Doing Time

Sophia Ghoneim
Written By Rosalie .

A collaboration with Blurbs’n Blobs magazine. 

Time is at its most precarious and vulnerable point. Accelerating speeds of development, production, and construction, are at odds with the devaluation of the everyday person’s time. The modern tension between time and money is tearing our measure of life into shreds. We are tethered by the future, worthless in the present, and nostalgic for the past. 

In the 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson analyze metaphors not as literary or poetic devices, but as conceptual frames that form everyday thoughts and actions. They suggest that “our conceptual system is largely metaphorical,” and “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” They take the concept of an argument as an example and “the conceptual metaphor ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR.’” This metaphor is linked to expressions such as “He attacked every weak point in my argument,” “His criticisms were right on target,” or “I've never won an argument with him.” These systematic expressions that are born from the metaphorical concept “ARGUMENT IS WAR” are not just expressions, they define the way we argue and how we look at arguing as an action:

We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack[...]

Following this line of thought, Lakoff and Johnson move to the metaphorical concept “TIME IS MONEY,” and systematic metaphorical expressions such as “How do you spend your time these days?”, “I've invested a lot of time in her,” “You need to budget your time.” Since money is a limited and valuable commodity, “TIME IS MONEY” leads to two ways of conceptualizing and experiencing time: “TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE” and “TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY.” Thus, expressions of time “refer specifically to money (spend, invest, budget, profitably, cost),” “to limited resources (use, use up, have enough of, run out of),” and “to valuable commodities (have, give, lose, thank you for).” These “metaphorical entailments,” expressed and reinforced through countless linguistic and behavioral forms, create a concrete system that completely wraps around our lived experience of time. We experience time as an expenditure, and units of life as something that can be squandered or well-invested. 

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” they write. What happens then to our understanding and experience of time when, within the lived metaphorical concept, “TIME IS MONEY,” a disequilibrium arises? In the U.S., the median household income was $60,000 in 1990, $58,800 in 2010, and $68,010 in 2020. The federal minimum wage was $3.80 per hour in 1990, $5.15 per hour in 2000, and has remained at $7.25 per hour from 2010 into the 2020s. The median home price was $97,500 in 1990, $169,000 in 2000, $221,800 in 2010, and $336,900 in 2020.

These numbers indicate that from 1990 to 2020, the median household income increased by 125%. The federal minimum wage increased by 90.8%. But the median home price, often used as a measure of the cost of living, increased by 198%. This indicates that within the metaphorical concept “TIME IS MONEY,” the average working person is experiencing time as a currency that is losing its value. The tool we measure our lives with is depreciating. 

In contrast to everything that makes time go by quicker in our day—accelerating speeds of production and consumption, pop culture turn-overs, the news cycle, the ever-growing threat of climate change, that doomsday clock, the constant need to catch up to everyday tasks, the time lost to escapism—our every second, minute, and hour is worth less and less and less. This creates a sharp contrast between our internal, everyday clock, and external, worldly events. The latter is accelerating, that churning machine of increasing stakes, it never stops, it doesn’t wait, it doesn’t stutter or hesitate. Our own time, however—well, there’s never enough of it—plagued by a mechanical pressure of productivity, facing a sort of inflation,  it’s increasingly losing its worth. The less time we have, the more we treat it as a commodity, the more our life becomes a medium of exchange, and managing it, a job. Somehow, this contrasting experience of time forms the most perfect, forgiving subject. The world won’t wait, and you don’t have time to fix anything. Everything has become so much bigger than our everyday lives. Nothing could be less impactful than the average human hour. 

And we do conceive of it as ‘our’ time. I could talk about my own sense of time; my two jobs, my hourly wage, how I deleted Instagram in a desperate attempt to value my own life, my obsession with dated lists and petty time management—it’s like throwing a bunch of small coins in a piggy bank, hoping one day I can buy back my time. Every day, I plan to live, and every day, I somehow fall short. But I don’t experience it as a matter of “my” time being undervalued. I experience it as a global state of being, a matter of modern life, as many people do, and that’s part of the problem. That's where class consciousness and modern interconnectivity come together against us—this sense of connection, of being a part of a common struggle, generationally or economically, helps to cope, but is ultimately counterproductive. It’s not the same state of class consciousness or connectivity that led to revolutions in the past but one that leads to subservience. It’s a connection and awareness that turns shared struggles into a collective joke. We come to think of our time as worthless as it is treated. Unflinching global development and scale-ups, in opposition to our individual feelings of finitude and exhaustion, expressed in self-aware unison, communicate a larger idea about our time. It is a time when change is a thing of the past, revolution is a tease, and all that is left is progress.



Sophia Ghoneim (Blurbs’n Blobs)

Personal, scrappy, and diary-like, Blurbs’n Blobs is a feminist magazine dedicated mediating the gap between writers and readers, as to well as creating intimacy between strangers. Tinnitus reads it and loves it!

You check it out browsing blurbsnblobs.wordpress.com or searching for @blurbs_n_blobs on Instagram.

Rosalie .
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