One of my Facebook friends recently posted this status: “if there was as much enthusiasm for curing cancer or ending child poverty as there is for the latest gadgets the world would be a better place”.
My gut reaction was to agree. I mean, it’s probably a feeling most of us get at some time or another. How frustrating is it to find out about something very serious happening (usually somewhere else) and then see people concerned about seemingly “trivial” things?
And yet, I then realised that this very same Facebook friend had just come back from an overseas trip he made to see some sporting events. Which to me is the epitome of trivial (I am violently bored and repulsed by 99.7% of all sport).
So I’ve concluded that this feeling is an illusion. The template is “how terrible that people waste so much time being concerned with X, if they put that effort into Y things would be so much better”. The trouble is that X is always that which I happen not to be interested in. Whoever this “I” is, and therefore something you really love will always be written off by someone else in the same way. It’s interesting that this illusion seems to occur across all political spectrums. But when we pay too much attention to it, we simply end up moralising and hand-wringing how people spend their free time.
Of course it’s different to be critical when someone simply spends too much time on things they find enjoyable and does nothing to improve the world. This is an age-old dilemma. For instance, I’m going travelling for a few months later this year — how many lives could I have saved if I donated that money to Village Reach instead? (Answer: according to some fairly good research, about 5-10.) And yet the logical conclusion to that would be the demand of (say) the character of Jesus in the New Testament, to give away all your possessions and become a pauper yourself. There’s something about that course of action that strikes me as profoundly immoral — a dereliction of duty to yourself if there is such a thing.
So in the end, most of us should be spending more time in general doing something more useful. However, I think we should avoid condemning people for wasting their time on any specific thing you find trivial. You might find this post and the conclusion too obvious, but as for me I’m still learning and am not above the “obvious” stuff.
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