In Praise of Wasting Time Audiobook Summary
In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks.
We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with “extras.” Our university curricula are so crammed our young people don’t have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in “wasting time,” of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks.
Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-driven lives, and examines the many values of “wasting time”–for replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.
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In Praise of Wasting Time Audiobook Narrator
Alan Lightman is the narrator of In Praise of Wasting Time audiobook that was written by Alan Lightman
Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He was educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in theoretical physics. Lightman is the author of five novels, including the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams, two collections of essays, a book-length narrative poem, and several books on science. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.
About the Author(s) of In Praise of Wasting Time
Alan Lightman is the author of In Praise of Wasting Time
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In Praise of Wasting Time Full Details
Narrator | Alan Lightman |
Length | 2 hours 38 minutes |
Author | Alan Lightman |
Category | |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster Audio / TED |
Release date | April 25, 2024 |
ISBN | 9781508256984 |
Subjects
The publisher of the In Praise of Wasting Time is Simon & Schuster Audio / TED. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Psychology, Social Psychology
Additional info
The publisher of the In Praise of Wasting Time is Simon & Schuster Audio / TED. The imprint is Simon & Schuster Audio / TED. It is supplied by Simon & Schuster Audio / TED. The ISBN-13 is 9781508256984.
Global Availability
This book is only available in the United States.
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