moderne wohnzimmer mit treppe

translator: andrew reedreviewer: ingrid lezar following the great improv stuff, i ought to just throw away my cards and say, 'change of plans! i'll tell you something different, as we start our search for lost time.' but i'm too nervous, so i've kept hold of all my cards. i'll try to take you through my ideas.

a few days ago, a good friend told me that his parents recently stopped picking up his younger siblings from piano lessons and football; now, they use a new transport service via a smartphone app, the kind that increasingly competeswith the taxi industry. wow, so practical, so efficient,such a time-saver, i thought.

this example says quite a lotabout our society and its values. a society that likes being efficient, progressive, pragmatic, fast,productive and technological. because time is precious. that's why, in recent decades, we've developed ever moretechnologies and solutions to make us more efficientand productive. and yet, just in this very society,

there's a paradoxicalobservation to be made. people around us, often we ourselves, are increasingly stressed out,burned out, with little time. time, and with itstressed, modern humanity, is a much discussed topic. but from a very normative standpoint,in my opinion. we meet with imperatives everywhere: be efficient! don't waste time! even when it comes to ourselves.

for being alone, relaxing, we've created terms like: 'quality time', 'me time'or 'down time', which are really just partof this same efficiency idea. we give in to this social pressure to fit in, to stay fit, to be informed or appear intelligent. the joy of boredom has been bannedfrom our daily lives. because boredom is boring.

wanting to find out more, i began reading, and learned: the cultures in which we live don't just have different languages,territories and habits; they also deal withand appreciate time differently. i focused on two verydifferent time cultures, silicon valley in californiaand myanmar in southeast asia, where i followed people's activities. silicon valley society pursues efficiency.

technology is embedded deeplyin people's lives. it's a 24-hour society, highly time-regulated, and full of tightlyscheduled appointments. myanmar, however, is an agrarian economy with strong family structures, with a religious buddhist society. the rhythm there is governed stronglyby the rhythm of nature, day and night, the harvest,

and so with appointments. on my journey i met six people, and i'd like to introduce them tonight. alex is a data analyst at google. when alex wakes up in the morning,his iphone rings, the sun is already shining outside and, still in bed,he starts reading and answering e-mails. he takes his work to bed with him. when he takes the google bus to work,

he connects to the wi-fi. even stuck in the traffiche can be productive. a private appointment is stillto be squeezed in for the evening. his whole day is planned out for him. soon, alex will have a new joband a new team, because careers move fastin silicon valley. koni, on the other hand,is a rice farmer in myanmar. the sun wakes him in the morning. the cows are hungry and want feeding.

he gets his wooden plough readyto go out into the field, before it gets too hot. out in the field, we notice a tractor in the distance. koni reacts ambivalently,almost fearfully. i wonder if he knowshow much faster and more efficiently this tractor could plough his field? but koni shows no signs of envy; on the contrary.

i guess he hasn't heard of microcredit, which would allow his village to buy such a machine. koni says he's always been a rice farmerand always will be. when i asked people in silicon valley how they would categorizethe 24 hours in their day, they could provide mewith a load of categories: 'work time social', 'work time alone','free time', 'transit time'. in myanmar, the question is metwith great confusion.

'my 24 hours are divided intoday and night,' says koni. steve is a product manager. his lunch today is a business lunch. precisely arranged,start and end fixed in his calendar, regardless of whetherthe actual task is completed at the end. multitasking between different projects,each in progress and evolving, is his daily reality. after lunch he makesa quick call to his girlfriend. he switches time and again,back and forth,

between private and professional matters. steve is yet another followerof the quantified self movement. with his digital armband he can track his movement,eating habits, sleep patterns, in order to optimize his time usage. but above all, he knows how he has used his time,how he has invested his time. ashin vilasa, by contrast, is a monk. this lunchtime he spent 20 minutesstaring out the window.

