Has time become less relevant in our era?
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” William Penn
During our young and mature adulthood, one adopts a material approach when thinking about time: it has always been of the essence. Benjamin Franklin clearly stated this view in a famous quote:
“Time is money.”
On the other hand, once we leave our careers behind with more leisure time, our thinking moves to a review of our legacy. Our reality starts questioning things we could have done better in line with our talents, vision, and mission. Seneca’s thought represents a better option for us to reflect on:
“Life, if well lived, is long enough.”
Christian morals taught us that our free will makes us responsible for our acts. In the Western hemisphere, dreams of a liberal society where a free market and the enterprising spirit of men will eventually lead us to progress. This ideology took the U.S. to the level of power, credibility, and wealth they achieved at the end of World War II.
However, we knew better than that: progress has rarely been a given. In all the precedent examples in ancient Greece, Macedonian, and Roman empires, the Middle and Modern Ages, and during our era, progress has been a roller coaster: a recurrent phenomenon.
In antiquity, schools of thought spread their philosophy along the Mediterranean. During the Middle Ages, religion became again predominant in Europe. The Renaissance first and the Illustration in Scotland, England, and France left a relevant contribution to science and technology. With it, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism became the schools of thought in the modern world. This trend continued until our times when radical movements such as Nazism and Fascism abruptly reminded us that progress can have different meanings.
Suppose that some intelligent beings look at our history from another planet. They could easily conclude that rationality has not played a key role in our decision-making. Ambition, egotism, and a power search, in other words, basic instincts, have become the main drivers of our behavior.
The survival instinct, based on the finitude of life and our ethical and moral values, has not been a deterrence -in any prior period of civilizations- to the occurrence of wars and the violation of human rights.
In an article published last week, political scientist Oriol Bartomeus, author of The Weight of Time. Story of the generational change in Spain analyzes the results of recent European elections with the thesis of his essay in hand. (Source: Spanish newspaper El País. “Why fewer and fewer young people believe in democracy” published on June 15, 2024.)
From this source, we quote (on the lack of faith in young people towards democracy):
In any case, it is unfair to attribute all the blame to the lack of pedagogy with the desire to inoculate the values of civility, pluralism, and respect that are the center of the democratic system because in the last 50 years, there has been a profound change in what democracy means and what it entails. For someone born in the second half of the last century, democracy was a political system that guaranteed respect for freedoms and implied economic progress and social well-being.
This idea represents a fundamental transformation regarding the role of politics in our world in which new generations have grown up. For many of them, politics cannot change things, to improve their lives, or to enable them to have a better future. The last generation that believed in politics was the young people of the sixties. After them, politics becomes vulgar, falls off the pedestal, so to speak, or worse, is a liability. Politicians are no longer leaders worth following and admiring.
Populism has filled the void left by the right and left of traditional political parties and is becoming the focus of attention. Recent experiences such as the two World Wars no longer represent a lesson to learn.
Under these circumstances, the following quote from the genius of Albert Einstein could best represent the relevance of time in our time:
“People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a persistent illusion.”
Note: I always use Grammarly to edit content and quotes.
