Freefalling through successive lockdowns, there is a growing sense of the need to stop and ground ourselves to a moment, a collective telling of the time. Synchronising watches to ‘post-COVID’, recalibrating our relationship with time presents both a problem to be solved and an opportunity.
The problem. ‘Time is money’, so the saying goes. We measure time in money and it has become so tethered that it is difficult to extricate it from its grasp. We make time, spend time, save time and invest time. Debt is measured in years. We commit to ‘5-year’ loans and ’25-year’ mortgages. Paper money is not valuable because of the paper from which it is made. Its value comes from the time we invest in exchange for its reward. We ‘earn a living’ – essentially earning a right to more time. Somewhere, decisions are made as to the value of each person’s time, set out in stark per hour or, worse, zero-hour terms. There is not only a minimum wage – a minimum value of a person’s labour, expressed in time – but its successor the living wage, and its successor the real living wage, and to come – in lieu of a really, really, real living wage – a ‘Universal Basic Income’. As we have seen with ‘affordable homes’, since superseded by ‘genuinely affordable homes’, the addition of subjective modifiers to already subjective terms like affordable, liveable and basic, only adds further levels of subjectivity, and room for manoeuvre.
In its most grotesque form, the success of our economies is measured in productivity, an input/output calculation ascribing a value to human life in terms of what that life can produce. The phrase ‘human capital stock’ which has been happily used in policy parlance for years (including in the UK’s Industrial Strategy) attracted outrage earlier this year (including from Senator Ocasio Cortez) when a Trump advisor blurted it out on Fox News. The jig is up. In a world where productivity is king, we are simply ‘human capital stock’.
Things become particular jarring when productivity meets health. The inherent value of care has been foregrounded during the pandemic, but care takes time. Ascribing efficiency targets, limiting GP appointment and home visit times and prioritising hospital beds over the patients inside of them combines to a final, and grim, conclusion – the value of keeping someone alive as compared with the associated cost. In UK policy, ‘the productivity gap’ is a readily accepted term most often used to describe the extent to which the GDP of the North of England lags behind the South (and the London epicentre). Strategy after strategy has been developed to figure out how this gap might be filled; the dominant theory relating to the relatively poor health outcomes of the Northern workbots. Improving health by x%, we are told, will close the productivity gap by x%. This seemingly innocuous, but dangerous thinking has the same root as ‘human capital stock’, prioritising productivity, but presented in the guise of the betterment of health. The core idea is that the healthier we are, the more we can produce. A little like dairy cows.
But like those dairy cows, over-productivity turns out to be not so good for our health. Lockdowns have given us the opportunity to experience what a work/life balance might look like without long nights at the office and the grinding daily commute. Prefaced by a long overdue destigmatising of mental health issues over the last decade, and alongside an increased awareness of the threat and realities of mental burnout, the individual and collective mental strain that has come with a global pandemic has prompted a glut of meditation podcasts and exercises in ‘mindfulness’ building on now well-absorbed concepts such as ‘self-care’. Even the economy has been stealth-yogied into a down-dog with ‘wellbeing economies’ emerging as the current economic buzz. Iceland, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand are among the countries taking the (all-female) lead in exploring ‘wellbeing economies’ at national and global scale.
Yet, despite widespread recognition and swathes of work around its limitations as an effective measure of economic success (not least its inclusion of ‘product’ from prostitution, gambling and illegal drugs), GDP clings on. Wellbeing remains a nebulous and highly subjective field of measure. One of the difficulties in finding a replacement for GDP is the extent of work going on to find a replacement for GDP. A steady flow of new wellbeing metrics, measurements and indexes makes the ‘alternative economy’ landscape ever-more clouded.
As we stumble our way through – and hopefully emerge from – the pandemic, we are immediately faced with the time-critical challenges presented by climate collapse. There is a growing urgency and imperative for the big questions. ‘The Great Pause’ has given us time to swallow a dose of reflective existentialism, revealing our opportunity. If the economy’s – and our collective – purpose is not this endless accumulation of money, of things, of wealth and debt, then what is the end game? If our end game is not our survival as individuals, our future as a species and the survival of our planet – then what are we in this for? What is the point?
What if, instead of GDP and the numerous efforts to measure wellbeing through subjective methods, we instead commit to measuring – and investing in – the universally understood, quantifiable and accessible metric of time?
Investments of our time, from this point forward, can be investments in our time. In a post-COVID age of contribution, civic investment and a generative (as opposed to extractive) economy, the purpose of our collective, and instinctive, mission – and the measure of our economic success – could, and arguably should, focus not on the generation of money or product, but on the generation of time. How much time does x or y project, programme or intervention add to individual lives, human survival or additional years for the planet?
Self-care gurus advise us to make time for ourselves. Maybe it’s time we did just that.
842-11