Unraveling Our Obsession with Time: Clocks, Perception, and Society
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Contemporary society is obsessed with time — it is the most used noun in the English language. Since clocks with dials and hands first appeared on church towers and town halls, we have been bringing them closer towards us: into our workplaces and schools, our homes, onto our wrists and finally into the phone, laptop and television screens that we stare at for hours each day. We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our “free time” is rigidly managed by it too. Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock. We are “time binding” animals, as the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin put it in his 1987 book, “Time Wars.” “All of our perceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain, use and implement time.”
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people reported that their experience of time had become warped and weird. Being trapped at home or laboring unusually excessive hours made days feel like hours and hours like minutes, while some months felt endless and others passed almost without notice. It seemed the time in our clocks and the time in our minds had drifted apart. Academic studies explored how our emotions (such as pandemic-induced grief and anxiety) could be distorting our perception of time. Or maybe it was just because we weren’t moving around and experiencing much change. After all, time is change, as Aristotle thought — what is changeless is timeless. But rarely did the clock itself come into question — the very thing we use to measure time, the drumbeat against which we defined “weird” distortions. The clock continued to log its rigid seconds, minutes and hours, utterly unaware of the global crisis that was taking place. It was stable, correct, neutral and absolute.
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But what makes us wrong and the clock right? “For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of our electronics. And we’re wandering around with an early primary school level of knowledge about it.” The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks”, does not matter. Thus, the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.
