Just a thought

As we become more efficient, our time becomes more valuable. That means our future time becomes more valuable than our present happiness. Which means that decisions that may shorten our future life (and decrease our future output) become less attractive. This is why higher-earning and better educated people tend to smoke less: they've got too much riding on their good health or they've invested too much in their future to jeopardize it. I think all of this can be generally agreed upon.
What I just realized today is that that means that prosperity and cowardice should be positively correlated. Or perhaps more diplomatically prosperity and caution should go hand in hand. You probably already knew that, but now you have that to think about today.

In terms of

Iraq

Most successful bands' second albums

Robin Williams

Your dad

Time Porn

There is a Kilgore Trout story in Breakfast of Champions, I believe, about a space traveller who visits an alien planet. Here's Vonnegut's description of it, in its entirety (courtesy of Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner):

It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.

They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.

They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, "Yes." They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, "As dirty as movies could get."

This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.

It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.

So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn't any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam's apple. His Adam's apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet:

THE END

It was all faked, of course. There weren't any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn't the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.

Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half--soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam's apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.

After a while, the actors couldn't eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn't think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.

The audience went wild.

When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn't actually deliver these goodies, of course.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.

And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

Wasn't that an amazing story? I distinctly remember reading that story in 8th grade and being really affected by the concept. Vonnegut was saying that pornography meant taunting yourself with something one couldn't have, which, Vonnegut believed, was intimacy. At that time I thought this was about the wildest thing ever.
Well we now have food porn to watch, in fact it's very popular. We can see it on the food channel. It differs from cooking shows of yore because they were mostly about the process of making the food, whereas today's shows are mostly about eating food. To extend our analogy a bit, the cooking show of old is the titillating health film strip or ostensibly 'educational' nudist camp film to the modern cooking show's Real Sex on HBO.
But the food shows here in Korea, and also in Japan, put anything on the Food channel to shame. They match Vonnegut's description exactly, the slurping, the moaning, the tight shots of glistening lips and bobbing adam's apples, it's all there and people love to watch it. The recipe portion of the show is collapsed into less than ten seconds. A typical recipe would be "Sugar, red pepper powder, ginger, garlic, salt, vinegar. Oooh, rub it on that meat and grill, grill, yeah, grill it some more. Oh yeah!" The bulk of the action is all juices dripping down chins. In the world of food porn, Japan and Korean make barely legal hard core bukkake.
But today I've discovered a new kind of pornography. I'm talking about time porn. That's what people who live busy modern lives indulge in when they discuss the merits of slow food, labor intensive ways of doing anything, and the good life that they perceive people who live rural or less technologically dependent lives lead. Jean Feraca has led me into this world, but it extends in every direction. There are all sorts of people out there fantasizing about taking their sweet-ass time doing things, which, I suppose, is only natural in a world of busy people. As natural as food porn in a world of McDonald's. Perhaps both forms of sexless porn point to a greater problem of joyless abundance that we as Americans face. We've been trying to shove more and more into our holes and sense organs in an attempt to gain more satisfaction, but we've run up against the wall of diminishing returns. We can't be happy with more food, it has to be more intricate, fresher, more exotic. We can't be happy spending our time vegging out or reading a book, we have to spend our precious and hard earned time doing something that takes a lot of time. Neither of these desired routes to greater satisfaction is easy to come by. Usually people only fantasize about eating an authentic Moroccan feast or taking off the summer to renovate a sailboat, so they console our unsatisfiable cravings by reading books about hiking the Appalachian Trail or by watching some guy eat kebabs in turkey. That is the porn of our time, among those who desire such things. That said, I take it the regular porn will continue to be enough for the rest of the less rarefied, more easy to please balance of mankind.

I'm better at spending my money than spending my time

Which is why I sell all I can. I only bring it up because today I sold my weekends. Actually, I sold the heart out of my Saturdays and Sundays. I'll be doing two hours in a row on those days, and there's a 2-hour round trip commute involved, so a good fat 4 hour-plus gash down the middle of each day. It wasn't an easy decision, but unfortunately, I am not in a position to refuse any offers for private English lessons. To my chagrin, my time is worth less to me than it is to quite a few Korean students of English. I am hard pressed to think of a period of time that I would not sell. I have left family gatherings to teach private lessons. I endure a lot of commuting and chronic pharyngitis due to my never-ending talking. I'm not complaining, I'm genuinely dazzled by the economics of it all. I can't afford my own time.
But it's not exactly that I can't afford it. I can't get as much value out of it by myself as I can by trading it for money. Like an American soy bean farmer at harvest time, I look at my schedule book and think "What am I gonna do with all of this?" The farmer says to himself "Let's see, my old buddy Chang usually takes about 15 kilos off of me, and my wife usually sticks a few cups of soybeans in her Far East of the Border Chinese Chili that always comes in dead last at the chili cook-off. The rest I can sell." What would an American farmer do with soy beans? Make baked beans with them? Make tofu? Well, what would I do with my time? Write a song that I can't even sing with my constantly swollen throat? Catch up on The Wire. Well, I'm all caught up.
Actually, part of the attraction of the private lesson is that the per hour rate seems so high when you don't factor in travel time. It's like renting a room in your apartment. It's just one room that you rent out, but the rest of the house becomes a public space. So reading in the living room is okay, but no more reading Herb Cohen in your underwear in the living room. Same thing for me. I can do anything I want during my commute, as long as it fits on my lap and tolerates a bumpy bus ride or lurchy subway ride (i.e. reading and writing and listening to mp3s. So it's still my time, but not really.
I hope some day to be able to afford to buy back some of my time. In fact it's been my goal for a while. I can imagine what it's like being a prostitute. The lure of easy money makes it seem almost impossible to turn down any offer. It's quite disturbing, in fact, to know your value. I assume a day will come when my time will become more valuable to me than its cash equivalent. I only hope that it realizes its value as time for doing something fulfilling. It would be a shame if the only thing that stopped me from selling away my time was the value that it held as time for sleep.

