What Will We Do With Our Time?
The hours we’re getting back – and the radical act of a day apart.
A friend came over for dinner recently. He’s a few months into a new role building technology to optimize daily life.
I asked how things were going.
His eyes gleamed. Then glazed.
“It’s thrilling,” he said. “But we’re all breathless.”
He described a Claude-first organization where AI coordinates workflows, sets agendas, nudges the humans along. The efficiency gains are dazzling – and dizzying. But those gains are already baked into next quarter’s expectations.
More and faster becomes the new baseline. There is no arrival. Only acceleration.
We’ve been told technology will save us time. And in a sense, it does — every week brings new invitations to automate and offload. The time dividend is real.
But we’re moving too fast to even ask the most crucial question: What are we doing with the time we save?
My hunch — and the evidence suggests—is that we’re plowing it straight back into more output. Technology hasn’t freed time so much as compressed it. It shrinks the distance between question and answer, desire and delivery, wanting and getting. It sounds like freedom, but functions as frenzy.
As Daniel Thorson put it recently: “AI puts samsara on fast-forward.”
The treadmill speeds up. Expectations quietly ratchet. The finish line recedes.
Over a decade ago, Judith Shulevitz, in her luminous book The Sabbath World, noticed something that has only intensified since: the more time-saving technology we invent, the less time we feel we have. Imagine what she’d say now – when the cars drive themselves, the code writes itself, and we are still somehow breathlessly behind.
The language we use gives us away. We spend time. Save it. Waste it. As if it were money – not a living, pulsing current.
But time was not always something to manage. For most of human history, rituals, rites, and seasons set the pace; shared pauses held a line between doing and being. That line has begun to dissolve.
When we’re always on the clock, our field of vision narrows. We start to miss what isn’t urgent; the wider context fades.
It’s like looking at the sky through a straw.
There’s a study I think about when I catch myself in a blind rush. Seminary students, on their way to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, passed a person in visible distress. Whether they stopped to help had nothing to do with compassion or character. It came down to one thing: whether they were in a hurry.
Their behavior wasn’t a failure of values. It was the result of attention pulled forward, anchored on what comes next.
More often than we realize, we live just ahead of ourselves — the present something to move through.
The world we've built rewards getting there over being here.
What have we done to time?
It’s a question that’s haunted me for decades.
In my early twenties, someone gave me Abraham Heschel’s The Sabbath. I was mesmerized by his description of setting one day a week apart to create a cathedral in time. Not a productivity hack. Not rest in the service of working harder later. But a day to remember who we are when we’re not producing. A quiet rebellion against industrial time.
I’ve carried that image ever since, with a mix of admiration and envy for people who actually live it. College presidents and cabinet secretaries who can’t be reached on Saturdays. My friend Casper, whose email footer reads: Tech Sabbath. Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
I’ve tried, too.
Versions of Saturdays unplugged. Rules. Restrictions. Quiet commitments to live otherwise. Mostly, it felt like pushing a boulder uphill. Alone. I’d either break my own rules, or keep them and turn the whole thing into another form of productivity.
Which makes sense. Keeping Sabbath was never meant to be a solo discipline. As Judith Shulevitz writes, it’s nearly impossible to practice it in isolation. Without a collective container, it collapses into personal effort, and often, personal failure.
For a long time, that’s where I left it. A beautiful aspiration, structurally out of reach.
But recently, what feels like the acceleration of everything has begun to feel less like discomfort and more like emergency. More and more, life feels less like a pace I’m choosing, and more like one choosing me. I’ve felt speedy, siphoned, split.
So earlier this year, I started a new Sabbath practice. But I'm approaching it differently this time.
Less prohibition, more intention. Less map, more compass. Not what am I not allowed to do, but what would it mean to choose aliveness?
On Friday night, I power down my computer. On Saturday, as often as I remember to remember, I ask a simple question: Does this feed my aliveness, or deaden it?
It’s enough to interrupt the trance of habit. I begin to notice the difference between impulse and longing, and choose the latter. I read on paper, not screens. Choose music instead of a podcast. Spend time outside instead of at a desk. Follow curiosity instead of a queue of tasks.
And something shifts.
The taut wire of urgency slackens. The momentum that normally propels me forward loosens its grip.
Time stops feeling like a line to move along. It becomes a space to live within.
When I manage to drop in, the world begins to shimmer. Public art winks. Strangers’ eyes shine. Simon & Garfunkel on the radio, like a message from my past self.
It’s a day that lets me see the whole sky.
Some of the clearest thinkers of our time have radically different relationships to time.
Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry unplugs completely every November.
Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, disappears for weeks each summer into the High Sierra.
Yuval Noah Harari, who writes so vividly about the stakes of this technological moment, steps away into months-long silent retreats each year.
They are not escaping time. They are protecting it. Reclaiming it. Creating cathedrals within it.
The clock is only one way of keeping time.
There is Sabbath time, and so many others: solar time, mycelial time, deep time, tidal time, cosmic time.
None of these rhythms are on the clock. And yet they are more real than anything the clock can capture.
Which brings us back to a choice.
AI is already delivering a time dividend. But dividends can be squandered, or reinvested.
Will we notice the hours returning, and choose what to do with them?
Will we raise the bar again, fill the space, speed up the pace?
Or will we reclaim some days as holy like our humanity depends on it?
Because in a way, it might.
The question isn’t how to put more time into our lives, but how to put more life into our time.
Will we?
A few meditations on time:
The Sabbath — Abraham Joshua Heschel. Slim, prophetic, enduring.
Saving Time — Jenny Odell. On discovering a life beyond the clock.
The Art of Rest — Judith Shulevitz in conversation with Ezra Klein on what the Sabbath offers the modern world.
The Human Alignment Problem — Daniel Thorson asks, What happens when you can build anything — but don’t know what you want?
A small postscript, apropos of time: I’ve been sending these on Sundays, which, it turns out, makes me quietly anxious on Saturdays. In the spirit of this essay, I’m granting myself some flexibility. I’ll send when the stars align—which today happens to be Friday. Consider it an act of Sabbath rebellion. ✨
“They are not escaping time. They are protecting it. Reclaiming it. Creating cathedrals within it.” Thanks for the reminder that time is our one resource that we can never get more of….. I explore my cathedrals are outdoors - hiking, biking or back country x skiing…