In Praise of Wasting Time: Embracing the Luxury of Inefficiency

It’s January again, which means that a significant portion of Dutch people are punishing themselves with gym memberships, zero-carb diets and non-alcoholic wine. I’ve done this before, without success. That’s why I have another good resolution this year: waste more.

Just a detour. What I hate is when people ask about what they see as a futile activity: “Is this something you think about on your deathbed?” My first reaction: how am I supposed to know what I’m thinking about on my deathbed? Maybe my brain is showing a compilation of all the blunders in my life, or I’m having a real-time relive of the time I was standing in line at St. Pancras International and check-in took so long, thanks to staff shortages, that the Eurostar was ultimately delayed by two hours. But then I take the question too literally (my eternal pitfall). The implication of the questioner is: on your deathbed you think about what really mattered, and that does not include this activity. But I like to focus on things that don’t matter. That’s the luxury of not being on your deathbed, that you still have some time to waste.

Waste has a bad name in all kinds of areas. Living in a rental house: a waste of money. Falling in love with someone unattainable is a waste of time. ‘Unhelpful thoughts’: wasted thinking space. Work that doesn’t look good on your resume: wasted effort. Fruit juice: wasted calories.

Anyone who implements this line of thinking makes a cost-benefit analysis with every new encounter, consumption and career choice: will the pleasure in the present outweigh the damage later? This is a very unpleasant way of thinking, and the difficulty is that you do not always know in advance whether something is waste. Moreover, these kinds of considerations go against that other modern commandment: ‘live in the moment’. You cannot live in the moment and always make the most efficient choice. Hence my intention to waste more, or at least: to be open to waste.

Once I formulated this, I wondered what waste actually is. Literally, according to Van Dale, it means ‘reckless or useless spending’. Then you think of food waste, or mountains of clothing that are destroyed. But that’s different from the waste of time, money and effort I referred to above. In those examples, waste rather means ‘suboptimal use’. Money you spend on a rental house is not useless, you have received a roof over your head in return. But you could also have spent it on a mortgage; then you would have had that roof and made a wise investment. Time spent on an unattainable love is not necessarily useless: the experience is certainly valuable in its own way. But with an attainable love you might have had equally wonderful experiences, plus nice extras such as sex and intimacy.

When we talk about waste, we usually don’t mean that something is good for nothing, but that it is suboptimal or inefficient. And despite the criticism of ‘efficiency thinking’ in recent years, we still think it is a bad idea. Anyone who works suboptimally or inefficiently is a thief of his own time, money, effort and happiness. In short, he is a loser.

I realized how entangled we are in optimization thinking while reading Alan Lightman’s book In Praise of Wasting Time from 2018. According to Lightman, it is healthy to waste time: geniuses like Gustav Mahler, Carl Jung and Albert Einstein also did it. It is precisely when you are wandering aimlessly through a forest or staring at the horizon that brilliant ideas come to mind. This made me laugh, because the idea that wasting time is good and healthy is of course a contradiction in terms. If something is useful, it is not waste. And let’s be honest, there are also walks in the woods that do not yield brilliant ideas. Perhaps walking through a forest is nice in itself, regardless of what ideas present themselves there. You often only know afterwards whether it was the optimal way to spend your day.

In short, being open to waste means choosing uncertainty and suboptimal outcomes. Cycling without a route planner; take a course that is unnecessary for your career; reading a book that got bad reviews. Not wasting as an end in itself, but wasting as a result of inefficiency. Because having that option makes us human.

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2024-01-06 00:00:00


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