With life having reached that stage where each passing minute grows more precious than the previous, I’ve become a time conservationist. How can I conserve the remaining minutes? Or at least make them more meaningful? Less wasteful?
I began pondering this puzzle, as I often ponder many puzzles, while standing in my hallway waiting for an elevator to arrive at my floor. It took an inordinate amount of time for the lift to appear and, once inside, I gained even more pondering time whilst it stopped on at least a dozen floors during its descent. Which got me thinking — how many minutes of my life have fallen into the vast void of elevator commuting?
Having failed to log such minutia for the 25 years I’ve lived atop this downtown tower, there’s no way I can know for certain. All I can do is make a ballpark estimate based on ballpark generalities. Which is always dangerous since I don’t even like baseball.
Let’s say, conservatively, that I make three roundtrips per day. Each leg of the trip, if it only stops once on the rise or descent (a conservative estimate), takes a minute. So that’s 2 minutes per roundtrip or 6 minutes per day. Furthermore, I’ll assume the wait time for an elevator is roughly 45 seconds. So that’s 90 seconds per round-trip, or four-and-a-half minutes per day. I’m trying not to depress myself, so I’m gonna round down to 4 minutes. So, conservatively, that’s 10 minutes/day.
365 days in a year means 3650 elevator minutes in a year. 25 years of this means I’ve spent 91,250 minutes elevatoring. Which boils down to 1,521 hours. Which boils down to 64 days… and those are 24-hour days, not 8-hour workdays. If I just wanted to look at elevator time as “time I could have spent working”, that’s 192 work days spent in the elevator. That’s over a half-a-year of valuable creation time spent just going downstairs to take out the trash, check the mail, or go to the grocer. Half-a-year!
Just as I completed these calculations, the elevator reached lobby level — the doors sliding open to release its human contents into the lobby. Waiting to enter was a mother pushing a baby in its stroller. The realization that I’d spent more time riding this elevator than this kid’s been alive was rather disheartening. I’m pretty sure, when the grim reaper comes a reapin’, I’ll be wishing I could have all this elevator time back.
But then I realized how much better I have it than anyone who’s had to commute to work their entire lives. I’ve been working from home since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can only imagine the decades of life I’ve reclaimed by not sitting in traffic. And so, I felt marginally better. Besides, is an elevator commute really “wasted time” when it results in a new blog post? The time I just saved writing this month’s essay can now be applied to something more constructive. Like… say… nah… I’m sure I’ll just use it to take more photos…
©2025 grEGORy simpson
ABOUT THE PHOTOS :
Pods : OM Systems OM-3 with an Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens
A Quicker Descent : Olympus Pen-F with an Olympus 8mm f1.8 Pro Fisheye lens
Redacted : Leica M6TTL with Leica 90mm f/2.8 Elmarit-M. Shot on FP4+ at ISO125 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal).
Cyborgy : Olympus M-1 (precursor to the OM-1) with Olympus 135mm f.2.8 lens. Shot on FP4+ at ISO125 and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal).
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