Thank you for writing this, Hadden. If there's one thing I learned from old farmers, it's the cultural value of stopping to visit when you meet in the field, or in the dooryard. For them, being busy amounts to a disavowal of the village, the neighborly web.
Those stops for a chat are culturally valuable of course, but they're also useful to find out what's going on. The main purpose is to be friendly, but you might learn something to your business advantage too. If you don't remain connected you miss out.
My mind immediately goes toward the spiritual disciplines and practices that we find very, very hard in modern life: Receiving and rejoicing in the fully-alive kind of Sabbath rest, prayer, silence, solitude, hospitality, etc. Granted, we know they have always been difficult for people, because we are fallen creatures. And yet, the mature Christian life requires dead time to be developed at all. These things take time. Time that won't be carved out on its own!
Indeed, great points Haley. This essay was already too long and I had to cut a section on how the Israelite year was full of so much ordained and commanded dead time: Sabbath, Jubilee, Feasts, times of uncleanliness etc. But it didn't stop Israel becoming a prosperous land.
The spiritual aspects of dead time is a subject worthy of pursuing.
I build dead time into my day as a software developer, and cherish it as a human being. Dead time is where some of our greatest ideas come from. It’s where our appreciation for everything in the natural world, everything ‘life’, grows. Dead time is really the ultimate paradox because to every other animal in the natural world what we consider dead time they would consider life.
There's still a lot of dead time in an office, but nowadays it gets filled not by friendly chats with colleagues, but by private, individual web or social media browsing. It can be hard to tell if they're working or not because everyone's still staring in silence at a screen.
When you write about our moral duty to work in this way, I’m reminded of a junior minister in the last UK government who was explaining why folks who were ill etc. were expected to make more effort to find work. The aspect of folks who were disabled clouded from the interviewer’s perception the minister’s statement that ‘it is the duty of citizens to work’. Part of me wondered whether I’d fallen asleep and woken up in China. On the other hand I was also pondering whether the interviewer also assumed the ‘duty to work’ as the purpose of being a citizen, or as it were another mindless cog in The Machine.
I've felt for many years that politicians see us precisely that way and that once we become "economically inefficient" they'd rather we quietly shuffled off to the next realm.
Coming to a country near you soon . . . We have the same in NZ, which also has the world’s overall highest suicide rate, and second highest globally amongst young men
Great essay, thanks for writing this, made me think of Marshall McLuhan's discussion of what technology amputates when it's overextended. A lot, it would seem.
I often feel that those driving this insanity know the end is in sight, where endless growth for its own sake consumes itself. The constant need for "growth" is if course ultimately unsustainable, but it's as if each generation of "leaders" want to make sure the collapse isn't on their watch, so to speak, so on and on we go.
For me, slowing down, consuming less and less, reveling in dead time, pursuing my faith etc has become my way of living. Not always easy when the family don't fully embrace the principle, but hopefully we'll get there!
Very good Hadden. I look forward to the day when tools, especially hand tools of lasting quality become heirlooms again. But as you suggest, '(footnote 1.) 'economics' is complex when it comes to supplying benefit. Very recently I read an essay on the concept of 'Basic Income'. (Lots in there including when the concept of those in need of support were vilified successfully in the public mind as 'scroungers'.)
Fundamentally we all rely on 'basic income' from sunlight, even in the days when extra energy for 'economy' came from horses, and wind an water. It has always been a 'trickle up' economy even before the agrarians. Modern critique of 'classical/extant economic understanding points out (e.g. Steve Keen) that 'energy' does not figure in the scheme of 'capital' and 'labour'.
On a visit to the Wales Centre for Alternative Technology a few years ago I picked up a copy of a book I had long intended to read. The author of 'High Horse Riderless' (1947), engineer LTC Rolt, provided a similarly nuanced but essentially the same argument that you put forward. He became an influential columnist and the principle driver of the 'rescue' from irretrievable ruin of the British canal network in tha dificult post-war period.
He was aware of the ironies involved in that early industrial machine, a network that still retains 2000 miles of its original connected 'grid'. 'Efficiency' had been a harsh mistress for the families who manned those boats, but their artwork of course has become a prized possession in the same way you have pointed out for other 'antiques'.
PS I see there is a used pbk for sale in UK for £6.50!
PPS I have thoughts of a 'library' of HJ Massingham books and I could share mine by post. Further thoughts of books attach to your great 'coffee House' idea/initiative but I will leave them for another day.
Finally, I shared this with a few friends a couple of years ago. I also enjoyed the cat. There are modern power DIY tools these days, but that is another level of sophistication ...
Apologies for those typos above. Hope you can read through it.
I happen to be experiencing in the last few days a lot of co-incidences grouped round the 'Gaian' inspiration (originally James Lovelock) that gained international momentum early in this century at Schumacher College/Dartington in England.
Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification) has a long conversation with a guest who was mentored and educated by the same Schumacher experience having key inputs from the original international thinkers.
Nate's intro includes: "This week, I’m joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living. "https://natehagens.substack.com/p/bioregional-futures-reconnecting
All too much for me these last two or three days, what with Peter R having a guest post Etain Addey, whose writing and place I happen to know from way back in Umbria. I must now get out into the September afternoon sunlight on my bike, if for no other reason than to keep up the therapy on my 'slipped' lumbar discs and to get on with being more practical again.
The thesis is an elementary, objective truth, drowned out by the hype of "productivity", the notion I spectacularly dislike (although I know that I have a reputation of an efficient designer.)
Work patterns evolve, and now, in the face of climate change, it is the best opportunity to revive quality over quantity, craft over speed, creativity over productivity. We do not need "more". We need "better".
The pursuit to eliminate "dead time" from a worker's routine was mocked enough in 1936 movie "Modern Times" with Charlie Chaplin (a spectacular scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1apYo6-Ow ), yet it does not seem as if the architects of management models have learned a good lesson from it. In is the highest time to do so now.
Dead time for me is when I’m subconsciously processing a problem, a potential solution, a creative idea without actively thinking about it. And invariably, I come up with an answer. But if we don’t have the ability to process, ponder or actively unplug, we will dry up as a species. Human or not, we are still part of a larger process that requires a certain level of maintenance that requires being still, quiet, unfocused. Just as much as sleeping, eating, socializing. It’s part of our being. Although my major concern is, nay fear, is AI run amuck and overtaking us.
Oh, yes, this is an excellent point NilaMae! How AI might erode dead time further by displacing our time for reflection and deliberation. I hadn't thought of that.
Thank you for writing this, Hadden. If there's one thing I learned from old farmers, it's the cultural value of stopping to visit when you meet in the field, or in the dooryard. For them, being busy amounts to a disavowal of the village, the neighborly web.
Those stops for a chat are culturally valuable of course, but they're also useful to find out what's going on. The main purpose is to be friendly, but you might learn something to your business advantage too. If you don't remain connected you miss out.
Oh, I like that: being busy being as a disavowal of community. Thanks, Adam, for sharing.
Fantastic thoughts, Hadden.
My mind immediately goes toward the spiritual disciplines and practices that we find very, very hard in modern life: Receiving and rejoicing in the fully-alive kind of Sabbath rest, prayer, silence, solitude, hospitality, etc. Granted, we know they have always been difficult for people, because we are fallen creatures. And yet, the mature Christian life requires dead time to be developed at all. These things take time. Time that won't be carved out on its own!
Indeed, great points Haley. This essay was already too long and I had to cut a section on how the Israelite year was full of so much ordained and commanded dead time: Sabbath, Jubilee, Feasts, times of uncleanliness etc. But it didn't stop Israel becoming a prosperous land.
The spiritual aspects of dead time is a subject worthy of pursuing.
I build dead time into my day as a software developer, and cherish it as a human being. Dead time is where some of our greatest ideas come from. It’s where our appreciation for everything in the natural world, everything ‘life’, grows. Dead time is really the ultimate paradox because to every other animal in the natural world what we consider dead time they would consider life.
Exactly! Well said Shane. It certainly is paradoxical
There's still a lot of dead time in an office, but nowadays it gets filled not by friendly chats with colleagues, but by private, individual web or social media browsing. It can be hard to tell if they're working or not because everyone's still staring in silence at a screen.
It’s even possible some of them are Substacking.
Ha! Very true
It sounds like you’re saying that dead time is the time we’re most alive. I can deal with that.
When you write about our moral duty to work in this way, I’m reminded of a junior minister in the last UK government who was explaining why folks who were ill etc. were expected to make more effort to find work. The aspect of folks who were disabled clouded from the interviewer’s perception the minister’s statement that ‘it is the duty of citizens to work’. Part of me wondered whether I’d fallen asleep and woken up in China. On the other hand I was also pondering whether the interviewer also assumed the ‘duty to work’ as the purpose of being a citizen, or as it were another mindless cog in The Machine.
PS was in Sedbergh this week :)
Ah! I hope Sedbergh treated you well Eric :)
And yes, I wonder if our politicians perceive of us as mere GDP producing cogs in the machine too. Sometimes it feels like it.
I've felt for many years that politicians see us precisely that way and that once we become "economically inefficient" they'd rather we quietly shuffled off to the next realm.
Not that they'd ever publicly admit it of course.
This is where MAiD in Canada is very concerning (to say the least). Evil is a more accurate term.
Coming to a country near you soon . . . We have the same in NZ, which also has the world’s overall highest suicide rate, and second highest globally amongst young men
And the locals call it paradise . . .
