"Seeing” Time

Check the time now. Look at a screen.

Isn’t it crazy that you instantly grasped the rotation of the Earth in a few digits? Isn’t it also crazy that depending on the numbers you see you think it’s early, late, time to eat, time to work or feel guilt? 

We yearn for the passing of these numbers in our youth. Once in the real world, we wish for it to slow down. If I could package the joy I felt learning May had 31 days on May 30th, I’d sell it to you. If the calendar didn’t tell me, I would not have known the 24-hour delay of the future. 

Funny thing…this documentation of time.

Waking up

My mornings start with the flashing of time. The alarm on my watch vibrates and I see the time flash on the screen. Depending on what the numbers show up, our psychology will change. 

A person who wakes up at 4:30 am is considered an early riser. I guess it’s early compared to this universal time of 9 am. The universal time in my teens was 7-8 am because parents had to go to work in their universal 9 am so us teens had to start earlier. 

When I woke up at 10 am I used to feel guilt. If I slept at 2 am, then it made sense to get my sleep and wake up refreshed at 10. Yet, we refer to certain numbers on a watch to denote shame on another human being. It’s considered waking up “late”. 

There is also the idea of sleeping “early” or “late”. If I didn’t have a clock at home, I would have no idea if I was sleeping early or late. I would be sleeping when I got tired. A natural response. 

By creating a clock, we can see time and the numbers proceed to alter our behaviour. 

Eating

I eat when I’m hungry. This can mean breaking my fast at 2 pm. But restaurants no longer serve breakfast menu items after 11 am. We further categorize what we eat as breakfast, lunch, and dinner by time. 

Instead of letting our body guide our eating habits, we’ve changed to let our clock tell us when to eat. I think this is ridiculous. We don’t all live the same universal lives. We do different things with our day, our physiology is unique to us and we all have different habits. Yet, the clock has slowly stopped us from thinking. 

Efficient Time

Clocks are truly a marvel. With the visualization of time, we’ve learned to be efficient. We’ve divided a day into 24-hour slots. With each hour, we have 60 minutes to squeeze out efficiencies. 

We’ve turned this into blocks on a calendar. By creating blocks to fill, we’ve learned to fill them up and this is called “busy”. We leverage this filled calendar to denote our importance. We use it to scream “Look how in-demand I am! Get the fuck in line if you want some of this!”

The real power move is Warren Buffett’s empty calendar. 

But few are able to disassociate from the machine that demands you fill up every block in your calendar. Look at your friend that moves into a big house. He bought it because his current place is too small for all his stuff. He’ll bitch about all the shit he has to move. Yet, he will buy even more shit to fill up the space. 

The tools of visualized time (i.e. calendar, clocks) have shown us a floor plan of our day and we can’t help but give in to our desires to fill up spaces. 

I used to be obsessed with minute efficiency. The classic 20-minute meetings with 10-minute gaps to optimize moving between rooms. Using the Pomodoro method of 20 minutes of work with 10 minutes of scheduled breaks. What followed were bouts of anxiety and panic. What often happened were days where everything fell apart like a house of cards. You only need one part of the calendar to take longer and everything breaks down. 

I’m not talking about whether I should’ve built slack into my system but the craziness of how my psychology got a royal fucking from treating time like a game of Tetris. I would have days where I’d watch TV. You know, have some good old fun. I’d check the time and feel impending guilt at not being “productive”. 

It’s not just me. The feeling of having “wasted” time seems universal. This feeling hits me when I check my watch and I subtract it from the last time I checked it. I now know how much time has passed and that creates all kinds of negative emotions. How odd that is. 

It’s as if I would do better to not look at a clock at all if I want to relax. But it seems the world doesn’t want me to do that. Everywhere I go, there are screens. It’s as if time is Big Brother. 

Every smart home appliance, phone, watch, computer….everything digital tells me the time. I can’t seem to escape the subtle overlord that is there to remind me that I am using time. It’s slowly singing me a lullaby “look how time is passing….look how your day is going…look how much is left of your day…what have you done?….what are you going to do now?….it’s been 10 minutes….it’s been 30 minutes…it’s dinner time….it’s bedtime….it’s late…"

A possible future

I handwrite my daily journals. I didn’t know this was weird until a friend said she didn’t know how to write in cursive. My generation used pen and paper in school. I’m guessing they have laptops in high school now. I could see a future where there is a generation that does not know how to write. 

My mother used to compete in abacus championships. I know what it looks like but I have no idea how to use it. My generation uses calculators. I have no idea if kids in school still use calculators. 

As I mentioned before, time seems to follow us everywhere through all our digital devices. But they all tell time with numbers. Like the abacus and pen, I think there could be a generation that doesn’t know how to read a two-handed clock. 

We already live in a world where ranges of time denote when it’s time to work, eat, sleep, and relax. We still get to decide in set ranges. If you go to a restaurant between 8 am to 11 am you can order the breakfast item. 

Maybe this is too dystopian but is the next evolution the loss of choice? I could see time continuing to change our behaviour to the point we let it tell us what to do. A world without choice. Where everyone eats lunch at 12 pm. It doesn’t seem so farfetched when we are surrounding ourselves more and more with time flashing around us. 

Spare a Thought for the Blind

While I’m inundated with more screens silently screaming time at me, the gap between my world and a blind man’s widens. Unless he has his pulse on a brail clock every day, he will have gaps of being completely free of knowing the time. 

He could proceed to spend an entire day waking up, eating, doing stuff, and sleeping by listening to his mind and body. It sounds like such a foreign experience from the average person in the modern world. 

I think it’s a worthy experiment to try. To spend an entire day not looking at the time. Can you imagine a morning where you wake up and you have absolutely no idea what time it is? You don’t know how long you’ve slept. You don’t know if you got below or above the “optimal” 8 hours. 

The clock helped us move from primal execution where we relied on our biology to an industrial execution of efficiency. Every glance at a clock is a feedback of your efficiency. This has done wonders for my own productivity. 

But with great power comes great responsibility. I think the next stage is to build a level of self-awareness where we learn to use time for our benefit instead of the other way around. 

I think we could learn a lot from choosing to be aware of our relationship with time. This might result in consciously deciding to outsource it. Some might want a clock to tell them its bedtime. But I think it's valuable to think about what that means for you and your life. 

Consider how you act when you don’t look at the clock 24/7. Where do you end up spending your time? Maybe you’ll spend a day reading an entire book instead of breaking it up by 30-minute reading increments. The former results in understanding the book to a greater depth than the latter. 

The visualization of time deepened our relationship with it. It’s like a coworker for life. I think it’s a neglected relationship that requires close examination.