ult: Collect and make avail of your ULT

If there is one thing that this World Cup should teach all of us – no, it’s not to count your chickens before they hatch – it is to value ‘unnatural lost time’, or ULT. While this may sound something straight out of Henri Bergson – the philosopher who spent a lot of time thinking about ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ time that ticks outside and inside people, respectively – ULT is the cumulative time not spent in playing football that is then added to each half of a game. Considering much stoppage takes place between play due to the usual fouls and injuries, but also goal celebrations, time spent awaiting the video assistant referee’s (VAR) decision, substitution, time-wasting and spectator pitch invasion (which is yet to happen in Qatar), for nitpickers, it makes sense to add two sets of temporal slabs at the end of each half. So what if it seems like almost the duration of a half for old-timers.

In life, of course, we tend to think of ULT as wasted time, some even categorising relationships that either don’t come to fruition or come apart as being in this category. But what one can do – and must do – is after every day, stack up one’s ULT and push it to the next morning before punching the clock again. What will happen is the appearance of a rich, glorious stash of what is FT, or free time, seemingly out of nowhere and nowhen.