This year I started making the case for why we need practical tools for our current predicament. We seem to be struggling to make ends meet, don’t we?
I’m not just talking about dollars here - the cost of groceries, gas, and rent (things that often get missed in inflation indices).
I understand that money is important. But when asked ‘at what cost?’ all we can talk about is dollars and that seems to be some reasonable percentage of our collective issues.
“The deal we made with our planet, its creatures, and our rural workforces, all so we could enjoy a slightly cheaper hamburger, might just be the worst deal that was ever made.” - Harris
My macro-case for why we’re all so disconnected from ourselves, reality, and from each other, has three components and is quickly turning into a longer project.
It goes something like this, and as readers, you’re helping me understand it better.
Life Force = we’ve lost our will to go out into the world and make great work
Mentors & Apprenticeship = we don’t have mentors and we don’t enter into apprenticeship - and even if we wanted to we don’t know where to start because the rituals and structures by which we would have done so don’t exist anymore
Action & Tools = we instinctively feel that there is something to do about all this but we don’t know how to take the first step and that makes us feel paralyzed and miserable
A word of caution, if that’s something you need - I’m speaking on a place and time that I inhabit. About a people that I know intimately and have seen change over the course of my life. You will no doubt have your own observations, but I hope mine are useful in your context nonetheless. There can be no doubt that the phenomenon is global.
This particular essay is about the role of time preference and its direct link to apprenticeship.
“You just need a few good ideas and a lifetime to be successful.” - Munger
TL;DR: We move in time - we all know that - but in modern life we deny its power. We think we are in control. We believe this collective delusion because we no longer have the rhythms, rituals, and rites of passage that make the power of time obvious to us. We don’t live on, or work, the land anymore so the nature of work changed, alienating us further. If we don’t respect time - if we don’t have the rituals, rhythms, and rites of passage by which time would become meaningful - and if we don’t work on long-term things with long-term people then, naturally, we don’t revere our elders - those who deserve our reverence because of experience over time. If we don’t admire, respect, and hope to one day emulate our elders, we don’t enter into apprenticeship.
I. Time, Rhythms, Ritual
I recently had the honour of delivering my grandmothers eulogy.
I spoke about how Nan’s life, like many in that particular time and place, was lived within the natural rhythms of family, food, and time.
Time - although it may seem to you to be in short supply - was something she always seemed to have a surplus of.
When you’d sit with Nan, she wanted nothing more than to hear about your day. To get an update on everyone's news, and to share a table of homemade food with you. No distraction. No rush. No hint, whatsoever, that she could or should be doing something else.
You might say that Beryl Kirkpatrick’s time preference was low. She favoured meaningful things that took time over less meaningful things that were more immediate, but ultimately fickle and fleeting.
Contrast that with our current moment of joyless urgency - as we rush frantically to-and-fro, under an obvious, almost comical, collective delusion that we can control and manipulate time, forcing it to work in our favour (yes, I too find it likely that the gentlemen in that particular video is a uniquely modern brand of insane).
“…for most of us, time presents a huge problem. We don’t have enough of it. Yet the harder we run after time, the more it recedes. A tricky substance, slipping through our fingers, taunting us. We are pressed for it. We waste it. Worst of all, we age, losing our precious store of it. Time becomes a great adversary and we can’t escape the sense that we are losing the battle. We have lost the secret.” - Stutz
What changed?
Are we really better off?
Is all the frantic doing actually accomplishing anything, or are we simply treading water in an infinite productivity pool of our own making?
“We have forgotten that time is sacred…To the ancients, time was a gift of the gods, to be treated with awe and reverence…Our culture has descended into a contempt for all things that take time…We can’t even tolerate brief periods of time when we are not being gratified, thus we eat or get high or disappear into our phones.” - Stutz
If time was seen as something essential - as something that we moved in, instead of something that is ours to control - our relationship to time would expand far beyond our own immediate wants and we would be able to find the discipline to treat it with respect. Our time preference would naturally lower, allowing us to focus on things that compound slowly, but surely.
Time would be seen, as it is in many cultures, as something communal. A necessary ingredient that shapes the rhythms and rituals by which communities, families, and individuals make meaning, and therein, become healthy and resilient. Two things that we are most assuredly not.
“Ritual was the mechanism by which ancients acknowledged time as something from a higher world. They knew that if they lost their rituals, the meaning of life would fall apart. We can feel a faint echo of this in our holidays, at weddings, and funerals. - Stutz
One consistent theme in all cultures that have been able to maintain their traditions is the idea that, whatever it may be, there ought to be a process to these things, and processes take time.
You’re a small piece of a very large drama, none of which is of your making, and none of which is under your control. The group - the herd - is what matters, and that is how time was/is seen and experienced.
When those communal structures collapse, personal freedom naturally increases, but at significant cost.
In a modern, individualist culture, commitment to a consistent daily process - something that requires low time preference - requires great personal discipline because the culture rewards the opposite.
“…and indeed, discipline can be defined as the correct relationship to time.” - Stutz
II. Rites of Passage and Elders
For many people and in many places, rhythm and ritual culminated in formal rites of passage - an important and practical way by which a culture marked the passage of time.
A line was drawn in the sand. An initiation was under way. The official transition from here to there. From the beautiful, care-free ignorance of youth, to the responsibility of adulthood and the necessary adoption of low time preference.
