Complete Control Over Your Schedule Comes at a Cost - Not Worth Paying

Mark Manson was a digital nomad. Although, the term ’digital nomad’ is misleading since traditional nomads were not loners but highly group focused people who had less personal freedom than the members of the settled tribes and who worked together. A fellow wanderer, Manson learned, ‘burst into tears on a suburb in Japan watching families ride their bikes together in a park’. It was then that it dawned on him that his ‘freedom’ to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted had put such ordinary pleasures beyond reach.

An idea that is propagated by the so-called self-gurus nowadays is of being a digital nomad. The idea of having complete control over your schedule. You should be the one in control of your time. You should be able to work whenever you want, from wherever you want, take holidays when you need and be beholden to nobody. This is a naïve idea and the price you pay for being a ‘digital nomad’ is not worth it.

Time derives its value from how many people have access to it and how well your time is coordinated with theirs. It is similar to having a smartphone. It is not useful if only you have access to it. Having a smartphone or your social media account derives its value from how many of your friends and family have access to it. It is a very ubiquitously propagated idea that we should get rid of nine to five and have complete sovereignty over our time. This freedom comes at a cost of weakening the relationships that we have with people by because it’s not in sync and not coordinated with other people.

Terry Hartig’s research and is a solid proof of why we don’t need ‘flexible’ time schedules but we need a better social regulation of our time.

He along with his colleagues did a research where he had ­an ingenious notion of comparing the Swedes’ holiday patterns against statistics on the rate at which pharmacists dispensed antidepressants. There were two remarkable findings. First, Swedes were happier when they took time off. Second, antidepressants use fell by a greater degree. Hartig demonstrated, in proportion to how much of the Swedes were on holiday at any given time. It was evident that Swedes were not merely happy because of holiday but also from having the same holiday as other people. It was as if a cloud of relaxation had prevailed all over the country.

Surprisingly, people who were retired or unemployed also felt even though they had no work to do. For retired people, they were able to spend time with those who were off. For unemployed, it gave them a little respite from the shame of not working.

Oliver Burkeman writes, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, “Hartig didn’t flinch from the controversial implication of his results. They suggest, he observed, that what people need isn’t greater individual control over their schedules but rather what he calls ‘the social regulation of time’: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways. That means more willingness to fall in with the rythms of community.”

The key work in his statement is ‘rythm’. For the pre modern people, the gravest of punishment was to be ostracised, to be abandoned in some remote location, where you could not fall in with the rhythm of the tribe or group.

We as humans need synchronization. For instance, when we are walking down the street with someone, our steps automatically start to fall in sync with the other person’s steps. When people are off work simultaneously, they are not anxious about missing out on things, emails filling in your inboxes, getting undone tasks completed or their competitor colleague getting more work done and getting ahead of them. Also, what makes weekends fun is that we get to spend time with those who are also off work.

What is the use of having so much time and not being able to coordinate it with others? What is the use of so much time when you are forced to experience it all alone. There is a profound sense of meaning that comes with falling in with the rhythm of the community and to be free to engage with the ongoing activities of the society by sacrificing some part of your time.