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The time(s) to think


How much time did you have to sit and think today? The time we have for this is malleable. It is shaped by others, by ourselves and even by the natural world. We can have time to think because we have set this aside, or been given it, or claimed it. And this is just how it is for our time for anything, shaped by the overlapping demands on one another. As the sociologist Sarah Sharma writes:


Frequent business travellers hail cabs to the airport, late for their flights. Taxicabs speed up and slow down at the will of their backseat passengers. […] Nine-to- fivers take express hour-long lunchtime yoga classes at work in order to get through the day. Mobile yoga instructors arrive at corporate offices, making pitches to managers about the benefits of yoga for employee productivity. Slow-food connoisseurs are seated in slow-food establishments across Europe and North America. They are enjoying their slow-cooked meals, but an exploited service staff hurriedly cleans their dishes.”


Sharma is drawing attention to the way our respective temporalities – the pace and schedules we each live by – are deeply interwoven “across the social fabric”, and often in ways that are shaped by those in positions of power. The time we have to think is no different, it too is part of this fabric. Here I want to unpick and better understand some of its threads.


Time made


In my early twenties, I got called up for jury service. I was not summoned to a trial for a number of days and then when I eventually was, I wasn’t picked to be part of the final 12 jurors. Soon after, my time was up and my service, if I can call it that, was over. My only experience to date of the state requiring me to think deeply about matters of public importance used up on wondering what to get from the vending machine in the jurors’ waiting room.


An important slice of the time we have to think deeply is created by authorities. In the UK and elsewhere exists ‘time off for public duties’. This isn’t always remunerated but it can be, normally to cover basic expenses rather than as pay for the work put in. A school governor, or as a union representative, for example, might be supported financially or with time allowed away from other commitments. It might come in other forms of official need, like being a legal witness or doing military service. Not all of this is required and not all of it is found the world over, but if authorities can create such time, what else could they make? While these might feel static, eternal inventions, is important to remember they are deliberately made and we can be in the midst of their creation or growth. The phenomenon of ‘corporate volunteering’, for example, in which employers provide leave for people to volunteer, has grown in the UK since the pandemic.


One example of an entirely new way for the state to shape our time to think is the concept of a ‘Deliberation Day’. As its creators, James Fishkin and Bruce Ackermann describe, it would be a new national holiday in the US held prior to national elections, in which “voters will be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of 15, and larger groups of 500, to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign”. All participants would be paid $150 for the “day's work of citizenship”, on the condition that they then show up at to polling booth. All other work, “except the most essential”, would be prohibited.


Less grand but more significant given it has actually been put into practice are institutionalised deliberative democratic processes.  These see randomly selected members of the public come together to hear from experts on an issue, deliberate over what should be done, and communicate the outcomes of their discussions to help shape and inform policymaking. Although it varies, these often put in place support such as remuneration for people’s time, covering expenses, and childcare.


Time reclaimed?


The time we take to think, it turns out, is a tricky thing to track. Time-use studies, which use diary-keeping and other methods to record how people spend their days, can be hugely insightful, but what counts as the time we spend thinking? Can it not be happening at almost any moment, alongside almost any activity?


Looking at authoritative data held on global time use, we find perhaps the closest candidate for this in a broader category of ‘In home free time leisure’. It is here you will find ‘0955’, otherwise given the unintentionally Orwellian title: ‘RELAX, THINK, DO NOTHING’. This, in turn, comprises things like the time we spend “relaxing, reflecting, thinking, planning, doing nothing.” Yet it also includes whatever we are doing when we are doing “no visible activity.” Things get more confusing with the further examples provided. These read like a high school teacher complaining about their students in a 1950s teen movie: “smoking dope, pestering, teasing, joking around, messing around, laughing.” Amusing (and as oddly dated) as this is, it reveals that when we try to isolate the moments people spend thinking, we quickly end up counting many other activities - including ‘doing nothing’ at all!


This attempt to categorise thinking time also carries a hint of another dated image by focusing our attention on sedate, relaxed moments of our day in the home. Deep thinking here is something people do at their leisure, rather than alongside or stimulated by other activities like work, caring for others, or generally just being up and about (another part of 0955 describes these moments as the kind of thing done when we are “just sat” down). We are left with an archaic image: the gentleman scholar, reclining in his armchair, smoking (dope?), and thinking deep thoughts while the women make his dinner.


