Barry's Blog

Why doesn't anyone have any time today? Where did all the time go? Peter Kreeft suggests that, when he asked this question of philosophers, theologians, sociologists, historians, and other learned people, not one could give a good answer. And that perhaps the best answer he ever received as to where time went? "Cleveland." :)

As he suggests, the question is more puzzling than at first glance. While in ancient civilizations, if you were rich you had slaves to do your menial tasks so you could be free to pursue your leisure time, today we face a modern day conundrum. One would think that with all of the "time-saving" devices, we would have an abundance of leisure time, certainly more than our ancestors, yet we know this simply isn't the case.

Since we are indeed impatient people, all of us, Kreeft gives us Pascal's answer without delay: "We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it."

Listen to Pascal:

"If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it." (#70) "Diversion: If man were happy, the less he were diverted the happier he would be, like the saints and God. Yes: but is a man not happy who can find delight in diversion? No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside... (#132) "I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." (#136).

In Kreeft's opinion (and I tend to agree) this is the most powerful of all the pensees, because it so accurately describes our contemporary culture, our need for diversion, one of the two pseudo-solutions we employ to "cover up" our lack of contentment in life. We might conclude from this, then, that the society (or individual) which has the most diversions and amusements is not if fact the happiest, but the unhappiest. It isn't hard to "connect the dots" to realize that our society, with social indicators like depression, suicide, divorce, drugs, and violence, all point to our lack of contentment as a society. If life felt like a holiday, why would we seek holidays from it?

Kreeft observes:

"If you are typically modern, your life is like a rich mansion with a terrifying hole in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiply diversions."

So what's the wallpaper you and I are using in our lives?