What’s your ROTI?

What’s another acronym to an already growing list?

The Return on Time Invested is the benefit you get from the time spent doing a particular activity. Don’t look it up, I made it up. With so many time-hungry temptations vying for our attention, ROTI does to the mind what rotisserie does to the chicken, a slow, patient roast, good for the customer, but not for the chicken.

And it also focuses the mind on a paradox.

The ancients had a far lower life expectancy than us, their risk of death was statistically higher and phenomenologically more salient (it was easier then to imagine how one’s own life could suddenly come to an end, or severe suffering could arise), but they don’t seem to have developed an anxiety about time or intuitions about time economies in the same way we have done.

Carpe diem was certainly not FOMO. The via negativa of so many ancient traditions, both East and West, did not, for some reason, produce the negative, loss-aversive intuitions about time scarcity, temporal trade-offs or lists of 100 places to visit before I die, although the 7 wonders of the world would arguably have been top candidates.

We have more time, less statistic personal risk, and yet we are more anxious about zero-sum time games than ever before.

So many people are making a fortune on our sense of ROTI, and so many lives become miserable because of this mindset.