Almost 80 years ago, George Orwell published an essay titled Books v. Cigarettes in which he explored a common gripe among his contemporaries that books were simply too expensive a past time to afford. In response Orwell compares the relative costs of drinking and smoking, common hobbies of the complainants, and their associated costs with that of a reading, eventually concluding that even in the case of a very heavy reader, the costs of both habits are roughly the same over the period of a year. The point of the essay was to demonstrate that the inability to afford books was a product of decisions made in the spending of one’s salary, not the inaccessibility of literature for the common person.
Today, it would be a stretch for many in the West to say they don’t read because they can’t afford the hobby. Books, whether electronic or paper, often cost less than a drink or two at the bar and many libraries offer annual memberships for as little as ten dollars a year. With services such as YouTube, the cost for audiobooks may even be free. Instead, lack of money has been replaced with lack of time and in both it is more a diagnosis of unwillingness than inability. It is not that we can’t accomplish the things we say we want to, but rather that decisions we make with our time inhibit our ability to do so. I encourage a more thoughtful reflection of each of our own daily habits and believe we should be taking more responsibility over our own future.
I’ll provide an example but I encourage you to examine your own habits – I myself am far from perfecting my time management – to see the point I am trying to make. Returning to reading, I often hear people my age say that they don’t have the time to read with everything going on in their lives whether it be work, school, family, or some combination of the three. But how many of us are working every waking hour? How much time do we spend watching TV at night? On Instagram or TikTok? Scrolling through Twitter or watching YouTube? And if reading isn’t your fancy, then replace it with “I don’t have time to (cook meals, learn a language, study X or Y, write, etc.)”. Is there really no time we can make to do the things we say we want to? The truth is that we make decisions every single day that limit what we do with our time. It isn’t that the time doesn’t exist, rather we are choosing to spend it in other and often more unproductive ways. Continuing to act as though our own time is outside of our control is both untrue and symptomatic of our tendencies to shirk responsibility, something I believe bleeds into other areas of our lives. This is not to say that every waking hour should be spent on “the grind” and for many, it may feel like more of an issue of lack of energy rather than lack of time. Setting aside periods of our day for relaxation and decompression holds its own importance in each of our lives. I am instead trying to focus on being more intentional with our time and in a larger sense, our lives, versus those “disappearing hours” – scrolling social media for hours or binge watching a TV show – that we spend relaxing but not necessarily intending to. If there is something we say we want to do, we must consciously make an effort to accommodate it in our day.
I strongly believe that the mindset of “I don’t have the time” versus “I am choosing not to make the time” is indicative of the lengths we are willing to go to succeed at whatever our chosen profession is in life. There is nothing inherently wrong with believing we don’t have the time, but at best it is a convenient lie, and at worse it is actively preventing growth we could otherwise be making. It will always be easier to blame our problems on some external force, but is that really being truthful with ourselves? I won’t discuss in depth the implications that this has on a society in this essay, but they certainly do exist and are easily observable if we take the time to look. Just how successful can a people be if their problems are always of someone else’s making? And perhaps some of the entertainment we do digest is actually harming our own personal drive. In 1946, Orwell wrote when discussing literature and radio/television that “perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyer-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.” The garbage in, garbage out process that has taken over online entertainment today and consumes many hours of young people’s time seems to fit that definition, and is certainly not promoting greater self-responsibility or creativity.
I hope that at the least, this short essay will induce some self-reflection and promote the idea of being more intentional with our time. It isn’t that we should all aspire to spend every waking hour improving ourselves as some “life coaches” put it, but rather we must be aware of how our decisions impact what we get out of life. Orwell put it better than I ever could: “And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.” If we say we want to do something but don’t actually decide to do it, that fault is no one’s but our own. Our time belongs to us and we ultimately choose how we spend it. If it is not the reflection of ourselves that we intend for it to be, it is only us who can change it.
