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Friday, August 22, 2025Spirituality

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The greatest possible waste of time would be to waste all of the time allotted to you, in your life, for any lasting object other than God . . .

Michael
Pakaluk

To waste time is not to use it for nothing, but to purchase something much less valuable with it than what one could have purchased.
I say "purchased" because time is like money and is said even to "be" money. Time is an indefinite good ready to be assigned to or used for a variety of different things, like money. When we assign time to something, we purchase that thing with that time. The time is gone forever, like money once spent. What remains is what we purchased with it. We have a finite amount of time to spend, and a finite amount of money.
What we might have purchased with the time, but did not, is what economists call the "opportunity cost" of the use of time. All use of time has an opportunity cost. Time is wasted when the opportunity cost is clearly greater than what was purchased with it. It's not that we spent it on nothing, because everything that we choose, we choose for some good.
The clearest example of wasting time today is in the use of screens. Someone sends me a link. I go to that link to check something out briefly, I think. An hour later, I realize that I've been scrolling without serious purpose through Facebook, X, Instagram, or TikTok.

I've "wasted my time" because I've gained in that hour only some mixed pleasures from gratifying my curiosity -- "mixed" because that slight good is likely to be mixed with many bad things, which I don't directly seek, but which make the total distraction a net loss for me. I mean internal sins of envy (sorrow at another's loss), anger (disproportionate desire for punishment), greed (wanting something apart from a good reason for it), and pride (such as preening myself on not having the flaws I see in others).
Wasting time in the precise sense described stands on its own as a lamentable instance of foolishness. But when we put it in relation to other things, it shows up under other major vices as well. "Just now, without complaint, you spent 40 minutes scrolling through X, while you have been struggling recently to pray 10 minutes a day?" -- This is a gross injustice against God, and an expression of a tepid love for him.
Likewise, you spent 60 minutes scrolling when you could have read a good book, made progress on household repairs, caught up on bookkeeping, or sent thoughtful emails to friends and relatives.
The greatest possible waste of time would be to waste all of the time allotted to you, in your life, for any lasting object other than God, thereby giving up an infinite good, for a finite good which, in relation to eternity, is as if nothing. The saints say that the greatest suffering of anyone so unfortunate as to be damned in hell would be the realization that he might have spent his life in possessing God, but instead he acquired, well, money, fame, being "liked," power, sensual pleasure, comforts, or even the vain pleasures of a gratified curiosity. This is possible. It is possible to have wasted all of the time which one once possessed.
On the other hand, many good things will look like wastes of time, although they will not be. Prayer looks like a "waste of time" because you seem to be "doing nothing," that is, you are not by your own power changing anything perceivable in the corporeal world. An attorney who bills at $1,500/hour certainly looks like he is wasting his time if he takes 30 minutes to go to Mass during the day. If he gets home early to be at dinner with his family, he may even do the mental accounting that the meal has cost him more than dinner in a Michelin-star restaurant.
All fine things, all beauty, and everything "noble" (in Aristotle's sense), will look like a waste of time. Play looks like a waste of time, as do music and art, as does a genuine liberal education.
We do well to ask: What is the virtue we should cultivate so that we do not waste our time? There are right and wrong answers to this question, non-Catholic answers and one Catholic answer.
Historically, the Founders and shapers of our country believed it was the virtue they called "industry." Look at Benjamin Franklin's famous table of virtues in his "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection" in his autobiography. Fully four of his 13 virtues are about some realization of "industry":
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
The great flaw in his list is that he gives no scale of goods to discern what is genuinely good, useful, or "necessary." The reason is that his list speaks mainly to young men with "proper ambition," who want indistinctly to "make a mark on the world" and to "make a name for themselves," but no more.
For a Catholic, rather, "One thing is necessary," (Luke 10:42): the love of God and neighbor, for us, is the sole criterion of whether we've wasted our time.

- Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His latest book is "Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel."