I started poking at this idea a bit more today - what exactly has technology done with our sense of time? I initially wanted to hop to the conclusion that it has decreased the value of time, but in trying to prove this, I realized that in fact the opposite is true. And the math behind this is quite simple: we are now capable of producing and performing tasks in a matter of minutes that in the past required hours, days, or even months of time. So time has only grown more precious with technology, because we can produce (and consume) more in a single unit of time than we've ever been able to in all of history.
That's a good thing, right? In many ways it obviously is, and this has contributed greatly to the level of comfort and dare-I-say-opulence that many of us enjoy today. But something in my gut protested against this thought, and it goes back to V's post about whitespace. The problem I have is this: in the present-day economy of time, the relative value of whitespace has gone way down. While technology has increased our ability to do things more efficiently, it has done nothing to help us think more efficiently. The amount of time you need to invent, to create, to consider, or to analyze has remained constant.
The net effect is the devaluing of whitespace. Or put in another way, the unprecedentedly high and ever-increasing cost of whitespace. The hour break that you take every day to just think - if you're wise and lucky enough to be able to do such a thing - is competing against an opportunity cost that's only growing as we continue to make ourselves better at cramming things that could be done in that same hour.
And it isn't just whitespace that suffers. This deflation affects everything that technology hasn't been able to (or in some cases, allowed to) touch. Whether it's the amount of time needed to read a book, complete a painting, enjoy a meal, make love with someone, or hell, get a full night's sleep - all of these require the same amount of time as they always have... and so their perceived value to us has only dropped and continued to drop. The only reason some of these things remain high on our priority lists is because their perceived and actual values are so high that, even with deflation, they still manage to come out on top or reasonably close to it.
Whitespace, however, has never had the luxury of being perceived as extremely valuable, and so it is among the most vulnerable to this deflation. So if anybody's wondering why they can't seem to make time for whitespace anymore - I'd say that the primary reason is simply that you're using your time too efficiently. And the only way to counteract that without giving up efficiency is to seriously force yourself to assign whitespace such an astronomical value in your mind that it can survive our ever-increasing demands from time itself.
