Being-Time and the Logged Second…
Spirituality isn't about the afterlife.
It's about learning to live — and live right — here, while we're here. Fr. AMA used to say it comes down to having a healthy, balanced relationship with Power, Money, and Sex. Often he'd add: it starts from Sex, Power, Money, in that order. I've started adding Time to the list now. The first three, at least conceptually, are easy enough to get a handle on. Time is not.
Just 2 days ago, a friend and erstwhile colleague, in a WhatsApp group posted about binge-watching OTT to kill time, and not remembering any of it the next day — so he said he wasn't the right person to give suggestions.
I replied: You don't have to kill time. It dies by itself. Time doesn't need our help — it's the ultimate self-destructing entity. Every second we try to "kill" is already a corpse by the time we take aim. 🙂
And thinking about it more — if time is already dead by the time we aim at it, there was no marksman either. Just the aiming-thought arising and passing, like everything else. That's the trick nobody tells you about time. You can hoard money, misuse power, indulge or repress desire — all of these hold still enough to be gripped, negotiated with, renounced. Time was never there to be gripped. It's gone in the reaching.
The great Zen Master Dogen never wrote a book on money or power. He wrote one on time — Uji, being-time — because this is the subtlest of the four. Firewood doesn't become ash, he said. Firewood has its own before and after; ash has its own before and after. The moment doesn't survive into the next moment to be spent or saved or killed. Each moment is already complete, disclosing the whole of being-time in itself.
Which is what made my friend's reply the more interesting koan, more than the binge-watching itself. Not remembering any of it the next day — that's not a confession of failed willpower. It's a fairly precise report of time passing with no witness built around it. No thread laid down. Could be dissociation — going out the back door. Or, minus the noticing, it could be close to what Dogen is pointing at — time occurring with nothing accumulating. Same shape from outside. Not the same from inside. Worth asking him — not as correction, but as a real question — was he absent, or just unaccumulating? Those look identical the next morning. They are not the same door.
And then this morning, a colleague from twenty years ago — we were on the same team once — shares this: Wipro deploys real-time productivity monitoring tool for employees. Wipro. A place I “worked” quite a number of time years, across three separate stints.
TimeScope, they're calling it. Rolled out to 5,000 employees in May, now expanding — fixed-price teams, billable roles, support functions, even people on the bench. It watches login duration, periods of inactivity, time spent inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Chrome. If there's no evidence of login on a working day, leave gets deducted. You can contest it, they say. They also say it isn't tracking keystrokes or screen content — just presence. Just whether you were, provably, there.
I read that and thought: this is the exact inversion of what I wrote to my friend two days ago.
I told him time doesn't need killing — it dies by itself, it's already a corpse by the time you take aim. TimeScope needs the opposite to be true. It needs time to be a substance that can be caught being wasted. It needs the murder weapon and the body, because without evidence of the kill, they dock your leave. It is institutionalising the very delusion my one-liner was trying to dissolve — that time is something you can hoard, spend, or be caught not spending, rather than something already gone in the reaching.
And of course it isn't really about time. It never is. This is Power and Money borrowing Time's clothes — a dashboard is Power, a xxx-basis-point margin drop is Money — dressed up as neutral, technical measurement so it doesn't have to announce itself as what it actually is: surveillance wearing a lab coat. With Sex, Power, Money, you can at least see the greed plainly when someone's caught in it. With Time, the greed gets to disguise itself as efficiency, as data, as fairness — "we're not accusing you, the dashboard is just telling us the truth."
A dashboard on every login gap. Different scale, same species of attention — the gaze that can only trust what it can measure, turned on something that was never suited to being measured that way. Thirty years, three stints — and this is where the place has arrived. Not because anyone there is evil. Because margin pressure, like every hungry ghost, eventually runs out of everything else to extract, and starts extracting your presence itself, second by logged second. By the way the hungry ghost is a Buddhist legend — beings with tiny mouths and enormous stomachs, never satisfied. That's not demonisation. That's diagnosis.
And that is diagnosing a civilisational confusion. In my view, we have mistaken the measurable for the real. We have mistaken logged presence for lived presence.