Yet, the women on the other side of this equation could just as likely be engaged in reflection. The writer Lola Olufemi wrote recently about the role of food and of cooking in radical social movements. She draws attention to how women in movements have engaged in thought and discussion through preparing meals and eating communally, and how this gets overlooked despite food being “a focal point around which communities under threat solidify their interdependence.” Crucially, not only through “bringing people together” but also in literally “structuring how they relate to each other, providing parameters for frequent meeting and exchange.” Meeting turns to reflection, of a sort no less and likely a lot deeper than a solitary male armchair philosopher. “A meal cooked in a community kitchen once a week can be enough to sow the seeds for critical analysis”, Olufemi notes, “beginning perhaps with joint observations about the local area, and expanding when people and their neighbours start to ask why things are the way they are.”


You could say time to think here is being reclaimed by those who have been shut out of the conversation elsewhere, and that is often true. But this would be missing what I think is Olufemi’s wider point. She is not suggesting that the women in these movements are some rarefied group of kitchen-counter philosophers, who just happen to be preparing meals. Instead, it’s in the nature of something like preparing food with others that it can so naturally lead to reflection. In this way we see that the effort to distinguish the time we think into neat packets of time-use can lead us to overlook the rich extent to which all of our lives can have moments suffused with deep reflection.


Time disrupted


What about more chaotic, unplanned disruptions to our time? What do these do to our time available to think? Pandemics, economic crises, industrial and natural disasters, state violence, terrorism, and war. These give those on the receiving end little time to think at all, except for their safety. These are periods defined, at an individual level, by anxiety, urgency, fear, and danger. Yet, for that same reason major disruptions are tremendous motors for reflection at a societal level. The Covid-19 pandemic, the 2008 Financial Crash, the Fukushima nuclear disaster.


Now and through time events such as these have demanded we think about what has led us to catastrophe and breakdown. The tragedy of this is just when a question is thrust centre stage – of global health, the global economy, the future of energy production – it is often too late for discussion; indeed, at times this might be gratuitous. Where disruption is more clearly connected to the force enacted by specific individuals, states, or groups, this is no less true. Yes, the moment prompts reflection – it forces us to think – but it doesn’t provide all of us with the time to respond. For many, it does, but they may double down on refusing the call to reflect on their actions or inaction.


What is striking, is that when societal disruptions end, the need to reflect is so often given lip service by those in power, but without actual, novel structures then being put in place to allow people to engage. An interesting recent development here comes from looking at France. The Grand Débat National was a series of public consultations, debates, and other fora set up by the French Government following the 2018 Yellow Vests protests. The Government claimed 1.2 million people had been engaged, although researchers have questioned the representativeness (and quality) of the processes involved. Yet France has since run two, more impressive processes on the climate and on end-of-life issues. Perhaps these more recent experiences will prepare the country to give people the right space and time to respond together to the questions the next disruptions raise or to provide this before these occur.


Time off


Some time to think is closely connected to how we structure time for leisure. A clear example of this is retirement, which although it does not require anything specific from people’s time, inescapably creates time to reflect. Not least because, assuming one is retiring in old age, this means you are gaining a lot more time just when you are making a major transition in life. So profound is this period of life as an opportunity for reflection, it is a trope that some wish to avoid it for just this reason. Perhaps not such a leisurely time to think for all!


Holidays, similarly, are defined by a kind of openness – there’s no obligation to think when you are taking time off. Indeed, some expressions we use to explain why we want to go on holiday are about an escape from thinking; we want to ‘switch off’, ‘take our mind off things’, and so on. Yet we cannot always so easily escape having reason to think. The philosopher Emily Thomas draws attention to how travel is like philosophy, science, and literature: all of these in one way or another “show us things about the world we didn’t know before we started.” Going on holiday exposes us to novelty, just like when we encounter enlightening ideas, discover something through an experiment, or read a story about faraway people and places.


