We have colonized time just the way we have colonized space – and our wild, natural rhythms are in a sense contained and imprisoned by the structure of everyday life (workweeks, vacations, etc). We inherited this without much choice or say in the matter.
Intro – talk about why this matters, why this is interesting
There are some things about the world that we inherit that most of us are unlikely to question seriously. Why do we use clocks? Why do we use calendars? Why are there 24 hours in a day? The Earth takes about 365.25 days to orbit the sun, that’s a year.
Why do we typically have a 5-day work week? Why is the traditional job described and considered “a 9 to 5”? Consider phrases like “I’m on the clock”, “do it on your own time”. How do we think about holidays and sabbaticals, and parental leave. Gap years.
We have inherited a very narrow, specific way of looking at time. And if you think about it, it’s quite improbable that this was designed for optimal human flourishing. Rather, it was likely designed for the convenience of the ruling class – and this can often be inconvenient or outright unhealthy to the masses.
(By the way, why is it 2018? Kurzgesagt makes a compelling case that we should add 10,000 years to the calendar – the point being to recontextualize the present moment in a hopefully more universal human history.)
Recap seeing-like-a-state / existing ribbonfarm context
In A Big Little Idea Called Legibility, Venkat talks about James C Scott’s book Seeing Like A State – how the bureaucratic impulse for Legibility has a way of replacing functional disorder with orderly dysfunction.
- ‘scientific forestry’ – when you try to increase lumber yield by planting trees in tidy rows, you ruin the ecosystem.
- Urban planning – Jane Jacobs’ The Death And Life Of Great American Cities describes how a similar process systematically sucks the life out of cities
The above, taken from SlateStarCodex’s book review of Seeing Like A State, compares the street maps of Bruges (a premordern organic city) with Chicago (a modern planned city). You see how Bruges looks ‘natural’, like veins on the underside of a leaf, while Chicago looks like a harsh grid.
Disorderly, orderly. Illegible, legible.
From the review:
- Henry Ford’s assembly lines
- Taleb’s “Harvard-Soviet Complex” of central planning, and criticism of ‘soccer moms’ who overplan and overschedule and overmanage their childrens’ lives
Thinking about time
Now… consider what your schedule looks like. If you’re born in a modern city, you’re conditioned to think about time in terms of years, days, hours, minutes, seconds. This seems normal, but it’s really just one way of seeing. There are alternate ways of seeing.
Here’s a thing I think about – it’s fairly easy to imagine what life in the wilderness is like, spatially. We can watch Netflix documentaries about people living in the forests. (Human Planet. It’s really good, just to see that there are different ways of being than being a heavily-scheduled city rat.)
But I think it’s a lot harder to imagine what wild time is like. Maybe I’m projecting here, idk.
Summary / bits from Sideways Look At Time
“Cow-time vs clocktime”
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Quotes
“It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” – Cheryl Strayed, Wild
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Links to consider / possibly integrate
People used to sleep twice: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783 – “Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning.” Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
Why do we have fixed mealtimes? https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/945758660679974912
“Join me against circadian fascism”
Wired – How the body’s trillions of clocks keep time – “Almost every cell in our body has a circadian clock,” said Satchin Panda, a clock researcher at the Salk Institute. “It helps every cell figure out when to use energy, when to rest, when to repair DNA, or to replicate DNA.” Even hair cells, for instance, divide at a particular time each evening, Panda has found. Give cancer patients radiation therapy in the evening rather than in the morning and they might lose less hair.
Raptitude – your lifestyle has already been designed – “But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.”
NYtimes – Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss “I’m constantly aware of lost opportunities. I used to think such lost opportunities were beautiful towns flashing by my train windows, but now I imagine they are lanterns from the past, casting light on what’s ahead.”