What If You Had Just 10 Minutes?

If you are like most Americans, you’d probably waste it

Photo by Zulfa Nazer on Unsplash

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

— Shakespeare, Richard II

Archeologists believe that human civilizations emerged at least 6,000 years ago. If we accept that figure as the “life time” of modern humans, and that an individual can hope to live about 80 years, that means that today we exist for the equivalent of about 20 minutes within the span of our historical existence.

Of that short time, the first quarter is spent developing our bodies and brains, and the last quarter is typically spent fighting against losing them. And of course, many will not make it the full 20 minutes. So, that leaves individuals approximately 10 substantive minutes to influence humanity. This brief whisper of existence is our influence window.

How would you use it?

If you were told right now that you had just 10 minutes to live, you — and perhaps most people — would likely choose a wholesome activity: spending time with family or friends, performing one noteworthy deed, etc.

But when we think of the question in epochal time, where an individual can make their historical mark in just 10 minutes within the span of human civilization’s existence, but over the relative time of several decades, for some reason the answer is decidedly different.

Source: The Economist, 2011

The overwhelming majority of people in modern professional life feel like they are struggling to keep up, as though daily life is an incessant treadmill that can never be switched off.

— Brian Klaas; the False Gospel of Stuff and Status

Chasing stuff

For the vast majority of the population, their moment in the epochal spotlight is spent chasing stuff. To accomplish this, they go to work in the hopes of earning enough to buy the things they suppose will make them happy — a bigger house, car, fancy gadgets, vacations, etc.

In the late 19th century, urban workers averaged around 60 hours per week. Given that most people then (and now) participated in the labor force during the prime of their lives, this means that their ten minutes to influence humanity was spent primarily chasing a check. To be more specific, if you factor an average of 56 hours of sleep per week, then work and sleep alone consumed about 70% of their influence window.

People in 2024 averaged somewhere between 34 and 40 hours working each week, according to official reports. That number seems low, however, because surveys of self-reporting workers put the number closer to 44 hours per week. Moreover, in 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 35% of workers did some work at home, which may not be accounted for in the official stats of hours worked per week. Whatever the case, with sleep, Americans in 2024 still burned about 60% of their influence window working.

Approximately 50% of workers either hate their job or find it only “somewhat” satisfying. Fifty-six percent claim their benefits suck and 70% believe they are underpaid. Therefore, more than 80 million people dislike their jobs, get underpaid and receive inadequate benefits, and spend 60% of the total available time they have to leave their mark on history doing it.

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

— Dale Carnegie; How to Win Friends & Influence People

Social media & politics

After wasting away nearly two-thirds of their influence window making other people rich in exchange for the ability to acquire some trinkets, Americans fritter away more time on social media. Americans between the ages of 18 and 55 spend an average of 146 minutes per day on the top platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat). Add another 47 minutes per day for the average YouTube user. Thus, people spend roughly 17 hours per week on social media of one or more forms, another 10% of their influence window.

While using social media to connect with other people — purportedly its original purpose — is not itself a bad thing, allowing it to consume nearly 10% of one’s influence window hardly seems a good use of time. Of course, certain people use it to become “influencers.”

One estimate of the percentage of social media users who become influencers is 2.4. The definition of an influencer is not universally agreed upon, but the Influencer Marketing Hub (IMH) states:

An influencer is someone who has the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.

IMH also sets the parameter for a “nano-influencer,” the smallest type, at 1,000 followers — a seemingly low bar.

Whatever the numbers or definition, becoming a social media influencer hardly seems different than any other job. In other words, it’s just another way to make some money (and perhaps a tiny bit of ephemeral fame) to get more stuff. It is probably not the type of influence one imagines when thinking of the bigger picture.

Still others waste a precious 10% of their influence window using social media for purposes far more vapid than moneymaking. These include the conspiracy theory mongers and political sycophants.

Conspiracy theories tend to proliferate with time and are often spread by those seeking “to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.” People with the greatest inclination to believe in them are usually some combination of “insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.”

