Time and time again

Most of my coworkers are older than me. They like to point it out. I was born in 1997, they know this, yet repeatedly act shocked when I remind one of them that the year he moved to New York was when I was two years old. And that, no, I don’t really know what Dial-up is, even if my parents must have explained it to me at some point. I did grow up with an answering machine, I tell them, I remember when we only had five channels on the TV and we had VHS tapes, and I remember when the first iPod came out. Of course, I also act surprised when I meet someone born in 2004, even though that isn’t much younger than me.

Sometimes I think it’s strange that we can never return to the past. And it’s a bit sad to me—even if it’s strange to say this—but it’s sad that I can’t return to a time before cell phones and before the current boundlessness of the internet. It’s easy to romanticize, for all of us I think. The past is only a place in our minds, and every year we get further and further away from it. I wish I could travel to the 90s like I travel to a country, but alas. This must be why there are so many films like Back to the Future or 13 going on 30.

I recently saw an article headline: “New report shows people who leave parties without saying goodbye save up to two days per year!” I didn’t read the article, but I can imagine it’s saying something to the effect of “once you say goodbye, you actually have all these other conversations that delay you from leaving.” Those moments are so special to me, though. I think they can be the best part of a party. There are too many tips and tricks for how to save time. I see this in subway ads. Life hacks, we call them. “Save time by putting this in the microwave and while you do that, do this other thing!” Or “fold this Ziploc bag this way and then it’ll create this neat shape that will make it easier for you to do this thing!” I think slowing down and doing one thing at a time is valuable too. My mentioning of Dial-up reminds me that technology keeps getting faster, and now it’s merely memories that it used to take hours to turn on a computer.

Telo is reading Proust, so I’ve been thinking about time and memory, naturally. I am also planning to read the French version soon, once I finally finish Anna Karenina. It’s taken me an unfortunately long time to finish it (I’m almost there) because I only read around 30 pages a week and the book is 900 pages. I often wonder how Tolstoy wrote it. I believe it took him four years, which actually feels like a short amount of time for such a long book. It’s already taken me about half a year to read it. Probably all the time spent at work and on the internet is the reason I’m not having enough time for it.

I work 8 hours a day, often from daylight to darkness, more so in the winter. I’m finally seeing the sun now when I emerge from my work cave, thanks to daylight savings - another interesting way in which we, as a society, are thinking of ways to make time efficient, or prolong it. I could be doing so many other things with my time, I used to think, which is the reason I had quit my previous job. But now I surrender to time, letting it find me in other ways. I try to look out the window every hour at work, lucky that I have a view of a little corner of sky between the buildings.

And now, I leave you with a song which inspired the title of this post (and a video that might be a nice comic relief from all the wars in the world):