Exploring the alien planet was a risk; it was too close to a black hole.
It exposed Cooper to time dilation — for every hour he spent on the planet, seven years would pass on Earth.
By the time Cooper returned to the ship hours later, he had lost 23 Earth years.
He watched video messages from his family. It is the most heart-wrenching scene in Interstellar.1Interstellar is a sci-fi film directed by the legendary Chris Nolan, whose works include Inception, Tenet and Oppenheimer.
Cooper grinned as his son, Tom introduced Cooper’s newly born grandson (Tom was 15 when Cooper left Earth, now an adult).
But in the very next message, sent years later, Tom said that the boy died. Cooper had missed all moments of his grandson’s life.
What’s more painful is that Tom had also given up waiting for Cooper. That was the last message he ever transmitted. Cooper had lost his son.
He thought that’s all the messages he had, until his daughter, Murph, came up on the screen.
Murph was 10 when Cooper left. She couldn’t accept that her father would leave her. So this was the first time Murph talked to Cooper.
Still in pain after all these years, what she said crushed Cooper into pieces:
‘… today is my birthday. And it’s a special one because you told me… you once told me that when you come back, we might be the same age. And today I’m the age you were when you left… So it’d be a really good time for you to come back.’
Cooper lost his family because of work, because of time.
How we lose our family time
At their best, arts remind us of profound truths about life. Here, Interstellar warns us how invisibly precious the time with our family is.
True, we are not likely to wind up around a collapsed star. That’s not how we suffer the lost of family time. Instead, our black holes come in psychological forms:
1. Obsession with efficiency
At work, sometimes the workload we give others dehumanises them. We treat people more like worker drones with specific productivity and efficiency settings, and less like family-oriented human beings.
At home, yelling at our siblings or children seems to get us what we want quickly. While it is more time-efficient, we forget about the subtle, long-term damages that it causes to the relationship.
2. Losing ourselves in technology
Our great-grandparents perhaps never expected that we would spend more time with our digital machines than our family.
They fantasised that, as technology progresses, we will have more time for our families — the robots and AI will do our works.
And they were partially right. Our computation and automation let us finish tasks in a fraction of the time they would have needed.
However, they did not expect this: we don’t actually spend the extra free time on our families. Rather, we add more workload to occupy the extra time.2See The Psychological Benefits of Working Less. See also this analysis on the mental effects on shorter workweek.
3. Excessive ambitions
Being ambitious in a career is admirable. Our study or work is a huge part of our life. It is our spiritual service (‘ibādah), and ambitions can elevate its quality to excellence and beauty (ʾiḥsān).
But ambitions untempered by wisdom are mirages. From a distance, they look like desert oasis that will satisfy our thirst for success. When we get there, all we see are the dry sands of emptiness.
In chasing after good grades, job promotion or target revenue, you may lose the time for what truly matters to your happiness.3What matters for our happiness has been studied extensively. See Happiness: What We Learn from a 75-year Harvard Study
How to protect family time
1. Influence our organisation to value family
Help others to understand that valuing family is not just an emotional sentiment; we are not doing it just to feel good.
Families are the very foundation of a healthy society – a realisation recognised by intellectuals for millennia.4For example, Confucius (d. 479 BCE) emphasises Xiao, or filial piety, in his ethical system. A good society, according to this sage, places great importance on honouring family members, including those who are no longer alive. Al-Fārābī (d. 950) views the family as an integrated aspect of one’s political life. In Talkhis nawamis aflatun, he asserts, ‘What we say about all cities, is also true of the single household, and of each person’. If we can’t even extend our kindness and sense of duty to our family, why would we sincerely do the same to our country, which consists of strangers whose race, religion, or political views may differ from our own. A society that ignores family falls apart socially.
Show your colleagues that you are protective of your family time. Do not answer messages outside working hours. It may not be easy at first. But they will learn to respect your boundaries.
Do what you can to embed the importance of family in the culture of your organisations. Bring it up in lunch conversations. Share online articles or videos that talk about it. Embody it in your own attitude towards work and family.
