Sunday, February 4, 2024
Time and the soul
(As we discussed last semester in Happiness)-
…This attrition of presence, he observes, is maiming not only our individual inner lives but the inner life of humanity as we have come to mistake the right away of immediacy for the now of presence. Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever. We can only save ourselves, Needleman intimates, by recalibrating our relationship to time, which is fundamentally our relationship to the self and to the meaning of human life. He writes:
The real significance of our problem with time… is a crisis of meaning… The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself.
At the center of our self-defeating challenge is an unexamined premise: We have framed time as a problem — the problem of how to structure and manage our lives — when it is best regarded as a question...
https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/time-clouds-despair
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