I had a classmate in college whose laid-back approach to work used to annoy me, but as I spent more time with her, her easygoing attitude began to rub off. I had chosen a stream that required an intense amount of labour, and ignoring one’s assignments or putting them on a back-burner was a bad idea. But for one year in her company, my approach to everyday life changed from an anxiety-ridden, forced discipline to… the best that I could describe it would be ‘floating along.’. People ceased to annoy me, we socialised more than we worked, and I felt a lot lighter.
And work, well, it just got done.
I haven’t been able to recapture the essence of that approach to life since then, but from what little I remember of the feeling, my entire approach to Time, that lumbering behemoth chasing you out of bed each morning, had changed.
Time—there never seems to be enough of it, but too much of it bores you to death. The stress of this knowledge is probably killing you slowly. Momo—a children’s fantasy novel written by German writer Michael Ende—is a profound allegory on how we approach the passage of time in the modern world.
Think of José Saramago’s ‘what if’ like situations—what if everyone suddenly turns blind, what if the dead refuse to stop breathing—but with a more prophetic bent. Published in 1973, the book is a backward glance at the mainstreaming of Western industrial capitalist philosophy right down to the present. I’d even say it’s predicted modern mental illnesses with incredible accuracy.
Capitalism exists in every possible sphere, in every possible setting. You serve the machine because you have no other choice; it's either that or starvation. It worked for you and me, but at what cost? Have you ticked off all your projects, including the number of kids you would have, like your parents did? Have you slowed everything down for some ‘me time’ at the advice of Instagram gurus? Are you dragging yourself to the gym because your posture is bad after all those years in front of a computer? Do you have to wrench your eyes reluctantly away from your phone when your partner is trying to talk to you?
Are you, dare I say it, anxious? And what exactly are you fixing?
The titular Momo, a lost child, arrives in an unnamed town seemingly out of nowhere. After wondering what to do with her, the kindly townsfolk allowed her to settle in where she had first appeared, in the ruins of an old amphitheatre, and even built her a nice little nook with some basic comforts. She has no mother or father and expresses no wish to be adopted.
The town returns to daily life, and Momo becomes an integral part of it, with grown-ups as well as children cherishing her company. The adults begin to ask her for advice, and the children’s imaginations take on complex proportions when they are in Momo’s company. Although she owns nothing and relies on the generosity of the local townsfolk, Momo is highly valued for her intangible gifts.
Things in the peaceful locality begin to change after the arrival of the Grey Men. Claiming to be agents of a ‘Time-Saving Bank', they persuade people to save time by becoming more efficient, convincing them that their lives will be better if they stop wasting time on leisurely activities. Gradually, the Grey Men begin to steal away the townsfolk's time, making them more hurried, stressed, and disconnected from their true selves. People begin to prioritise productivity over simpler pleasures like play and nurturing relationships, unknowingly losing their enthusiasm for life. Parents begin to buy into it, and children begin to suffer the effects as well. The parents declare, “Children are the raw material of the future. A world dependent on computers and nuclear energy will need an army of experts and technicians to run it. Far from preparing our children for tomorrow’s world, we still allow too many of them to squander years of precious time on childish tomfoolery. It’s a blot on our civilisation and a crime against future generations.”
The only person whom they cannot manipulate into 'time-saving’ is Momo, and she quickly becomes the biggest threat to the Grey Men’s existence.
“All that matters in life,” a Grey Man advises Momo, “is to climb the ladder of success, amount to something, own things. When a person climbs higher than the rest, they amount to more, own more things, and everything else comes automatically: friendship, love, respect, et cetera.”
No one feels this more than one of Momo's close friends, Guido. A typical young man with his head in the clouds, by signing up with the Grey Men, he is finally discovered and begins to make money off of his talent for spinning tales. He is expected to churn out more and more and has no choice but to rehash old ideas, but the thirst for his stories doesn’t cease. He loses all his creative joy but is terrified of losing his newfound success, and can’t get off the hamster wheel.
What do the Grey Men want with people’s time? According to Ende, they survive on second-hand time and cannot exist if they run out of it, so they hoard it along with the ‘Time Lilies,’ a physical representation of the flow of time concocted by Ende’s fertile imagination. They go about like rapacious businessmen, hellbent on scraping the world for time inefficiently spent, convincing people to ‘save’ it by increasing productivity when they are contractually giving it away instead.
Sounds like an apt metaphor for the way social media works in the present age, doesn’t it?
We extend time, try to save it, rush pleasure, tick off boxes, and slow down only out of necessity when we are old. We love showing off time well spent on leisure. We distract ourselves from our pain with social media and new cheap things. We’re living in a compensatory age, an age where we have to make money to be of any value, and we prefer to spend time on things that, as defined by the age, are of value. In the process, we lose too many things on the way, including but not limited to our health. We destress because our lifestyle stresses us out, and we worship youth and longevity to make up for it.
Productivity has always been elusive to me. I’ve secretly wished I had a couple of extra arms and maybe an extra head so I could get everything done. I wish I could get back to that brief year in college when nothing bothered me, when I managed to enjoy my life and also got everything done.
I now live in a contradictory state of what’s-the-point and better-get-it-done. The joy of creativity, although my imagination is as fertile as it ever was, has long left the building. I’m also extremely suspicious of wasted effort, so I worry myself into knots wondering whether a certain idea or project would be worth finishing. And of course, I am terrified of jumping headlong into a project and losing steam halfway through. I’m afraid of wasting my love on a piece of work that might never feel the touch of a buyer’s hands. I waste a considerable amount of time in decision paralysis, and it all has to do with the way I began to approach time and began to put the pressure of sustenance on my creativity, or expected my creativity to solve all of my problems, financial or otherwise.
To quote Elizabeth Gilbert, "I’ve always felt like this is so cruel to your work—to demand a regular pay cheque from it as if creativity were a government job or a trust fund. […] What is dishonourable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence. […] ---only because such payoffs are exceedingly rare, and you might very well kill off your creativity by holding it to such a harsh ultimatum."
Of course, it is very difficult to trust the process because we’re not kids with crayons anymore.
I realised that many versions of the soulless Grey Men exist in our reality; they come in the form of friends, parents, teachers, corporations, and billionaires hellbent on stealing something because the metaphor addresses the primary insecurities of modern life: to be our best, most efficient, richest, prettiest, and thinnest at this very moment. The system snake-oiled us a “get x quick” solution to our problems (and some non-existent ones) and probably still is in the process of doing so.
To counter this, we have to assume that we have all the time in the world. That we can cut out the middleman to the state of mind we crave. To quote Eddie Vedder, “No time to be void, or save up on life; you have to spend it all.”
Momo did what any book worth reading ought to do: form tiny lacerations in my heart, regret my general approach towards life, lament the fleeting perfection of childhood, and possibly many more epiphanies.
To stick the knife even deeper, I had bought the book twenty years ago and started reading it only now.
Oh well, I couldn’t have picked it up at a more timely time.
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