Six Hours
Finding the Balance Between Creation and Consumption
Six Hours.
Though time can be calculated by seconds, minutes, months, and years, it still operates in a fluid immeasurability.
Like art, six hours is subject to the viewer. Depending on how I look at it, this can be an incredibly long period of time, or incredibly short. Time is bendable and stretchable. It sifts quickly through our fingers. It piles into hills. And even though it can live in our memories, we can’t get back the time we’ve spent.
That’s why, how we invest our time, is so important. It’s easy to let hours slip by, and our time has been squandered on scrolling, gaming, and viewing.
I’m convinced there’s no amount of content that can satisfy the hordes of gorgers. Those intent on sucking up every crumb of material produced, have fallen into a trap set by content platforms — quantity over quality. The quality diminishes, but the consumption continues.
At some point, I’m afraid we’ll burst. Or worse, I’m afraid we won’t. Our youngest son, Quinn, commented just today that people remind him of the floating-space-bound citizens in Disney’s WALL-E.
We were talking about how people are on their phones all the time now. Quinn commented on how we’ll attend a Timberwolves game, and people around us aren’t even watching these awesome plays. They’re on their phones. He told me, “It’s annoying. I wish phones weren’t a thing. Not how they are right now, anyway.”
And I get it.
We’re wasting our time on devices. We’re whittling away the hours of our lives, investing our time and energy into things with very little payoff. I don’t want them to completely go away. I remember testing the limit of stretch on the phone cord we had plugged into our wall as a kid- and it was never quite far enough for privacy. And I like the idea of wirelessly chatting with my dad and Nisi while I’m in the garden and sending a picture of the sunset to my mom and Pops while on a walk.
Like we always say, it’s balance. We have a lot of shared memories with our boys over things we’ve watched together. They even form some of our inside jokes. The problem is, the companies behind screens and apps aren’t looking for balance. They want all of our time and all of our attention.
As a family we’re evaluating our investment of time. We like phone games and watching movies, but we want to value creation more than consumption. Our family goal is to be contributors, not just mindless guzzlers.
We’re asking ourselves, what’s fulfilling? What can we create or discover in six 1-hour blocks of time — without screens? It’s not simply putting devices away. It’s creating something new, and the possibilities of who we can be are measureless — if only given the time.