Staffan Linder and the Harried Leisure Class

Staffan Linder is a Swedish Economist. His book, "The Harried Leisure Class", has the power to change the way you view the world in the same way as "The Selfish Gene". It's one of those life-altering premises, not a major earth-shattering new theory like evolution, but a new way of looking at it. As the selfish gene is to biology, The Harried Leisure class is to economics.
The premise is simple. As we all should know, one of the key inputs in any economic input is labor. Labor itself consists of the time one spends on a job, the expertise that goes into the work, and several other factors. Linder says that as one's wage and productivity rises, the value of one's time consequently rises. This leads one to expect to get more value from all of one's time, including one's free time. The result, according to Linder, is that people spend their leisure time in more and more intense, hurried, "efficient" leisure activities. This explains the decline in popularity of baseball, whittling on the porch, and anything involving hours of practice (i.e. almost anything worth doing). Thus leisure becomes less about relaxing and more about getting relaxing stuff done.
But it doesn't stop there. It answers a question I've long wondered about. Why do people like to buy things that look worn and old? What's so wonderful about jeans with holes in them? Linder's idea explains it all. People are too busy to put the holes in the jeans themselves through good honest mucking about under a car or out in a field, so they buy the jeans pre-worn:



But the concept just goes rolling everywhere, like the selfish gene, it's got legs. Why do so many people (like my sister-in-law) spend so much money on educational toys for infants when research shows that spending quality time with your child is more effective than all the fancy knickknacks in the world? Because the expensive toys (and my sister-in-law has spent at least $1000 on them and her son isn't 2 yet) are actually cheaper than her time. Sick world, huh? And why do so many housewives here in Korea send their kids to cram schools all day and still spend every waking hour fretting and kvetching over their children's educations? Because all that time, otherwise spent warming the couch, is almost worthless (relative to any other activity that those woman could do instead, short of actually getting a job).
And here's where it hits me personally. I work in the burgeoning English as a Never-to-be-learned Language (ENL) sector in Korea, teaching people who are going about it ass backwards, throwing money (on me)and time (on memorizing lists of things) at a problem (learning English) that can really only be solved by technique (actually exposing oneself to English in a meaningful way) and time (spent constructively). Although I have a steady job, I chose it for it's smack-in-themiddle-of-the-day schedule, which allows me to work much more lucrative private lessons in the morning and night. Right now my schedule every day is either 6:30am -9pm or 8:15am-10pm. I spend 3 hours a day riding the bus all over the place. All my time is for sale. Every moment of it. For the last 4 months every Monday morning I had a 2 hour break when I would go to Starbucks between jobs and drink the world's most expensive Starbucks (in Korea, a grande latte is $5). Well someone bought that. If you have the money and the inkling, you can buy the two remaining holes in my schedule, Wednesday and Friday Mornings, 10-12. If someone goes and buys them up them I have no idea when I will go to the gym. But needless to say, that being my gym time, I will expect an extra $5/hour to compensate for the loss.
So last week when I heard about this person who wanted to buy my coffee break, I was faced with a question I presume is very common to geishas, massueses and psychiatrists: How much is that hour of my life every week worth? Unfortunately, I know for a fact that anyone willing to buy my time is willing to pay way more than it's worth to me. So every time I get a new job, it's like losing an auction for my life. Should I push for $45, or stick with a standard $40? In fact, I got $50, quite a steal. That's another thing that you can learn from Adam Smith: You are most likely to make a big profit in an industry in which the product is scarce and the actual price is not well-known to non-experts.
Anyway, it's not all roses: the class is a one on one with a girl who speaks almost no English and, I would say, has almost no chance of benefitting from the class. In other words, she won't be learning English any time soon. I could see it in her eyes, she doesn't have the drive, the heart or the head for it. And, back to Linder, I could also see in her eyes that she was the type that was more willing to throw money than time at such a pursuit. I mean, a $50/hour English tutor would have to be a lot better than a $40/hour one, right?