Knowing the real value of free time

Writing more than 20 years ago multi-million selling Discworld author and Alzheimer’s sufferer Terry Pratchett warned that: “Time is like a drug. Too much of it kills you.”

That neat boxer’s right-and-left assumed a sharpened inevitability for Pratchett when he was unfortunately diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s — which he calls the embuggerance — seven years ago.

He, like anyone suffering from a slowly evolving disease with an inevitable conclusion, probably has a very different perception of time and its value to those of us who still don’t know how or when our time on this earth will end. He has a reasonably accurate timetable, probably one that’s far more focussed and appreciative of opportunity than the one most of us who just meander day-to-day follow.

Tonight summer time ends and we will change the clocks to try to better mange daylight if not time. For the vast majority of people it just means it gets dark earlier; for very many it just means going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. When that winter regime resumes on Tuesday far, far more people than is healthy will feel captives in an unrelenting cycle broken only at weekends. Nature and life’s demands will combine, as they do every winter, to hold us in an unshakeable half-Nelson.

You don’t have to be a curmudgeon to argue that because we are so time poor that weekends have become something approaching festivals of consumerism. Initially opening shops on a Sunday was a reaction to religious strictures going out of fashion but today the behaviour has become another barrier to that fabled ideal — quality time with whomever. Our assertion of our freedom from the observances expected by one God has made many of us slaves to another.

That a recent survey pointed out that shopping was one of the most popular ways families spend time together suggests a soullessness most Irish people would not associate themselves with but, unfortunately, the evidence is undeniable and growing. That Sunday shopping, unheard of in most civilised European societies where quality time is planned rather than stolen from a hectic schedule, has become so popular points to the fact that very many people, especially women corralled by work and family, simply don’t have the time to shop during the week. This is hardly something we can be proud of as it suggests a fundamental imbalance and that we have the simplest, most basic of things out of kilter.

Communications technologies mean some people no longer have a clear line between paid-for work and the rest of their lives. This has made free, or maybe we should just call it unburdened time, all the more precious. Changing work practices mean a commitment more in line with a religious life rather than a professional one is almost the norm for too many workers. Set against all of today’s needs it does seem almost impossible to argue for more free, sanity-giving time but you wouldn’t to have even a fraction of Terry Pratchett’s wisdom to know that it absolutely essential that we do so. This is a bank holiday weekend so when better to try to put a real price on your free, life-enhancing time?