Uncouth Reflections

Glynn Marshes writes:

Smart people try to do things intelligently, but it turns out their fine brains aren’t necessarily much help, and sometimes may even get in the way.

Take the planning fallacy, for instance. Intelligent people — perhaps even moreso than the less intelligent — tend to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task, according to Nobel Laureate and Princeton psych prof Daniel Kahneman.

Kahneman co-coined the term “planning fallacy” in 1979. Other smart people have since piled on with theories about why we fall victim to it: it’s “optimistic bias,” they say, or “focalism,” or “authorization imperative.” Oh my.

But maybe the real culprit is the nature of time itself.

Or more precisely, the way time isn’t space, and yet we conceive of time in spatial terms.

We think of it as a vessel, with dimensions — a vessel we can fill with stuff.

But it’s not a vessel. Not exactly. Perhaps because it’s invisible — perhaps we need to be able to see something to really ascertain its dimensions. Time is a chimera, therefore, measurable yet also an abstraction, an idea.

It’s easy to know how much stuff I can fit into a shoebox, but offer me 10 minutes of time and the farthest wall seems unreal. I can’t tell exactly where it is . . . it seems negotiable.

And while you might say — fancifully — that a shoebox full of family photos contains more space than a shoebox that holds, merely, a pair of shoes, there’s nothing fanciful about the difference between 10 minutes spent doing something meaningful and 10 minutes of housework or running errands or surfing cable TV stations.

You see? Time is different.

And we’re suspicious of people who overstate their abilities to ration time. We view such a person (if he even exists in real life, which I doubt) as unbalanced, inhuman. Or as a fool. “Think of the time I save,” sings the time-study man in the musical–

At breakfast time I grab a bowl.
And in the bowl I drop an egg.
And add some juice.
A poor excuse for what I crave.
And then I add some oatmeal too and it comes out tasting just like glue.
But think of the time I save!

–and we laugh at him. The fool!

And yet, our time-study man is also The Pajama Game‘s hero, the love interest. Managing time well, it seems, is something of a manly art, whereas running short on time comes across as spacey and girlish.

(He shows up on time for their date; she is still upstairs fussing with her make-up.)

I’ve noticed one person in particular who seems never to fall prey to the planning fallacy. He is also never hurried — and in being unhurried epitomizes, to my eye, something fundamentally masculine . . . and it occurs to me: perhaps it is masculine because being both unhurried suggests or overlaps with a kind of physical courage. Because insofar as time does share something in common with a shoebox, the far wall is death . . . and facing death calmly is emblematic of masculine courage, no? “Today is a good day to die,” says the warrior on the morning of the battle . . .

And yet how much simpler things would be if time were less . . . protean. If its signposts were not dreams in front of us and ghosts behind but concrete things, things that stub a toe . . . how much less time we would lose, without noticing how we’ve lost it . . .