Trapped by time
Lots of thoughts I've been having about clock time.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have been presented with an unusual amount of free time over the past few weeks; this has brought up a surprising amount of thoughts and feelings about how I spend my time, the value I put on my time, and the worthiness relating to productivity.
It also made me think about how my life, like many others, is completely and utterly controlled by clock time.
The average weekday in my life goes a little something like this: Wake up, look at the clock. Yoga, look at the clock. Shower, look at the clock. Make coffee, look at the clock. Journal, look at the clock. Work, keep a very close eye on the clock, clicking on and off a timer for every task I complete.1 Eat lunch, whilst watching the clock. Finish work, perhaps enjoy a short period without considering clock time, then begin noting time again to cook dinner at an appropriate hour, then start calculating what time I need to go to bed, to get enough sleep, to wake up at a set time, to continue the cycle all over again.
And I’m a pretty flexible person, I have no dependents and I freelance, which means the majority of my time is exactly that: mine. Yet, I feel increasingly trapped by the ticking clock, bringing me guilt for ‘wasting’ my precious moments, ringing in my ears like a heartbeat under my floorboards.2
We’ve been measuring ‘time’ for a long time, but the Industrial Revolution is what changed the way we perceive and quantify time. Previously we counted the Earth’s rhythm in seasons and measured our days by the sun moving across the sky. As I’ve written about cyclical living and slow winters before, simply we would take it much slower during the colder months and work harder during the warmer months. Work and leisure were often intermingled, the length of the workday depending on the tasks at hand.
But the beauty of modern technology (lol) is that we can now measure time in minutes, seconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds. This is because, by the beginning of the 18th century, factories began to require significant time management, which meant workers had to begin their shifts at specific schedules.
On top of this, our reliance on transportation networks meant we could no longer use local time (measured by the sun at the highest point as noon) but had to submit to Greenwich time across the country. Though Britain feels like a small island, this still made a significant difference; On the longest day of the year, London sees sunrise at 4.43 am and sunset at 9.21 pm, whereas Shetland, the northerly point of Scotland, sees the sunrise at 3.38 am and sunset at 10.33 pm.
None of this was a natural process for us, we had to shift many of our natural bodily functions to clock time, when we ate, when we rested, when we slept. Accounts of factory owners slowing down or tampering with clocks meant workers were literally slaves to the clock.
This complex clock/time/freedom dance is quite new to me. I was home-educated growing up, which meant I was gifted with an abundance of free time.
My parents took more of a child-led approach to education, I could often choose what I wanted to learn and follow my path of interest as far as I saw fit. I have memories of boundless summers and what felt like day-long meanderings around the sunny countryside.
Time was never a scarcity, a concept I had to fight against. It felt like the only limit to my day was my set bedtime, one of the only structured pieces of a traditional childhood that my parents followed for a teensy bit of alone time.
There were even stages where I had perhaps too much free time, staring down the barrel of an empty day, week, or month, not exactly sure what I could ever fill it with.
Entering the educational system in my sixth-form years was a complete culture shock.3 A time-tabled week, appointed break times and lunch hours, set syllabi, and homework to encroach on my evenings. I felt like someone had put a straightjacket on me, my chest tightened breathing got heavy every time I thought about the day’s schedule; I went from being a self-led, self-organised, agent of my own life to–what I felt at the time–being led around like some sort of petty criminal.
I believe this dramatic life shift is what brought me a strong fear of passing time in my late teens. I could never quite relax in the evenings, checking my clock to see how many hours I had left. I would get upset if I felt I hadn’t ‘made the most’ of my weekend and the Sunday Scaries were a permanent feature. I used to make my boyfriend list everything we had done that weekend–often multiple times–just to ensure we truly took advantage of the time provided to us. (Thankfully I don’t ask him to do this any longer.)
