Andrew Sullivan posted an excerpt from this article, which tries to put into perspective how much time people really have available:
“…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”
I’m of course typing this while watching Deadliest Catch (which rules), and would be useless without an hour or two of downtime every night, but the analysis above puts the phrase “if only there was more time available” into perspective.
I have enough time on my hands to write a comment. So here it goes…
There is certainly enough time to do whatever you want to do, but the main problem I have is finding enough money to not only go and do the things I want to do but also allow me the financial freedom to take time away from the non-productive 8 hours a day I spend in an 8×8 cubicle staring at a computer screen pretending to do mindless, useless, boring work (corporate america sucks). See doing things is cool and having stuff to do is cool, but things and stuff plus money is carefree-coolness personified.
Last night I had enough time to come up with the following way to express how cold it had become in Denver, “It’s dick-shrinking hard-nipple cold out there”. Imagine if I won the lottery and had back the 40 hours a week I spend in a cubicle… I could use my huge stock pile of creativity and genius to come up with cooler ways to say things. I could create a whole new language, and then a whole new country, and then a whole new world. “Hello New World”.
your cubicle is 8×8?
also, instead of coming up with a whole new language and a whole new world you should come up with a way that we could all take a safari to africa. it’s expensive, but there are lions and elephants and stuff, so it’s pretty awesome. another cool thing is that in africa you get to see the cradle of civilization, which is code that i think means “hippos”.
Hungry, hungry hippos?
dude, i don’t know, i’m not very good at deciphering codes. it’s either “hungry, hungry hippos” or “be sure to drink your ovaltine”.
Either way it’s just a crummy commercial.