Hello again, fellow Time Warriors!
I’m back to ramble again about the ongoing Time War we find ourselves in. If you’re anything like me, you enjoy high-quality, low-carb snacks during the day. I particularly like Chomps sticks and inside each wrapper there is some aphorism or nugget of wisdom. While a lot of them are your standard, run-of-the-mill “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” sayings, I recently found one that ties in so closely with what my colleague Elliott and I have been working on over the past year (shameless self-plug).
“Time is the only currency we have…Use it well.” If this isn’t a piece of ammunition in the Time War, I don’t know what is, and it was surprising to me to find a statement that sounds so right-leaning hanging out in a meat snack wrapper. As the resident Logo-Centrist here at Carpe Forum, I took this as a sign that I should analyze this idea. Anybody who’s been following The Wandering Humanists knows that we are simply obsessed with how we as finite, mortal beings can find a way to live in the face of the impending entropy of our world. Time is the thing that lets us move and act in the world. As Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.” Time is paradoxically also the thing which hastens our end. As Mr. Mackey would say, “It’s bad, mkay.” It really does seem that, since none of us know how much time we actually have and since our quantity of it is steadily diminishing, we should take it seriously.
This is standard, basic level existential philosophy. Anybody who’s gone through puberty and/or read some Camus or Kafka will know this, but how can we view time specifically as currency? “Time is money” is an oft-touted saying in our culture, but it seems to really be the opposite of the profound Chomps quote from above. While time may be money in a very narrow, business sense, I contend that money is NOT time. Money certainly is crystalized social power, and can be used to extend and prolong your life for sure, but (baring some sort of unholy AI-upload future) it simply cannot buy you time forever. Even an eternal AI god-construct is constrained by the heat death of the universe. To use Twitter speak, money is FAKE; that is, inaccurate. What any amount of money truly is worth (that is, what it truly means) is constrained by all kinds of factors. How rare the unit of money is has huge bearing upon what money’s perceived value is. Anybody here who’s paid for anything lately knows that when money’s value is bleached, prices start changing as the signal experiences interference. Bitcoin or gold does not fix this broader existential problem (although sound money should be everyone’s goal), because even more stable currencies still are constrained by time. Everything earthly is constrained by time. Heck, just look at the etymology of the word “temporal” (from the Latin temporālis-‘of time’).
So money is, by definition, an inaccurate currency and it always will be despite our best efforts. Time is the real currency, but unlike even the more based monetary options like precious metals, we can never really know how much of it each of us has. Very much like fiat currency (looking at you, Federal Reserve), our personal quantity of time is bleeding away with each second. A wise man once said, “Time keeps on ticking, ticking, into the future.” Like in a story by Camus or Kafka, we are left trying to figure out what to do now. As much as I love both of those authors, none of them really provide a great answer to the question.
I think my boy Tolkien provides a much better one in the voice of Gandalf. In The Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf lays the quest to destroy the Ring upon Frodo, Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” This is the sentiment of those of us worn down and worn out by fighting the Time War. Aside from acknowledging our own mortality, we are often dismayed by seeming victories of the Left at each turn. We find ourselves with T.S. Eliot in noticing that things really do fall apart. In this scene, Frodo expresses the anxiety and the temptation to despair that are constantly being forced down our throats. But as one of the greatest Time Warriors of the modern age Tolkien doesn’t leave us there. Gandalf responds by giving Frodo what is essentially a credo, a statement of faith. “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
While this doesn’t solve everything neatly and it doesn’t remove any of the steps that lie before Frodo (hint, that’s not what faith is), it cuts through the fog of despair that threatens to envelop Frodo. Also note that the word “time” is used by both characters in this exchange, but in different ways. For Frodo, “time” is something that belongs to him, and he is frightened about what his quest will mean for his life inside time. For Gandalf who is one of the Istari and has a very different perspective on time, “time” is something that is given to us. It is a gift given by Eru Ilúvatar, and even the end of our personal time in death is the final gift of the Creator.
With this in mind, I think the strangely profound quote I found in a snack wrapper comes into sharper focus. “Time” on a personal level doesn’t really belong to us. We were given it as a gift, and as such we should participate in it in the same spirit. Inwardly focused “time” is very likely to produce the bent, twisted land of Mordor, while a reveling in the gift of “time” is much more likely to produce something like the Shire. So with this in mind, remember that time really is the only currency, but don’t try to grasp it too tightly. Instead, receive it as an awesome gift, and find some cool people to go do awesome things with it.
PS: For those wanting a deeper take on this exchange between Frodo and Gandalf, I recommend this blog post by Stephen Winter.