Often, like in the tradition of crocodile skin in Papua New Guinea, or the initiation of the runners of the Tarahumara, rites of passage involved emotional and physical pain. The reason is both a metaphor and extremely practical. You are publicly accepting the burden of responsibility. People now depend on you and you have to be ready for that long, hard road. Challenge is inevitable. Discipline is required. You face what Stutz convincingly argues awaits us all in adulthood - pain, uncertainty, and constant work. That is the cross to bear for humans on earth. Best to go through it than around it.
Responsibility is earned, and formal rites of passage allowed for the official passing of the torch, acknowledged by the whole community, which breeds accountability and ownership over ones actions.
If we haven’t agreed, in principle, to why, when, and how our youth would assume that responsibility, how can we expect them to bear the burden with confidence and grace?
When children are invited to the decision making table in the way they have been - without going through formal rites of passage or the experience of time - perhaps they instinctually feel the adults don’t know what they’re doing. Childhood is over. The structures that once represented security, consistency, and strength now crumble. My guess is that we meant well, but that it will backfire in unexpected ways.
“You end up taking apart the things which actually held your society together…and it turns out that when you do that you just get a lot of angry, confused individuals in a society that doesn’t know how to support them…They haven’t been passed anything. They don’t know what they are. They’re told they can choose any identity they want, but they don’t know what that means. There’s no transcendent story. There’s nothing that’s bigger than them, that’s holding them, or that they’ve got to aim towards.” - Kingsnorth
We’ve created an environment where influence and opinion are not earned. We no longer revere the wise (time and experience) we revere the young and vital (energy and emotion), which drives the socio-political temperature through the roof.
Time preference sky rockets and attention spans plummet (to about the length of a Tik-Tok video), so naturally experience over time - instead of trading at the premium it deserves - is discounted. When experience is discounted, reverence for our elders falls away.
If reverence for our elders dies, apprenticeship naturally dies with it.
III. Apprenticeship and Work
I hope by now I’ve semi-convincingly argued that apprenticeship is directly linked to time preference.
Much of what I write about is some brand of social and economic development - perhaps best described as principles for our current predicament - so I’m sympathetic that our times makes this all more complicated. We have to live in the time and place we’re in. There’s no escaping it. Total separation from your people and place is just as destructive as letting the machine consume you entirely.
The real goal seems to be honouring the reality of where and when we are, but making strides towards a future we can all be satisfied with. Creating a world we actually want to live in - not one where we’re on TikTok solely because we feel extreme fear of missing out on a largely fictional reality.
Work is an important piece of this puzzle and is poorly defined because it’s changing so fast.
What is work?
Ideally, work is the combination of our natural inclinations and our early interests, that manifest in the form of some activity that serves the greater good. We call that activity a job - some of us get lucky enough to have a vocation.
There are jobs to be done in the world and we need people (and/or machines) to do them. Paradoxically, in a time when there is more work to be done than people to do it, we have never had more prime-aged people opting out of the workforce entirely (in peace time).
Although work has fallen out of favour in some circles, work has historically been, and still can be, a vehicle for dignity. Doing something well. Doing a job well. Doing something right is a great source of satisfaction.
What we seem to need is a new set of guiding principles for work.
Doing something well over a long period of time leads to what Robert Greene calls Mastery. Time is an essential, inescapable ingredient in the mastery recipe. It might even be the fundamental ingredient.
When we take our time and focus in depth, when we trust that going through a process of months or years will bring us mastery…We infallibly move to higher and higher levels of intelligence. - Greene
Acknowledging the role of time sounds esoteric but it’s actually perfectly practical.
We see more deeply and realistically. We practice and make things with skill. - Greene
The nature of work, and what exactly a job is, naturally changes over time and that comes with it’s own stuff.
When work, for most, meant formal apprenticeship in a trade, like carpentry, farming or masonry, apprenticeship was a natural extension of the process. The work required training, not education or memorization. It required tacit knowledge, earned through repetition and doing the thing everyday.
To be seen as credible, you had to gain the seal of approval of someone who already had a reputation for good work. You earned your seal by steady, consistent effort over an extended period of time.
At this stage you’re not making things for the marketplace, or for customers, you’re proving to the master that your work deserves his or her seal of approval. Your path to the marketplace, as an apprentice, came through the master and that right was earned.
In a process like this we can’t skip steps in the hopes of an easier or shorter path. That’s not how this works.
To the extent that we believe we can skip steps, avoid the process…We become slaves to time…The human that depended on focused attention for its survival now becomes the distracted, scanning animal, unable to think in depth, yet unable to depend on instincts. - Greene
Our cross to bear is that our current moment in time encourages the exact opposite. But if we can access discipline and buck this trend, we can begin to reconnect with the power of time, allowing us to move downstream instead of constantly feeling like we’re moving up hill and getting nowhere.
At any moment we can choose to shift our relationship to time and work with the grain, knowing of its existence and power. - Greene
Such is the power of low time preference.
Next time, the social media question, through the lens of a benevolent patriarch.
“…everything here is a work in progress. The to-do list is freaking incredible. Sometimes, I just have to say…’We’ve been doing this for 157 years; if we can’t get on it today, we’ll probably get on it tomorrow.’ ”
- Will Harris
See you on the path.
-MG