Time

Tick-Tock and the Human Condition: Unpacking Our Obsession with Time ⏰🤯

Tick-tock, tick-tock... Time. That relentless rhythm, that elusive concept. Today on Radio Tipping Point, I'm diving into the very essence of it – how we perceive it, manage it, and, perhaps, how it manages us. I'm trying to live by the motto of emergence, where things don't always go as planned, and I confess, it often leads to complaints because it did not turn out the way we envisioned it to be. This journey into temporality is a continuation of thoughts from my last show, The Future is the Past Shrouded in the Present^, where we explore how our aspirations are based on a future we cannot truly know, leading to inevitable disappointment. But what if things

not going as planned isn't a bad thing at all?

We begin by taking a meta-view of time, far beyond our current Anthropocene anchoring. Imagine cultures where time is measured not by clocks, but by the rhythm of life itself: units of rice cooking (about half an hour) or frying a locust (a moment). In many cultures, there's no clear differentiation between past, present, and future; it’s one continuum. Before clocks, we survived fine, living by natural rhythms, and understanding seasons and daylight without needing a clock... to know whether lunch would be served soon or not. We truly went with the flow, unburdened by the linear approach we've since embraced.

The shift began subtly with the Church dictating when people should show up for Mass. But the real inflection point, I'd argue, came with the

19th century and the introduction of the railroad.

Suddenly, people needed to know when to appear, leading to the standardization of time and pushing the Industrial Revolution into overdrive. This wasn't met without resistance. From Paris in 1830, where revolutionaries reset the clock, the town clock, to throw all of this into kilter against the monarch's control, to Martial Baudin's 1894 attempt to blow up the clock at Greenwich Park, people understood the correlation between time and control. Even peaceful protests emerged like Bristol's main railway station still bearing a third hand for Bristol time. People clearly understood they were becoming more and more estranged from nature, recognizing the link between time, their work, and their destiny – their moment of rage against the machine.

This journey through history reveals how time is used as a means by which we exercise power. From education training us to be present and functional for work, to the relatively recent phenomenon of our Monday-Friday work week (versus the historical "Saint Monday" revelry). Taylor's time and motion theory solidified this, equating value... tied to time.

But what are the hidden costs of this temporal fixation? One of the most lethal means of deprivation, I learned, is to conceal light from individuals, causing them to go mad because they do not realize what time it is. It makes them completely rudderless, highlighting our forgotten reliance on natural anchors like air, water, and sleep, which we now take for granted.

We've invented concepts like winning time through productivity and technology, without questioning their usefulness. We've created free time, often gender-related, which we then fill with external management and consumption because we've thrown overboard our rituals and traditions. Wasting time is equated with being unproductive and aimless, stifling experimentation. And buying time, through the service industry or even AI, means we outsource the whole thinking process to AI, and understand that AI is just another way of buying time, leading to a loss of our capabilities. Ultimately, time is money, a quantity we manage, produced not by nature, but by the clock itself.

This linear obsession has led to a progress trap, where we assume that progression is always positive, ignoring the undue circumstances and externalities that are being created. We've negated the ability to rely upon nature for those things that are already being produced for us. I'd argue, we don't produce anything. We manufacture things.

Never wanting to end on a downer, I offer a ray of hope for both you and myself. The first step is awareness: understanding that things were not always this way, and therefore, they don't have to remain this way. We can do something about this if we so choose.

Can we throw a monkey wrench into that plan every once in a while and mix things up? I did, by ending the show earlier than expected. Did it throw you off? Did it make you fantasize about what happened, just because your routine was broken?

It's a small example of how our routine imposed by others can play a very, very important role.

Can we suppress time by deciding that those rules do not apply to us for a period? If our free time is truly ours, don't we have a say in the way that we use that time? I recently tried this, leaving my daily schedule open for a prolonged period. I was pleasantly surprised, in fact, almost shocked that there was an emergent quality that I had that I had completely neglected. This emergence is the gift I want to give you: the ability to free yourself from... those certain time constraints. It might be traumatic at first, not knowing what to do with your free time, but I firmly believe you will find things that you didn't even know were possible.

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