Our obsessive measurements of time align incredibly well with our compulsive need to ALWAYS see growth and progress, constantly measuring ourselves against one another, checking our life is progressing in the ‘right way’. As Joanna Macy perfectly writes, "Life has become a race in a way that is historically unprecedented."4
With the ability to watch microseconds tick away you can feel your soul start to slip in a fascinatingly accurate, atomically-synchronised way. Here, give it a go yourself, can’t you just feel your organs beginning to fail? Sense all the younger, springier, child genius across the world begin to surpass you in life?
It never seems there's enough time to do all the things we need to do, which is why we always feel the need to “get there faster, do it faster, have it faster”? As Charles Eisenstein writes “The anxiety of modern society comes in large part from the feeling that there is not enough time."5
These anxieties surge when we consider the never-ending laundry list of issues we face as a society. The changing climate and other earth-shattering problems make it feel like there are only so many minutes, hours, and seconds to ‘save the world’. We have to do so many actions or make so many changes in a limited amount of time or else we’re all going to DIE! In fact, the deadline for humanity’s demise is now too a ticking clock you can watch flitter away if you’d like. (Don’t get me wrong, I still think this is an interesting project, but it does make me feel a little bit queasy.)
On the other hand, with our constant clock watching, we seem to struggle to look ahead, a thousand, hundred, or even ten years in the future seems too far off to pay attention to. Our life is too dominated by urgent demands to worry about the longer-term environmental, physical, or even mental effects of any of our decisions. Who can even think about the pollution effects of our business endeavours when we need to increase our stock prices NOW? Why would we worry about the physical or mental effects of working 50, 60, or 70-hour work weeks when we have rent to be paid, and savings to stock up on?
The clock makes 'time scarce and life short’,6 the unique moments in our lives are turned into just so many hours, minutes, or seconds.7 We can only play with our children for X amounts of minutes because we’re busy, we can only cuddle our partner for Y minutes because we have things that need to be done, we can only spend Z amount of time with our friends or family because we have more important things to do.
I see this scarcity reflected in my own life so often. I struggle with dedicating time to a hobby if I’m ‘bad’ at it because it feels like a waste of a valuable commodity. If I’ve spent 2 hours painting, only to produce something of ‘low quality’, what have I got to show for it? It feels like everything I ‘invest’ our time in has to have a worthwhile ‘output’.
Now I’ve been exploring what my life would look like if it wasn’t quite so controlled by the clock. Wondering if I could spend more time finding joy in activities I take, or be a bit more at peace on Sunday nights. I want to try to give myself space to shift and grow at the right time for me. We don’t judge a great oak for not growing quickly enough, or for not progressing in what we have deemed the right way.
I’ve been attempting to mono-task or simply sit and wait for things instead of trying to shove another podcast into my brain or read a new article during those precious moments. Folding the laundry, cooking, and even waiting for the train has brought me small joys when I am not constantly distracting myself by trying to make full ‘use’ of the time allotted to me.
Have you felt the restrictions of clock time appear in your life? Do you feel free of time constraints? I’d love to hear about your experience.
P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.
I actually have my tracker ticking away as I write this right now!
Funnily enough I’ve never actually read this book, I just watched The Simpsons episode about it.
This is like the last two years of high school for you Americans, sixth form is from 16 to 18.
From Active Hope by Joanna Macy
From The Ascent of Humanity.
From The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein. Page 66 if you’re interested.
If you're ever interested in exploring the concepts of kairos vs. chronos time, this piece is from the perspective of the Christian tradition - where kairos is the "deepest and truest form of time." https://mereorthodoxy.com/kairos-chronos
As you point out, technology is a big part of this time trap. You could replace looking at a clock with looking at your phone, constantly trapped by how others are using their time (should I be doing something else, because others on Instagram are?).
Re: climate. There's an interesting point here about how we view time is both restrictive but necessary? I wonder if climate communications can be effective without the urgency (and, therefore, anxiety) of the ticking clock, which is really encompassed in the 2018 IPCC report aka the "12 years to save the planet" report.