Time and Presence in a World Obsessed with Speed
Sweet Bites for February 21, 2025
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of Time.
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to complete your weekly exploration with.
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🍰 Mini Bite
Around the time he was turning forty, the Director Richard Linklater was thinking deeply about how we experience time and the transitions we make, both in youth and adulthood, and how they define who we are.
Linklater set out to investigate this in the form of a film, following a young boy from adolescence to adulthood.
Rather than produce it the way he normally would, Linklater decided to shoot the movie, Boyhood, over 12 years, spending several days each year to capture different moments in his actors’ lives.
No film had ever been made this way before. Sure, films are in development for a long time, but they are never shot over multiple years like this. When a character needs to age, a film simply uses hair and makeup, or different actors.
But Linklater wanted the audience to experience time and that unique period of growing up. He wanted the audience to be invested in the family, watching them grow and transform over the twelve years,
“I want the film to look like one film, almost to be seamlessly dissolving from one year into the next, people suddenly aging,” he said
The result is a film like none other, both for those working on it and those viewing it.
“You know, in a lot of ways, this movie is about trying to live in the present,” Ethan Hawke who stars in it the film would say.
Patricia Arquette who starred opposite Hawke would reflect:
“All of the areas that we are unaware of, all of the things that we miss, how we think these big moments are life—when I graduate, when I get married—but really maybe life is the moments in between those big moments.”
And this is the beauty of the finished film. You don’t just see this boy and his family’s highlights, you see the big and small moments. You, as the audience, get to experience the journey of growing up.
Linklater was in essence attempting to show what philosophers have spoken about for thousands of years: how we experience time.
The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, felt we are in too much of a hurry and didn’t allow ourselves the experience of time. When visiting the United States in the early 2000s, one of the things he told his audience was they needed “to take time to live more deeply.”
It means slowing down and recognizing the depth of the moment one is in. Life is filled with a richness that can only be experienced when we stop running and just experience the moment we are in.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out that we are all so focused on the future, that we inevitably lose out on the present because we never give it the priority it deserves.
“We reach out towards the future while taking up our past thus yielding our present activities. Note how the future — and hence the aspect of possibility — has priority over the other two moments.”
But when we’re intentional about living, when we recognize we ourselves are beings in time, and when we become aware of that, we allow ourselves the ability to not just slow down and embrace more of life’s present moment, we also allow ourselves to see the world through a different lens.
On the surface, Boyhood is a simple movie, and Linklater admitted so. “It’s kinda a simple idea to watch time work through a film,” but its beauty lies in the journey of the audience with the boy and his family.
If we give ourselves the luxury of the present moment, if we slow down and allow ourselves to truly dig deeper into the moment we’re living in, we give ourselves an experience with time unlike any other.
Boyhood forces the viewer to slow down and acknowledge the speed of time. It makes an audience look at life through the lens of every day events such as talking to your parents about your week or watching a parent get divorced and try to start over. By putting the time directly on film like this, the audience is forced to confront the speed at which our lives pass us, and in turn, make us reflect more vividly on our own lives and how we spend our time.
When Ellar Coltrane, who plays the lead character, was asked to reflect upon his experience over the 12 years, he said, “throw yourself into the moment, so maybe that’s what I’ve learned most of all.”
The moment. It’s all we have.
🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation
🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📰 Article Worthy of a Read
No absolute time By Matias Slavov
Writing about Einstein’s discoveries, Slavov makes the argument that they would not have been possible without the works of David Hume.
“Once the relativity of simultaneity was established, Einstein was able to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his theory, the principle of relativity and the light postulate. This conclusion required abandoning the view that there is such a thing as an unobservable time that grounds temporal order. This is the view that Einstein got from Hume.”
A few favorite passages:
David Hume: “[Time] can never be convey’d to the mind by any thing stedfast and unchangeable.”
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“Change is observable either in the succession of objects or in their relative motions. A good example of succession is the sequence of musical chords. We do not get time’s idea from a single ongoing chord. Instead, there must be a succession: chord, pause, chord, a different chord, and so on.”
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“Time, as it appears to us, is made of indivisible moments that are parts of succession.”
📖 Book Recommendation
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Favorite Quotes:
“The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay.”
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“You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it's already turned into the past.”
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“Once you're no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a "life well spent," you're freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You're freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you're already doing with it are more meaningful than you'd supposed and that until now, you'd subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren't "significant" enough.”
📚 Wisdom
“In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry--to allow things to take the time they take is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.”
Oliver Burkeman
Source: Four Thousand Weeks
🎙 Podcast to Listen To
I’ve written previously about her philosophy before and plan to again later this year, but L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experiences is worth your time.
In this episode with Tim Ferriss, she discusses her work on transformative experiences, time and being, and vampires.
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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