Great essay, thanks for writing this, made me think of Marshall McLuhan's discussion of what technology amputates when it's overextended. A lot, it would seem.
I often feel that those driving this insanity know the end is in sight, where endless growth for its own sake consumes itself. The constant need for "growth" is if course ultimately unsustainable, but it's as if each generation of "leaders" want to make sure the collapse isn't on their watch, so to speak, so on and on we go.
For me, slowing down, consuming less and less, reveling in dead time, pursuing my faith etc has become my way of living. Not always easy when the family don't fully embrace the principle, but hopefully we'll get there!
Very good Hadden. I look forward to the day when tools, especially hand tools of lasting quality become heirlooms again. But as you suggest, '(footnote 1.) 'economics' is complex when it comes to supplying benefit. Very recently I read an essay on the concept of 'Basic Income'. (Lots in there including when the concept of those in need of support were vilified successfully in the public mind as 'scroungers'.)
Fundamentally we all rely on 'basic income' from sunlight, even in the days when extra energy for 'economy' came from horses, and wind an water. It has always been a 'trickle up' economy even before the agrarians. Modern critique of 'classical/extant economic understanding points out (e.g. Steve Keen) that 'energy' does not figure in the scheme of 'capital' and 'labour'.
On a visit to the Wales Centre for Alternative Technology a few years ago I picked up a copy of a book I had long intended to read. The author of 'High Horse Riderless' (1947), engineer LTC Rolt, provided a similarly nuanced but essentially the same argument that you put forward. He became an influential columnist and the principle driver of the 'rescue' from irretrievable ruin of the British canal network in tha dificult post-war period.
He was aware of the ironies involved in that early industrial machine, a network that still retains 2000 miles of its original connected 'grid'. 'Efficiency' had been a harsh mistress for the families who manned those boats, but their artwork of course has become a prized possession in the same way you have pointed out for other 'antiques'.
PS I see there is a used pbk for sale in UK for £6.50!
PPS I have thoughts of a 'library' of HJ Massingham books and I could share mine by post. Further thoughts of books attach to your great 'coffee House' idea/initiative but I will leave them for another day.
Finally, I shared this with a few friends a couple of years ago. I also enjoyed the cat. There are modern power DIY tools these days, but that is another level of sophistication ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJRgUPSMpCc
I love that point about a basic income from the sunlight Philip. So very true.
And let's talk sometime about your Massingham library idea. You have piqued my curiosity!
Apologies for those typos above. Hope you can read through it.
I happen to be experiencing in the last few days a lot of co-incidences grouped round the 'Gaian' inspiration (originally James Lovelock) that gained international momentum early in this century at Schumacher College/Dartington in England.
Peter Reason 'Learning How Land Speaks' https://peterreason.substack.com has posted via Notes a very fine commemorative account of the teaching of the late Stephen Harding, Gaian theorist and teacher at Schumacher.https://peterreason.substack.com/p/the-deep-time-walk
Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification) has a long conversation with a guest who was mentored and educated by the same Schumacher experience having key inputs from the original international thinkers.
Nate's intro includes: "This week, I’m joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living. "https://natehagens.substack.com/p/bioregional-futures-reconnecting
All too much for me these last two or three days, what with Peter R having a guest post Etain Addey, whose writing and place I happen to know from way back in Umbria. I must now get out into the September afternoon sunlight on my bike, if for no other reason than to keep up the therapy on my 'slipped' lumbar discs and to get on with being more practical again.
Very best wishes for all your endeavours
The thesis is an elementary, objective truth, drowned out by the hype of "productivity", the notion I spectacularly dislike (although I know that I have a reputation of an efficient designer.)
Work patterns evolve, and now, in the face of climate change, it is the best opportunity to revive quality over quantity, craft over speed, creativity over productivity. We do not need "more". We need "better".
The pursuit to eliminate "dead time" from a worker's routine was mocked enough in 1936 movie "Modern Times" with Charlie Chaplin (a spectacular scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1apYo6-Ow ), yet it does not seem as if the architects of management models have learned a good lesson from it. In is the highest time to do so now.
Dead time for me is when I’m subconsciously processing a problem, a potential solution, a creative idea without actively thinking about it. And invariably, I come up with an answer. But if we don’t have the ability to process, ponder or actively unplug, we will dry up as a species. Human or not, we are still part of a larger process that requires a certain level of maintenance that requires being still, quiet, unfocused. Just as much as sleeping, eating, socializing. It’s part of our being. Although my major concern is, nay fear, is AI run amuck and overtaking us.
Oh, yes, this is an excellent point NilaMae! How AI might erode dead time further by displacing our time for reflection and deliberation. I hadn't thought of that.