Stop Selling Time, Start Stacking Life: The Philosophy of Urushi
Since that historical turning point known as the Industrial Revolution, we, the human race, have unwittingly internalized the extremely simplified economic principle known as “Time is Money” as an indisputable truth. The system that converts every ticking moment of the clock into monetary value was certainly revolutionary; while it formally accelerated civilization, it simultaneously cast an irreversible curse upon our mental structures. That curse is the low-resolution evaluation standard that now blankets the world, measuring the value of the human activity we call “work” solely by the physical metric of time spent. The result is the shape of today, making this the issue we moderns must face with the utmost sincerity.
The harm caused by this system is immense. In modern society, the essence of the act of work has been mercilessly diluted, eviscerated into a mere selling of time slices. In opposition to this, the recent movements praising “work-life balance”—asserting that life is not for working—are understandable as a physiological rejection of this excessive faith in labor. However, I cannot help but feel a danger in this trend as well. This is because the false premise that the act of working is synonymous with mere Labor has not been dispelled. If we debase work to the equation of Labor, perceive it as drudgery, and posit escape from it as the purpose of life, we are forced to spend the majority of our waking hours as if dead. That is, simultaneously, to spend life itself as if dead.
Fundamentally, the act of working for a human being should not fit within the framework of mere wage labor. It is an extremely existential activity: projecting one’s own life energy into the external world and leaving physical traces. Work is the only counter-measure a human possesses against the inevitable phenomenon of flowing time, holding an intensity that leisure—a consumption activity—cannot hope to match.
The greatest problem with the current social system is that while it is comfortable for those who produce nothing, or for those who do not burn their life force to create, it is too harsh an environment for those who attempt to burn their inner heat to create something.
Let us assume a master in a certain field, after 30 years of blood-soaked discipline, utilizes advanced technology to complete a difficult task in 5 minutes. However, when passed through the filter of current market principles, that result is processed as a mere “5 minutes of labor” and given an extremely cheap price tag. What should be evaluated is the vast time of 30 years lying behind those 5 minutes, and more than that, the accumulation of thought continued ceaselessly, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Yet, the modern capitalist system possesses neither the sensor nor the scale to measure that depth of time. Dismissing this simply as exploitation is easy, as history provides precedents, but I consider this a civilizational system error—specifically, a lack of resolution in perception.
In other words, modern society can only measure the length of time; it does not possess the thinking method to integrally evaluate the depth or density of time. As a result, the world has become filled with extremely superficial “content” that maintains only surface appearances. People stretch their time thin to sell it, chop their lives into pieces to exchange for money, and spend their days consuming thin entertainment. A mechanism has been established where people’s lives themselves are wasted in this shallow loop where nothing happens. The establishment of such a system, and the sheer scale of its population, is a first in human history.
Furthermore, ironically, the development of medical technology has contributed to the abnormal extension of only the biological human lifespan. A life that once averaged a close around the age of 60 is now forcibly stretched to 80 or 90 years. The problem, however, is that this extended time is unaccompanied by the heat source of living, and the issue of longevity does not account for this point. The mere extension of a biological survival state—where the heart beats and breath continues—for decades is not a cause for joy, but the form of a miserable future. In fact, that miserable future form already exists in Japan.
In 2025, in Japan, which has entered the world’s first super-aging society, if you look around the streets, you will routinely see many elderly people wandering in lonely isolation with unsteady steps, their conscious focus undefined, unsure of why they exist or where they are trying to go. Rather, this scene is now the very everyday life of Japan. Above all, they share one commonality. They were the vanguard troops who continued to sell their time to realize the massive system of the High Economic Growth period; they are the “parties concerned who created this future” known as the present. Unfortunately, they cannot deny this future-as-present. Because they created it themselves, and there, they too are compelled to live stretched out within this miserable extended time.
As a result, facing the vast void known as “old age” obtained as the price for establishing that system, they spend their 60s at a loss for what to do; in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, unable to endure the time that continues like a boundless life-support device, their consciousness grows hazy. This can be called a tragic end invited by over-adaptation to the system, but it is a fact that cannot be overlooked as a “success case of modernization.” That is precisely why we must completely change our way of thinking. For just as the future for them was the present, we can only assume we are building an even more miserable future.
The reality that we, who live in what was their future, must face is the structural defect of a society that ends up merely consuming and wasting the scarce resource of time. By merely speeding up this thin loop, we spread the lie that we are progressing and continue to avoid responsibility on a human scale. In the short span of a few years, changes may appear microscopic, but it is not hard to imagine that when we reach their age, a scene even more devoid of salvation than the present will have spread. The stoic idea of sacrificing the present for the future is also cliché, but the resolution of the concept of “future” that we assume is itself too coarse.
Viewed from this perspective, I welcome the powerful “Other” known as AI. AI far surpasses humans in information processing capabilities per unit of time, and it is trying to forcibly exit us from the sterile competition of “processing within time.” Of course, I place no trust in existing humanistic viewpoints about saving humanity or thinking of the masses; I perceive the penetration of AI as a welcome opportunity. Already, the era where humans compete on simple processing speed or the length of time spent is completely over. The survival strategy to survive the coming era lies in fundamentally changing the arena of battle. That is, to descend from the horizontal competition of the linear world—the length of time—and displacement towards a place that integrates the vertical domain—the density and depth of time.
The counter-concept I wish to present here is the advanced technology known as Sekisō (Stratification/Layering), which lies deep within Japanese wisdom.