Life is not instant coffee

In a world overwhelmed by hustle culture, we need to slow down and watch life as it happens around us.

My favourite Danish song is from 1973: it was sung by Poul Dissing, with lyrics by Benny Andersen, and it is supposed to have been written by a fictive persona, Svante, a “half-drunk, half-in-love, half-bald, half-fat” poet. This song, “Svantes lykkelige dag”, along with other song-poems that Andersen attributed to Svante in his novel-album, Svantes Viser—a viser is something like a ballad about ordinary life—was an unexpected hit and remains a Danish classic.

“Svantes lykkelige dag” (Svante’s happy day) is better known by its refrain: “Om lidt er kaffen klar” (In a while, the coffee will be ready). Essentially, it is Svante talking about one of his happy mornings: he has not always had a happy life, at least not by neoliberal standards. His girlfriend is taking a bath, and he is waiting for her to come out and join him for breakfast, the common Danish fare of cheese on rolls. The coffee is on: it takes a while for good coffee to be brewed. Svante looks around himself and observes things like a flock of birds, a spider: small unimportant things. The stanzas point out that “life is not the worst one has” and end with the refrain: “And in a while, the coffee will be ready.”

There is no instant coffee in that song.

I have nothing against instant coffee, but good coffee, like everything good in life, takes time.

In pursuit of quick solutions

We live in an age where time has been stolen from us. Everything has to be done faster. Speed is the only thing that matters: from fast food to faster cars to supersonic jets. It is only a few privileged people who, if they wish, can buy themselves time. Most of us, especially the aspiring middle classes, are running around trying to “make time.” The faster we run, the less time we have. Part of the appeal of a song like “Svantes lykkelige dag” is that it reminds us that we need to slow down and watch life as it happens around us. Life, after all, is not the worst one has—a point made with typical Danish understatement!

This is not just a question of “living life”; it is also a question of solving life’s problems. In a culture of instant coffee, fast food, and so on, we come to expect, at times unconsciously, quick solutions. This spreads from ordinary life to global politics, from relationships to wars. What Israelis want in Gaza is a quick solution. What Putin wanted in Ukraine was a quick solution. What Western powers would like in both Palestine-Israel and Russia-Ukraine is a quick solution. Politicians—across the Left-Right spectrum—come to power by promising “quick solutions”. As a rule, not one of these solutions works.

Danish politics in the 20th century was characterised by the realisation, rare in most nation states, that solutions take time. Life takes time. It is not instant coffee. Societies cannot be run like a computer program.

Dangerous incapacity

This was one of the things that, when I moved to Denmark in the 1990s, appealed to me: the traces of this tradition of stopping, thinking, acting, giving it time, were still there. Since then, even in Denmark, the movers and shakers, the hustlers, have been taking over—across party divisions. These politicians are often aided by technocrats. This is inevitable because technology, unlike society or life, can be changed instantly: if you have the means, you just need to implement it. You flick a few switches, turn an extra knob. So can corporations, at least if their bottom line is “profit”: it just takes a slight reordering of regulations and numbers.

Both technology and corporations are extremely bad models on which to base a state, a society, let alone life. These are instant coffee models. Politicians who have bought into these models—and name me a single significant politician in India or abroad who has not!—are simply incapable of solving the problems of society; they are essentially even incapable of living life as it should be lived. And they impose that dangerous incapacity on all the rest of us, when we accept their paradigms, definitions, and assumptions.

As against that hegemonic tradition, we have someone like Svante, the half-fat, half-in-love, half-bald poet, a man not very successful and not always wise, who nevertheless knows that “life is not the worst one has”, that you cannot run after life or happiness. You have to wait calmly, waiting for the coffee to brew, your partner to finish her bath and come out drying her hair, the flock of birds to fly across the patch of sky that you can see, the small spider to scramble up the wall.

This is knowledge all of us have deep inside, but it is shouted down by the “systems that matter”. We sometimes protest for more jobs or more pay, but we never protest for “more time”. But that, as the Jamaican-British reggae-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote, ought to be a political demand: “More time fi leasha / More time fi pleasha / More time fi edificaeshun / More time fi reckreashun / More time fi contemplate / More time fi ruminate / More time / Wi need / More / Time / Gi wi more time.”

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.