Remind yourself that your colleagues not just productivity units. They are someone’s father, mother, son or daughter.
2. Rein in our technological usage
Differentiate the technologies which:
- make your work easier
- They help finish your work faster, so you can spend more time on life and family.
- make it easier for you to work
- They compel you to do more work, even when you are with family.
Use that differentiation to choose which apps or techs to use and avoid.
Also, establish offline periods when you are unreachable. ‘Go dark’ when it’s time for you to be with those you love.
During your digital sessions, intersperse them with deep breaths. After a few breaths, ask yourself:
- What am I trying to achieve here?
- What is my main purpose for achieving it? Can I leverage my resources to get it another way?
- Is it better for my health and my family if I take a break?
Don’t always expect you can control yourself with willpower. For example, use apps like these to as external barrier.
3. Reevaluate our career pursuit
When I was a PhD student, I met Jorge, a Chilean friend. He was in his forties.
I can’t forget him because when we were doing experiments together, he would constantly remind people around him us to appreciate our family time, that it will be gone before we know it.
And people felt how Jorge lives those words. Even to his friends, he would slow down and take time to treat us like we are family.
It’s not that work is less interesting to him. Far from it. He told me unequivocally that doing his PhD is one of the most enjoyable things he had ever done.
If you have a close friend who is working on a PhD, you would know that ‘enjoyable’ is rarely the first word that comes to mind. PhD can be grueling.
Jorge showed me you can love and be ambitious in your career, but not at the cost of appreciating life’s real treasures: your family and the finiteness of your time with them.
We do this by situating ambitions in the larger context of life. In practise, I recommend writing the answers to these questions:
- What is the time cost of pursuing that ambition (exam result, professional rank, or market share)?
- What is the family relationship cost of pursuing it? Especially in the long run.
- Why do you pursue that ambition? Are you doing it for money or admiration? Uncorrupted, both are good motives.
- Let’s say it is money. How do you avoid purchases that put you in debt? So you can give up less of your income as interests to the banks.
- What are alternative vehicles to earn money, ones that cost you less family time and relationships, perhaps ones that you enjoy more?
- If you pursue ambitions for admiration, have you overvalued what others think of you?
- After people give you those thousands of praises and congratulations, they will move on and go home to their families. How is it like when you go home to yours?
- Do you feel less worthy if you are not productive? Do you unconsciously want people to know that you are busy studying or working at odd hours while others are with their families?
- Do you, deep down, pursue your ambitions to be accepted? To be loved?
- What are other ways you can find genuine acceptance or love? Is there another way — a more meaningful way — to feel worthy as a person?
Through those answers, explore your attachment to ambitions.
Your family is your world
Use those protection strategies to resist the gravity wells that steal away your time.
It will notwill not be easy, especially if you are in a demanding environment that worships entertainment and technology, or ‘hustle’ and ‘busy’.
Keep working at it, before the damage is irreversible, both for you and your family.
As depicted in Interstellar, even if your career can literally save the world, you still experience excruciating pain if you lose the time with your family.
Your family is your world. Don’t you think it matters at least as much as the outside world?
- 1Interstellar is a sci-fi film directed by the legendary Chris Nolan, whose works include Inception, Tenet and Oppenheimer.
- 2See The Psychological Benefits of Working Less. See also this analysis on the mental effects on shorter workweek.
- 3What matters for our happiness has been studied extensively. See Happiness: What We Learn from a 75-year Harvard Study
- 4For example, Confucius (d. 479 BCE) emphasises Xiao, or filial piety, in his ethical system. A good society, according to this sage, places great importance on honouring family members, including those who are no longer alive. Al-Fārābī (d. 950) views the family as an integrated aspect of one’s political life. In Talkhis nawamis aflatun, he asserts, ‘What we say about all cities, is also true of the single household, and of each person’. If we can’t even extend our kindness and sense of duty to our family, why would we sincerely do the same to our country, which consists of strangers whose race, religion, or political views may differ from our own.