The most precious resource is time: October 07, 1996 issue of New Thinking

October 07, 1996 New Thinking:
The most precious resource is time

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October 07, 1996

The most precious resource is time

By Gerry McGovern

When it all boils down to it, the only thing we have is time.

About 4 million years ago, the hominid began to walk the earth. About 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens appeared. About 10,000 years ago, the first permanent settlements appeared. About 6,000 years ago, the first writing appeared. About 27 years ago, the Internet appeared. About 4 years ago, the World Wide Web appeared.

It took us 3,950,000 years to move from hominid to homo sapient. It then took us 40,000 years to construct permanent settlements. It has taken us 27 years to construct the present Internet and 4 years to build the Web we know today.

Time changed a one-cell organism into a rock ‘n’ roller, but it took its time. Evolution created a huge variety of life, but it took its time. The modern human, on the other hand, seems to be in a race against time. We create with a frenzy, with an Internet month equaling a normal year (which is pretty abnormal in the first place on an evolutionary scale).

For thousands of years we lived in small settlements, hunting, living close to Nature, and clubbing anything that threatened us. All of a sudden, we became incredibly inventive, and in the blink of time, Silicon Valley appeared.

We’re amazingly, amazingly adaptable. But I feel that we are in danger of changing our world so much that our bodies simply won’t be able to adapt successfully anymore.

Because time defines what we are now, but it took its time. Slowly we evolved, in many ways our evolution a response to the slowly changing environment around us.

Here we are now, getting down out off the trees again and learning to walk in primitive cyberspace. Only in twenty years, it won’t be primitive no more. It will be a very sophisticated, complex place.

In twenty years, a 70-year-old person who never managed to adapt to cyberspace will on one level be like a hominid, as their homo sapient grand-children dance in cyberspace.

Time evolved life at a very slow pace and it probably had good reason. We have made a Big Bang with the Web, and everything is cooling and solidifying at a ferocious pace.

We are evolving on acid a new world for ourselves that may end up being more hallucinogenic than real. We are building, knocking, rebuilding at such a frantic pace that we may not be learning the lessons that only taking our time can learn.

We are fast, speeded, evolvers, squashing so much into our units of time, that we are perhaps nullifying our own time in the process. Because everything is expanding today, with only one exception: time.

All our inventiveness is supposed to give us more time, surely, and yet the act of invention, and the process of learning to use and adapt to each new invention, means that we have less time now than we ever had.

We have squeezed so much invention and evolution into these modern times. In the process, we may find that we are squeezing away the time to adapt, the time to enjoy, the time to live.

Gerry McGovern

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All our inventiveness is supposed to give us more time.