Preface
Many moons ago in the summer before I started university, I went on a trip to Papua New Guinea, then still an Australian protectorate. I had a pen friend from a coastal fishing village, an hour’s slow boat trip from Lae. I remember this time vividly, as I felt like I had experienced what was then thought of as “primitive communism,” a utopian natural state of cooperation.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use this concept to denote an early form of society whose members collectively share all resources and in which there is no hierarchy. I have since read “The Original Afluent Society,” where anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes how huntergatherers, with very little of what we would call technology, spend most of their time relaxing or in leisure pursuits, as they satisfied their needs with a three- to five-hour working day.
In the village, I was plagued by mosquitoes but tropical fruit grew abundantly for the picking, taro and sweet potato were cultivated in gardens, and fish in the sea were plentiful. The living conditions were indeed primitive, and I slept on a bench next to a row of girls in a women’s hut with no privacy whatsoever. But there seemed to be all the time in the world. Needless to say, there were no clocks!
I recall one day, as it was nearing Christmas, spending an entire day making coconut milk. Young and ignorant as I was, I suggested that if we altered the method by which the coconut flesh was squeezed in the cloth, we could make the milk much faster and increase productivity. The young people I was doing this with looked quizzical and told me that the making of the milk always took a whole day. They were not in a hurry. They were not interested in speeding up the process—it always had and always would take a full day to make. Now, forty years later, as I write this book on time pressure, I wonder why I so insisted that saving time should be our overriding orientation, an unquestioned good. I have since learned that the important things in life can’t be quantified, timed, measured, or accelerated.
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