finding him in the corner of a house, i watched him the whole time, and it kind of freaked me out. (laughter) what was he doing? later, i asked himif he'd been meditating, the only plausible explanation to me, these days when everyone does yoga. he said no, he was simplylooking out the window.

spending his free time with such a lackof planning or expectation as ashin vilasa does is not on simon's agenda. simon is a start-up ceo,and tonight he's in the gym. he knows exactly why he's there. because he wants to stay fit. just as simon spends his free time five times a week in a way he's planned, so too do many peoplein western industrialized societies.

even our free time is,ultimately, an investment, and we often clearly recognize what profit and added valuewe hope to gain from it. back in myanmar,choso is a shopkeeper. her family has a tv and loves to watch soap operas. soaps are an expressionof modern life in myanmar, and they bring with theminto the family living room the idea of planned leisure activities.

choso herself says she is often bored. her time culture knowsno scheduled leisure activities. tonight, choso is pretty tired. she is closing her shop, and i ask herwhat the opening hours are. she looks at me, surprised. she opens in the morning,she closes in the evening. she has no clock. no matter where we're from,

we are citizens of a time culture, and we often don't realizehow our surrounding time culture actually defines our way with and our decisions about time. researchers and professors, such as the german sociologisthartmut rosa, say: it's impossible to break outof our own time cultures. if you don't respondto your e-mails and calls, you lose your job.

if you don't publish enough,you lose your reputation, you become a failure. they say: the wellness industry,yoga culture, sabbaticals, are really only systemic downtime, little wellness illusions, to perform even better ultimately, to be more efficient ultimately, to be less tense rushing from a to b. so there's no real escape

from a system ofperpetual self-optimization. i think that whether it's the pressureto be productive in the tech industry, or the pressure emanating from tradition, or from a religious societysoaked in tradition, or both - the key to providing yourselfwith a proper approach to time, and to some extent having alone time, is to be aware of the values ofour respective time cultures, and to ask ourselves how these values

actually influenceour individual understanding of time. this means asking critical questions: what are the values of my time culture? do i agree with them? if not, how do i make roomfor my own ideas? what is my individual time culture? i think this question is a difficult one. and i think there'sa need for courage, because answers do not alwaysfollow immediately -

something we're no longer really used to in our information society. mostly, we only needthe right search term. various media comein shorter and more concise forms. i should also be briefthis evening. merely posing the question, questioning one's own time culture, without an immediate answer,is meaningful. two further thoughts on this:

time culture ascribes very differentvalues to men and women when it comes to the time we spend together with our families. it is one reason researchersare already considering the total time budgets of families. this questioning of our time culture would allow us to distance ourselvesfrom imposed values and truly make family lifewhat we want it to be. and secondly:

our time culture favours planned,scheduled leisure activities, intended to serve self-optimization, like sports, reading and learning. pottering about, observing and reflecting without meaning and purpose tend to be, at least initially, dismissed. and that actually correspondsto what's at the core of our time culture: the need to know always exactly why we spend our timethe way we do.

if we could separate ourselvesjust a little from our time culture, we could spend time in ways that do not require us to knowthe immediate benefit. i'll return briefly to my first example,that of collecting the kids. it's efficient and time-saving, true. but i remember the times, when i was with my parents,stuck in traffic, bored. times when i might have been picked upalso from football or piano, when, sometimes, there wereintimate and honest moments,

when you really got to knowthe other person, without scheduling quality time, or going on the next family vacation overloaded with high expectations. being stuck in traffic with your parentsis pretty mundane. but exactly becauseit's so mundane or trivial, it can be so valuable. no time-culture-dictated expectations, rather space for the unexpected

in a society that is otherwisefully scheduled, focused on productivity-oriented efficiency. what did i get out of my trip? i think it needs true courage nowadays to go without always knowing what the immediate value of our time is. only this courage creates roomfor the unexpected and for real value. (applause)

Subscribe to receive free email updates: