In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, a venerable physician discovers a potion of youth. He gathers a group of elderly friends and administers the liquid to them as part of an experiment. He cautions them at the outset of the study:
Before you drink, my respectable old friends,” said Dr. Heidegger, “it would be well that, with the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should draw up a few general rules for your guidance, in passing a second time through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and shame it would be, if, with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns of virtue and wisdom to all the young people of the age![1]
The potion is effective, and soon his four friends are dancing youthfully, decrying the vagaries of age and making fun of their old, decrepit selves. This folly is short-lived. The potion’s effects are transient, and suddenly the four youths are old once again. They begin to fight over the remaining bottle, and in their scuffle they knock it to the ground. Dr. Heidegger pronounces his judgment over the experiment as the story closes:
“Yes, friends, ye are old again,” said Dr. Heidegger, “and lo! the Water of Youth is all lavished on the ground. Well – I bemoan it not; for if the fountain gushed at my very doorstep, I would not stoop to bathe my lips in it – no, though it’s delirium were for years instead of moments. Such is the lesson ye have taught me!”[2]
Dr. Heidegger uses an interesting word to describe the effect of the potion on his imbibers: “delirium”. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines delirium as a “mental disturbance characterized by confused thinking and disrupted attention.”[3] Confused thinking and disrupted attention aptly characterize our modern understanding of time.
In this short essay, I will argue that human flourishing requires recovering the biblical view of time as a gift to be stewarded, not a commodity to be controlled. I will evaluate how we commodify time in three ways: our quest for agelessness, in pathological productivity, and in our emphasis on the extraordinary at the expense of the ordinary.
Quest for Agelessness
You might expect the discussion around human aging to be characterized by gratitude. After all, in 1900, the life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was around 47 years, versus in 2023, when human life expectancy was 78![4] This is a nearly 70% increase in human longevity in one century. A sustained increase in the next century would lead to an average lifespan of 129 by 2140.
However, our posture towards ageing more closely resembles a war, with endless attempts to push back the enemy’s line or even rout the enemy altogether. Innumerable scientific enterprises, like the Methusaleh Project, aim to extend longevity and vanquish old age.[5] Biotechnological efforts to improve human muscle mass, memory, and reduce oxidative stress all seek to ameliorate the effects of aging.[6] This leads to the prescient questions asked by the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2003, “Is human life a victim in need of rescue? Should human limitations be attacked altogether?”[7] What resources and at what cost should these ends be pursued? Heidegger’s four friends squandered the rest of their lives in search of a renewed fountain of youth. “When does the preoccupation with youthful bodies or longer lives jeopardize our prospects for living well?”[8]
A posture of receiving time as a gift instead of a commodity to be exploited is not at odds with projects to advance longevity or reduce the untoward effects of aging. But, all efforts to “conquer” the human project or “transcend” human limitations altogether are incompatible with recognizing the truth that we are designed – and designed well – by a God who fashioned us with intentionality and care (Psalm 139:13-14). Human beings are not whatever we decide to be; we are what the Creator made us to be. We are “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” (James 4:14). As the Psalmist instructs, recognizing our limitations can lead to wisdom. “So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12).
The commodification of time looks like an endless quest to fill up our time barns ever fuller, treating time like a resource to be hoarded and zealously guarded. Receiving time as a gift, like daily bread, looks like the humility of finitude. The former attitude results in anxiety; the latter in rest. For, as Jesus said, “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Luke 12:25). We don’t need to fear fortieth birthdays and feeble hair follicles; receiving time as a gift allows us to appreciate the wisdom that comes with aging and escape an unbalanced veneration of youth. We must recapture the outlook of Dr. Heidegger: “For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no hurry to grow young again.”[9] Youth is beautiful, but so is gray hair. The arc of life bends in the shape of a narrative, a narrative whose value surpasses the delirium of being forever young.
Pathological Productivity
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, romance author Danielle Steele shared her secret to writing over 170 novels: she worked like crazy.[10] Most days, she slept four hours. At times, she wrote for twenty-four hours straight. Each year, she took off five days at Christmas and a week in the summer. The rest of her time? She punched away at her novels from before sunup to after sundown. The Business Review praised her as a hero of our age – a doer, a discipline junkie, and a high-achiever. But might this exorbitant productivity come at a cost? Are her five marriages and five divorces not scars in her battle for superhuman productivity?
In “4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”, author Oliver Burkeman gives a name to this malaise: Pathological Productivity.[11] The well-established literary genre of “Time Management” books belies yet another way we commodify time: we manage it. Like a group of kindergartners on a field trip in need of our constant supervision, our minutes need direction, order, and a marshalling towards some purposeful end. Time is not received as a gift, but as a means to an end determined by our will.
I write these words as an invalid suffering from pathological productivity. I falsely believe that I can work a full-time job, move across the world, be a dad to six young children, pursue a Bioethics Master’s, preach at my local church, function as more than a mediocre husband, be a medical missionary, exercise, worship God, enjoy nature, shoot basketball with my son, squeeze out time for reading, and somehow hold onto sanity and a light spirit all at the same time. I am guilty of “instrumentalizing time”, of treating each minute not as a gift to enjoy but as a means to an end. Gone are non-productive hobbies. Gone are slow conversations. Gone is spontaneity. Gone are restful amusements. Gone is rest.
Author John Mark Comer diagnoses our preoccupation with hurry, with our urgent quest to satisfy our desires by an accumulation of more through the vehicle of time management:
Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control.[12]
In contrast to this posture of treating time as something to be managed, instrumentalized, and extracted like a thoroughly rung rag, is the idea of stewarding time. A steward wisely invests that which is entrusted to them. God gives us our allotted days as a gift to be used wisely for his glory, our good, and the benefit of our neighbor. An anxious hurry for more, more, and more, or a delirious belief that I can accomplish an unlimited number of tasks, is antithetical to receiving time as a gift to be stewarded wisely. In his book “Margin”, physician Dick Swenson pushes back against our culture of progress in words that, as a parent, cut to my heart:
We must have room to breathe. We need freedom to think and permission to heal. Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has time to listen, let alone love. Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high-speed good intentions.[13]
I don’t want a life of unsustainable velocity. I don’t want to run my children over with high-speed good intentions. But how does one escape from our cultural obsession with more? A single travel sport becomes an all-consuming endeavor. Those at work who are most efficient in getting things done are only given more tasks to do; their productivity does not allow them to get ahead, but only to be asked for more. There is the endless danger of climbing the ladder of life, at ever greater speed, only to one day discover with sweaty palms that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.[14]
Comer gives a helpful reminder that balances both our human aspirations and our human finitude: the reminder that we are image and dust.
Image and dust. To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential. We have the Divine’s capacity in our DNA. We’re like God. We were created to “image” his behavior, to rule like he does, to gather up the raw materials of our planet and reshape them into a world for human beings to flourish and thrive. But that’s only half the story. We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers. Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite. Image and dust.[15]
Two concepts can help us recover the gratitude of stewarding time and escape the commodification of time management: seasonality and sabbath.
In “How to Inhabit Time”, philosopher James Smith challenges us to view time seasonally: “Seasonality means that, rather than being governed by the unceasing ticks of a minute hand, our lives unfold in eras… for temporal creatures like us, the season is perhaps the most natural form of timekeeping. The answer to the question, ‘When am I’ isn’t six o’clock or 2022; it is more like youth, middle age, chapter 3 of a life.”[16]
When I recognize that life is composed of seasons, and that specific callings will fluctuate from season to season, I am freed from the impossible notion of doing everything at once. A season of life filled with young children is perhaps not the time to pursue vocational advancement and secondary degrees. To sense a calling to be a medical missionary does not mean that living out that calling looks like having my boots on foreign soil every day. What is beautiful about the season of childhood? Is it not its unburdened freedom, creativity, exploration, and exuberance? Is it unwise, then, to fill that season for my kids with vicarious productivity, with an endless quest to instrumentalize their time towards accomplishments, accolades, and superlative ACT scores? Would that not be to, somehow, miss the point of the season of life they are in? To live seasonally is to live with discernment. It is to ask, “God, what are you calling me to in this season?” It is to be a faithful and grateful steward of the now.
