Most of our lives are spent wrestling with time. Time as a memory, a resource, an organizing principle, an abstract concept in which we organize our lives.
In their book Time for Life, John Robinson and Godbey historicize the concept of time. From “circular and less-precise," time measured in the “ebb and flow ebb and flow of tides, the orbits of sun and moon, and the passing of seasons." Years later, it would change to “linear concepts in the Western world,” in which time now contains a direction that was influenced by the Church. From the concepts of Creation, Resurrection, and Judgment Day.
Then the industrialization of work, the unprecedented process of speeding up of life, the mass production of watches, and talks of speed and efficiency. When profit became the pursuit, the scientific management of time became necessary, and its success fundamentally changed our concept of time. Now, it’s hard to imagine life without thinking about whether or not we have enough time.
When I think about time, I think about the time I worked for a BPO company. A radical reconstruction of my perception of time. In her article, Global Economy of Signs and Selves: A View of Work Regimes in Call Centers in the Philippines, Alinaya Fabros articulates the reconfiguration of time (and thereby self) in a BPO industry.
Most BPO industries are known for operating at night a.k.a. graveyard shift because of their outsourcing nature, i.e. providing service to foreign nations. This in turn, disrupts agents’ circadian rhythm, and encourages temporal reconfiguration of time in which the self must become attuned to perform their task but other than that time is also measured using “strict rules set on attendance, breaks, leaves, and absences” imposed by metrics, i.e. targets of the company necessary to keep jobs afloat.
Night shifts or graveyard shifts reconfigure time by substituting nights as days, by attempting to subvert the agents' local context in the service of a faceless stranger living in a different time zone. Being a call center agent then is a negotiation of being in “two places at once," constant renegotiation of firmness, which essentially, in a way makes the work placeless (when you’re in two places at once, you are never really anywhere) and alienating at the same time. When our call center trainer, after a month of training, shared with us, “Magiging tao na ulit ako,” referring to the change of shift at work which would be during the day, that became my first concrete lesson about work, as truly alienating. But also, I think about how the sense of community always provides “humanness” to an individual because what feels more affirming of humanity than maintaining social connections with people at the same time, literally.
Then, I’ve been wrestling with time. My shift starts at 11:30 p.m. until 8:30 a.m. Waiting, sometimes, for friends to finish their call, I would then be able to get to Starmall Alabang where the jeepneys are waiting to take me back to our town around 10 a.m. The sun, already piercingly hot coupled with the lack of shade and smoke swirling in the air, — merciless characteristics of the city. A few meters from the terminal, our building resides where trees are erected (one friend quipped, for aesthetics), a waiting shed in place, and a supply of wide, walkable pathways. The juxtaposition, jarring. Something I frequently think about.
One hour of travel sometimes extends to an hour because of waiting for other passengers to fill in the jeep. I’ll be home around 11:30 a.m., if lucky, lunch is served. Then I would begin counting the hours left. Shift at 11 p.m. means I have to get up an hour earlier, so 10 p.m. but because the last trip going to Alabang (where I work) in our area leaves at 9 p.m. I need to adjust. So 8 p.m. then.
When I lie on the bed, I begin counting the hours. The alarm set. Three, four, five instances. Whether guarding the delusion of the body to wake itself, or to potentially do something worthwhile about these seemingly free hours is anybody’s guess.
In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell recalls the origin of the 8-hour work week by tracing a graphic by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Our 24 hours divided into work, rest, and the other what we will. Not specified by anything. No imperative to be productive. “The most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it,” writes Odell. Just what we will. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”
Rest and leisure
Leisure attends to our humanity. That there’s life beyond work. “Leisure requires an absence of rushing, tranquility, an end to hurrying, a letting go," writes Robinson and Godbey. If work denotes speed and efficiency, leisure then is the opposite. It’s relaxed, gentle, leisurely (pun intended). There’s a paradox to this that is interesting to me. That whenever we experience something enjoyable, say reading a book or watching a film, time is faster but only because these activities temporarily suspend the preoccupation of rushing as proven by our intense engagement with it.
If leisure is free time, hobbies are what we do during leisure. Whether it’s reading, watching films, birdwatching, knitting, — the main feature that characterizes hobbies is it gives pleasure, it’s enjoyable. In his article In Praise of Mediocrity, Tim Wu wrote about the debilitating effects of the ‘pursuit of excellence’ on the concept of hobby. However, Wu contextualizes our current perception of hobbies and why it has become paralyzing to explore them because people are 1) afraid of being bad at them, 2) intimidated by expectations, 3) hobbies have become too serious, 4) too demanding, 5) too much an occasion to be anxious about whether you are the person you claim to be.
There’s a particular insight to this that Wu is cognizant about to which sometimes I find myself thinking. That these fears are caused by the hallmarks “of intensely public performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time." There are, of course, multiple viewpoints to think about this. The insidious assault of capitalism to the personal, converting free time to capital, the imperative of social media to constantly accrue mileage, to not care about what other people think or simply not post almost everything online.
Being productive then asserts itself to me during days off. I call it productive because the idea hinges on the fact that time is being wasted, the affliction that stems from the lack or limited time to do things that one loves. In my mind, I think about the days off as I have to make something out of this. Because the days would rot, perhaps a recognition that this is not living.
On a much larger scale, isn’t this what most Filipinos (if not all of us) wrestle with? The unforgiving socio-economic conditions, scarcity of resources where it forces everyone to compete, politics befuddle us into thinking about who the real enemies are. That not having enough time is a result of our harsh material conditions?
This idea further revealed its clarity to me when some well-meaning classmates and friends shared/posted Google Drive links of compiled resources about the Marcos regime, its violence, corruption, and its repercussions on the country. While I recognize the valuable sentiment inherent in this archiving of works, I can’t help but think of when can an ordinary Filipino, swamped with work, find time to sift through this? Because for the most part reading history necessitates time, piecing together contexts and ideas, understanding their relevance, and I think time is also needed to guard oneself so that reading, the act itself, would not devolve into abstractions.
This dilemma invokes the question of who has free time. One can argue that if a person can go to social media, one must have time to read. But that simply isn’t the case. Moreover, aren’t these routines, the continuous taps on the screen, the doom-scrolling, frenetic habits of not having enough time? That our time on social media might as well substitute for entertainment that can be found in reading, watching films, or other activities, because it is easy, convenient, gives a sense of connection, and is gratifying all at once? Because a few moments later, we will again weather the harshness of the road and work?
In his article, Work, leisure, time-pressure and stress, Jiri Zuzanek concludes that the sense of not having enough time stems from systemic issues.
Most pressures faced by people in modern societies are social or structural. They are embedded in the competitive demands of globalised economies, changing workplace environments, value orientations emphasising rapid material gains and conformity with standardised and fast forms of expression prevalent in popular culture. As mentioned in an earlier article (Zuzanek et al. 1998), in today’s society, practising ‘yoga’ is paradoxically a symptom rather than a remedy for stress.
Improvement of socio-economic conditions is beneficial not only to our social life but also to our physical health. That the “determinants of human health” are not necessarily the utilization of medical facilities but on “cultural, social, and economic factors.”
Until we solve the problems of inflation, slave wages, lack of housing, impaired health infrastructure, all activities from here on out will always be encumbered by rush, producing a sense of time that hurries towards, just simply… stability, a stable, comfortable life.
Graphics: Aira Shandy Dagohoy
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