“Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.” — John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Sit with that for a moment – what a beautiful piece of writing.
It’s from a passage where Steinbeck is describing a soldier living through years of peacetime routine — parade, drill, polish, repeat. Nothing happens. And because nothing happens, the years leave no mark. He looks back and finds… nothing to look back at. The time passed but stories didn’t accumulate. That’s what the posts are.
Moments with enough weight to stick. A before and an after. Something the memory can hang itself on.
Here’s what I took from Steinbeck when reading this: time is measured in moments, in changes, experiences and events. And we are living in a world that is aggressively stripping texture out of experience. The news cycle is a good example. A war. A celebrity split. A trade deal. A natural disaster.
There is so much corruption and idiocy all arriving at the same speed, in the same format, with the same emotional temperature, where any one of them alone would be historically noteworthy. But together, when everything demands attention, nothing gets it. The posts blur into background noise, we scroll on and the weeks slide past. I mean it’s already June!
But it’s not just the news. We’ve air-conditioned ourselves out of the seasons. Strawberries in winter, carrots, spuds, and asparagus all year round — the natural markers that once told our bodies time is moving have been quietly removed. We live in a kind of eternal present, comfortable and seasonless. And then there’s the screen time. Hours dissolving into the next level, the next episode, the next scroll. Not unpleasant necessarily — but leaving no trace of experience. No before. No after. Just a vague sense of drift and it’s somehow Friday again.
The memory has nothing to hang the time on. It shouldn’t surprise us that human experience is an extension of physics. An event in spacetime requires something to happen – a change – at that point. No occurrence, no event — no time. Steinbeck and Einstein, art and science, arriving at the same place.
The answer, I think, is almost embarrassingly simple: do things in chunks that have a before and after. Learn something hard enough that you can remember not knowing it and feel pride at the growth. Cook a family meal from scratch on a Sunday to remember that it is Sunday. Read a book that makes think, that challenges you to stop and stare at a sentence. Go somewhere that changes the light. Take on a challenge with a finish line. Plant something and watch it grow. These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re signposts, bookmarks, milestones. They’re the things that, when you look back, give the time its shape.
Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in 1952. He is one of the greatest American novelists — achingly human. If you haven’t read his stuff, I’d strongly encourage you to. Not because it will make you more productive or successful, or even happy! His books can be a bit of a downer if I’m honest – brilliant insight into human nature – but they usually don’t end happily.
But read them because like a lot of great art — it marks you. You come out the other side slightly different from how you went in.
Have a good weekend and do something eventful!