but using it does not consume it and so there is no way of wasting it. But time is scarce, to humans at least, because we die at some point and so cannot do everything. We must choose what to do out of myriads of possibilities. So, time can be wasted then? Well not yet, because scarcity by itself does not enable wasteful use. It also requires a better alternative use that is obvious enough so that we can reasonably expect people to know of it. I can waste drinking water if I use it to water plants even though there was also non-drinking available. Wasting food can be done by not eating it and just letting it rot – obviously a worse use than eating it. Electricity can be wasted by leaving the lights on even though no one is home and if they serve no other purpose.  So, for us to waste time we must accept that it is scarce and then use it in way where a better alternative use is obvious. The issue here of course is, who could say that any time could have been used for a better alternative use?

How to Waste Time
You might say the easiest case is if we have defined for ourselves the best use of time and then do not follow through. For example, I might say that I want to use the entire day to read about the history of LOTR but then end up doing nothing. In that case I can claim that I wasted time because I formulated the best way of using time and did not use my time in that way. The problem is of course that it can very much happen that after having breakfast I decided that doing nothing was actually a better way of spending my time. The issue here is that people are not one-dimensional, so they have a variety of interests and ways of ranking the pursuit of different interests. In addition, the different interests we pursue are interdepend. I might say the best way to use my time in the morning is to eat a croissant and the second-best way is to eat a porridge but if I already ate the croissant, I am too full for porridge and so it goes down on the rank list of using time. This is all to show that there really is no objectively good way to spend time. We might be able to determine for ourselves when we waste time but doing so for others is very difficult. This can be illustrated by another example. Imagine I relate to you a story of a recent visit to a friend who asked me to carry a fridge up to this 5th floor apartment. After arriving at the top, he asks me to carry the fridge down again. The whole ordeal took more than an hour that I could have spent working. Now you might say that my friend wasted my time but how would you know. Maybe I was super bored at work and really needed to move a bit and so it was actually the perfect way to spend an hour. In the end it is me who decides whether I wasted time. From the outside it is very hard to tell because there are so many ways to use time and ranking alternatives is difficult.  

Now it is important to mention that, my attitudes of what are better or worse alternatives to use my time are influenced by others. In some social circles spending hours reading LOTR might be a “good” way to spend time with few better alternatives. In other circles working 12 hours each day is considered a “better than most” way to spend time. But still my interests are too complicated and the way I can spend my time too complex to make claims about better or worse ways of spending it meaningful. This is true in particular for activities that are broad and long term. Claims like “studying literature is a waste of time” or “walking everywhere is a waste of time” are so incredibly broad that they cannot be called a waste unless considered in hindsight by the person who did them because who else could determine for them the “right way to spend their lifetime”. Social circles can influence how we value different alternatives of spending time, but in the end, it is ourselves who must rank them and determine how to use our time. This is good because being situated in social circles that help us make sense of what good ways of using time are helps us in decided between the endless different ways of using it, because there is no objectively best way to use time. At the same time, it leaves enough room for us to make independent decisions on how we ourselves want to use our time.  

Summary
So let us return to the initial problem. Can I waste time? The answer to that is yes if I use it in a way that fails its purpose or could have been used in a better way. But determining this is almost impossible to do unless we do it for ourselves or maybe know the person who we suspect of wasting time very well. The proper way of using time is in part determine by social circles that we are situated in but also by us as the individual who balances different norms about using time and then applies them to the question of whether we waste it or not. This means that telling others, especially people we do not know, that they are wasting time is almost always wrong. There is no objectively right way to use time, and we do not know what social circle they are in which might help us to determine whether the way they are spending time is considered a waste by themselves. The only thing we might say is that if it were ourselves, we would have considered it a waste. Now this does not have to get us to the point where each has their own isolated understanding of what constitutes wasting time and so we cannot talk about better or worse ways of spending time with each other at all. There are approaches to determine whether a normalized way of using time the right way in a given social circle is in fact a good normalization but that goes beyond what this essay attempts to do.

Based on the previous discussion the point really just is that time can be wasted if there are better alternatives but there really is no objective way of determining a better or worse way of spending time for someone else. So, the next time you someone tells you that you are wasting your time you can reply “prove it”. Let them define what constitutes a waste of time and more importantly either establish an objective way of judging whether something is a waste of time or prove that their normalization within their social circle of what is and is not a waste of time is better than yours. They might still have a good reply to these questions but at the very least they now have the burden of proof on their shoulders.