A second way to escape pathological productivity and the commodification of time is to practice the Sabbath. In “Sabbath as Resistance”, Walter Bruggemann writes, “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”[17] The most helpful framework I have discovered for Sabbath is this instruction to “Take one day each week to stop producing and start receiving.” One day for stepping off the treadmill of accomplishment. One day for opening my hands and receiving God’s good gifts. One day not to do and just to be. To me, that sounds like a breath of fresh air. Why, then, do I forget so often to breathe? Seasonality and Sabbath. Two means to push back against the instrumentalization of time. Two means of inhabiting time in a more flourshing, full, and grounded way.
Instagram Life: In Pursuit of the Extraordinary
In “Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues”, philosopher Brent Waters asks why so many Americans are struggling despite material excess:
Progress has given us unprecedented affluence, education, technology, and entertainment. We have comforts and conveniences other eras could only dream about. Yet somehow, we are not flourishing. In fact, we are fragmenting, even in the midst of abundance.[18]
Why might this be? Waters posits that one source of dissatisfaction is that we have forgotten, culturally, how to value ordinary things. We have forgotten the formative power and the deep meaning of boring things like household chores, doing the laundry, meal preparation, showing up for work, and being good to our neighbors. Instead, influenced by the false narrative of social media, and Instagram pictures of our coworkers at the Taj Mahal, we begin to believe that only the extraordinary things, the Instagram-worthy moments, are of value. Waters writes:
We are fabricating a world saturated with excitement and pleasure, an endless array of experiential possibilities – a world congenial to a synthetic culture that is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Hence we imagine we are at liberty to make and remake ourselves at will… we live in a culture in which everyone is or can be extraordinary… this is not a good place to be, for it is actually a culture pervaded by cheap and banal amusements. It is a culture that, despite its cheerful rhetoric, is tedious, humorless, devoid of playfulness, and deadly serious.
As finite mortal creatures, we best honor, serve, and utilize the extraordinary by concentrating on and caring for the mundane and commonplace. We flourish by caring for one another in the ordinary times and places of our creaturely existence. The task at hand is to be faithful pilgrims rather than to flatter ourselves as mediocre creators of our lives and fate.[19]
Oliver Burkeman shares the story of a professional YouTuber who traveled each year, alone, to innumerable exotic countries. One day, this vlogger was in a suburb of Japan, watching families ride bicycles together in a public park. He suddenly burst into tears and could not contain his weeping. He realized that his life of traveling alone to one dream destination after another had cost him the beautiful and ordinary moments of a shared family life in a simple local park.[20] Being a digital nomad has its costs.
Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin instructs, “Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things… as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.” Social media teaches us that the valuable moments in life are the spectacular concerts, the beautiful outfits, and the flashes when we throw off the boring routines of our daily existence to do something really special. But, when we instrumentalize and commodify time in pursuit of the special, the exceptional, and the extraordinary, we miss out on the good of being boring. We miss out on the most foundational, the most formative, and the most beautiful parts of the lives God designed. Like children playing “I Spy,” staring out the car window to find something red, we miss the beauty of the lupines, Tetons, wrinkled faces, and white pines. Like whale watchers fixated on a breach that never comes, we forget to savor the sand, the lull of the waves, the salt on the air, the squawk of seagulls, and the warm humidity.
Social media stokes the fire of our fear of missing out. Does my life measure up to my neighbor’s? Are my children in the right activities to thrive? Am I successful enough? Beautiful enough? Unique enough? Plagued by restless insecurity, I go in search of more and more and more, hoping that enough extraordinary things will add up to a meaningful life. Hoping I can finally declare, “I’m enough”! But the denouement never comes. The anxiety never abates. The fear never withers away. Instead, a creeping sullenness, a hardening cynicism, gathers in my soul like layers of sediment.
Oliver Burkeman offers a wise insight: When it comes to life, the truth is, we are all going to miss out on almost everything.[21] In the vast array of possible life experiences, we can taste, as embodied and finite people, only the most infinitesimal fraction. I will never know what it is like to explore a Bengali sea cave. I will never understand the nuances of quantum physics or fly my own private jet. I won’t play the oboe or learn French or be part of a symphony. This recognition sounds depressing but is actually freeing. Instead of deliriously cramming more and more into an already overfull life, I exercise the gift of wisely deciding and stewarding.
Burkeman points out that the word “decide”, stemming from the Latin decidare, literally means to “cut off”. In deciding, I exercise the privilege of “cutting off” possible trajectories of my life to make space for the ordinary. I will never soar away from Earth’s orbit, but I will tuck my five-year-old into bed and read him “The Wind in the Willows” while he falls asleep. I will never have the technical mastery to climb K-2, but I will sit on the porch with my wife while Ford and Eleanor whiz through the sprinkler like frisbees.
In cutting off limitless choices and embracing finitude, I reorient to the restful truth that I am image and dust.
From Delirium to Rest
As modern westerners suffering from time-delirium, we have forgotten that human flourishing recognizes time as a gift to be stewarded and not a commodity to be controlled. By receiving time as a gift, we don’t waste our lives in search of endless youth at the expense of wisdom and gratitude. By stewarding time with seasonality and Sabbath, we avoid the crushing burden of pathological productivity. Finally, by deciding to value the mundane and the ordinary, we escape the wearying search for the exceptional. These whispers hint at a life that is more fulfilling, more restful, more meaningful, and, ultimately, more human.
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References
Bioethics, The President’s Council on, and Leon Kass. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness: HarperCollins, 2003.
Brueggemann, Walter. Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: Penguin Random House, 2019.
Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change: Free Press, 1989.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne’s Short Stories. First Vintage Classics Edition ed.: Vintage Classics, 2011.
MacroTrends. “U.S. Life Expectancy (1950-2025).” 2025. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/life-expectancy.
Merriam-Webster Inc. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 2019.
MethuselahFoundation. “Making 90 the New 50.” 2025. https://www.mfoundation.org.
Smith, James K. A. How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022.
Swenson, Richard A. Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives: NavPress, 2004.
Waters, Brent. Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life: Baker Academic, 2022.
[1] Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Short Stories, First Vintage Classics Edition ed. (Vintage Classics, 2011)., 103.
[2] Ibid., 108.
[3] Merriam-Webster Inc., The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 2019).
[4] MacroTrends, “U.S. Life Expectancy (1950-2025),” 2025, https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/life-expectancy.
[5] MethuselahFoundation, “Making 90 the New 50,” 2025, https://www.mfoundation.org.
[6]The President’s Council on Bioethics, and Leon Kass, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (HarperCollins, 2003)., 168-196.
[7] Ibid., 307.
[8] Ibid., 301.
[9] Hawthorne, Short Stories, 102.
[10] Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)., Chapter 9.
[11] Ibid., Chapter 9.
[12] John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (Penguin Random House, 2019)., 146-147.
[13] Richard A Swenson, Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives(NavPress, 2004)., 13.
[14] Stephen R Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Free Press, 1989)., 98.
[15] Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
[16] James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022)., Chapter 5.
[17] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014)., 38.
[18] Brent Waters, Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life (Baker Academic, 2022).
[19] Ibid., 240-241.
[20] Burkeman, 4000 Weeks, Chapter 12.
[21] Ibid., Chapter 3.
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