The tie-in with literature is important. Thomas notes how historians generally agree that European travel writing emerged in the 16th century alongside the emergence of utopian literature, like Thomas More’s famous Utopia which itself describes travel to a little-known, albeit fictional, land. From early on, writing about travel and about utopias have shared, as Thomas highlights, a “reflexive” element: they “purport to show foreign places but really encourage readers to reflect on their home places.” The early literary utopias were “modelled on travel books”, while “travellers searched for utopias”.  While a holiday does not guarantee that we will reflect on our lives at home, let alone anything else, Thomas’ point is they inherently create this potential.


Yet more time


There is much else we could unpick that tells us about how our time to think is shaped. Sabbaticals, for instance, which give employees a period of time away from work as distinct from holidays and other forms of leave. Although the term is biblical in origin, the modern practice began in American universities in the late 19th century. This was in recognition that such a break was “an intellectual and practical necessity” for academics to stay abreast of new research. The practice has grown to other job sectors and widened in its purpose, but this has been led by employers rather than states. As the examples above suggest though, there are various reasons to argue such time should be available to more people, from engaging in democratic life and social movements, to responding to the questions societal disruptions raise, or to gain a new perspective on our day-to-day lives.


We might also look at holy days for religious observance, which vary in their purpose but are in one form or another an evocation to reflect, often specifically in the sense of venerating or revering something greater than oneself. Organising time around this notion is not restricted to religious contexts. Political ideals have been used to shape how we structure our time, such as the introduction of the Republican Calendar following the French Revolution, or the Soviet calendar, described by historian Tony Wood as “a gesture of secular faith in industrialization.”


Thinking in a time of moonshot


The longer you look at how our time is shaped, the more you will find there is to unpick. Sharma was right: it is a densely knotted thing, our social fabric, weaving together all our temporalities that are in a large way knitted by the power we hold over one another. The time we have to think is found in many moments, some of it is made, some reclaimed or ever present if you take a closer look, while some is the product of disruption.


Some periods encapsulate well how these can collide. Two years ago, I interviewed the historian Jonathan Rée about his notion of ‘wild philosophy’, by which meant the philosophical reflection that is so bound up in people’s lives that they engage in it without even thinking of it as philosophical. He gave the example of the 1969 moon landing:


I remember thinking at the time, “What a bore! What a waste of money!” If you can get to Watford, then you can get to the moon, you just go a bit further. But I now know that a lot of people say that knowing that astronauts were looking back on the Earth from the viewpoint on the moon somehow changed everything for them. And maybe all that expenditure on getting a person to the moon was justified because it sparked off all this wild philosophising. Even if no genuine scientific results had come from it, it caused many people to think hard about their place in the universe – and that in its way is a result!”


It is estimated that about a fifth of the global population of the time, or ~650 million people, watched the Apollo 11 landing and no doubt it has occupied a place in many more people’s thoughts since. This was a moment of shared reflection that was in a large way a political creation, the product of the Space Race. While time was not given over for society to reflect as such, it’s significant that in the UK the coverage of the landing was also the first ever overnight broadcast. The moon landing was also a disruption of sorts, albeit one characterised by awe and wonder interrupting people’s lives rather something disastrous.


Yet what people should have thought about was wrestled over. Prior to the launch , US civil rights, antiwar and environmental activists all criticised the Government’s funding for the mission and the attention given to it. They were seeking to reclaim the time that was being given over to Apollo 11 in the national consciousness to encourage a rethink of state policy. (There was even space for philosophy, when ITV hosted a discussion during the evening of the landing on the ethics of space flight.)


Around a year earlier, the demonstrations, strikes, and occupations of May 1968 erupted in Paris, again creating a reshaping of the time given over to thinking about the questions of the day. As the writer Annie Ernaux recollects in her memoir that combines a personal and public perspective, she writes how in the tumult people “saw and heard things [they] had never seen or heard in [their] lives, or even thought possible” as places “whose functions were determined by age-old rules and which admitted only specified populations, were now open to all.” In these spaces, “Professors and students, young and old, company executives and manual workers conversed” in a way they had not before. What it meant to have the time (and space) to think with others was created anew, if only for a moment.


Our social fabric is tightly knitted but can be unpicked and woven differently - I hope to have shown this much is true. There are other kinds of times to think out there still.

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