Rigid political partisanship, and the tendency to vociferously identify with ideological movements, is driven by many of these same traits. People today often develop their political views in concert with their racial, religious, cultural, and geographical identities, an effect known as “affective polarization,” As one researcher notes:

In essence, we’re acting more like fans of a football team going to a game than a banker carefully choosing investments.

For some, then, the better part of 10% of their influence window is spent attempting to fortify their insecurities against the challenges of their reality, or to imagine reality altogether differently.

While it is understandable that a person might choose to say something about politics or even join a specific movement that deeply matters to him or her, for most people, evaporating 10% of their influence window on this kind of activity seems eminently wasteful.

Is spending a minute of your 10 minutes of existence posting things like this really a good use of your time? Social commentary can of course be useful, but the posts in this image are mere juvenile piffle.

Other distractions

There is a plentitude of ways people find to distract themselves, and many of them are not inherently harmful. Reading smutty novels, watching silly movies, or attending sports events are all entertaining escapes from the inevitable harshness of reality. They even offer opportunities for social interaction that most people find necessary for happiness. But, like with all things, moderation is the key.

Americans watched an average of 2.86 hours per day of television in 2021. They also used a computer or game console for entertainment for 0.56 hours per day. A survey conducted in 2019 found that men and women spend an average of 0.43 hours per day in the bathroom — between doing their business and getting ready. Across all states, Americans spend about 1 hour each day in their cars (this varies widely by city and state, hence the average).

Combined, these distractions comprise more than 20% of the influence window.

Source: Pinterest

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

— Oscar Wilde; The Picture of Dorian Gray

An uncomfortable truth

People have contemplated the meaning of life for millennia, often seeking it in religion. Yet, despite this pedigree of pondering, the vast majority now expend 90% of the time granted to them to make a mark on the world engaged in tedious or frivolous activities. This is not meant as a criticism of any singular activity; rather it is a call to think about how our limited time is actually spent.

It seems that a large segment of society has abandoned the pursuit of the meaningful in exchange for trinkets and distraction. Or, perhaps, the hunt for something greater was always conducted so fervently by a miniscule few that their efforts have simply overshadowed and, thereby, concealed the longstanding apathy of the rest.

Maybe most human beings never cared about life’s purpose, focusing instead on spending their time in selfish, insignificant endeavors. Perhaps religion is a mere tool, another form of distraction, to further the avarice of some and to justify the malaise of others, rather than an avenue for finding the bigger answers.

Regardless of what humanity’s true motivation might have been or is now, the numbers reveal a rather uncomfortable truth: most Americans really don’t commit time to any higher purpose or, worse, don’t care to bother.

Some might say that the economic system precludes spending much time or energy on such concerns. But this is problematic when one considers that every economic system depends on widespread cooperation. Accepting inequality of wages and wealth, mistreatment by employers, being overworked, and other distasteful conduct is a collective choice. Unionization movements of the last century proved that. Moreover, the cost of living is, in large part, a personal choice.

If the collection of widgets and over-indulgence in trivial distractions were as maligned as scientific understanding and advancement has become in some circles, imagine the progress humankind could make. Indeed, some of today’s problems — human-induced climate change, ecological destruction, and technological abuse and misuse, to name just a few — might never have morphed into the existential crises they are now.

But, alas, that is not the world in which we live. And it seems that is not who we are. It just might be that the figures we purport to despise — the selfishly ambitious and greedy, the childish and choleric, the shallow—are simply distastefully accurate descriptors of all of us to some extent or another.

Perhaps it is true that we don’t care about unlocking the mysteries of the universe or even of our own planet; that we don’t care about our cohabitants (man or animal) or the condition of the world that we all call home. We just want to live gluttonous, comfortable lives and let the outliers do the hard stuff.

As long as they don’t clamor too loudly about the unsustainable nature of our abundant superficiality, we will ignore them and carry on in our joyful delusion until the ground burns all around us and the answers to the wondrous mysteries of existence are forever lost.

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