When Did Time Become the Enemy?

Remember those summer days when you were a kid? They were endless. Like time stood still. But today, life seems to fly at warp speed.

Our perception of time is deeply tied to our subjective experience of what’s happening around us. If everyone’s sleeping on an airplane then we are more likely to doze off. But, have you ever noticed how time can feel different based on the activity? 

It seems to fly when we are having fun and crawl when we are not. If you want time to stand still, just enter the vortex of a Doctor’s waiting room or your local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

When you’re 10 years old, one year is 10% of your entire life. When you’re 50, it’s only 2%. When you’re 80….okay, you get the point. This mathematical reality does seem to affect our perception of time. But that’s only part of the equation.

I’ve often wondered how our relationship with time has changed over the course of human existence. Sure we have the same 24-hours as our ancestors. But has our perception of those 24 hours changed?

I think we can both agree that technology has made us more productive in countless ways. In a sense it has changed the numerator, where the denominator is a constant 24 hours. In the same amount of time, we can create, analyze and communicate vastly larger sums of information than ever before.

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that by now we’d be working 15-hour weeks, because technology would make us so productive that we could maintain our standard of living with far less labor. Ironically proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are making the same claim today.

Instead of just making us more efficient and productive, technology has made us more demanding. As if productivity only begets, well, more productivity. Like a hamster wheel that keeps speeding up until the little guy gets tossed into the shavings. Artificial Intelligence is more likely to throw gasoline on this already raging dumpster fire.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution time was based on observing the sun’s passage, lunar phases, and the changing seasons, not the clock. A farmer’s day ran from sunrise to sunset.

The introduction of the oil lamp and later electricity dramatically changed how we perceived time. Suddenly, we weren’t bound by daylight. With artificial lighting we could stretch the day, fight off the night, and push productivity past the limits of sunlight. That was the first domino in the slippery slope.

The Industrial Revolution and its demands for punctuality required workers to sell their labor in hourly increments. For the first time, time was “not passed, but spent,” and punctuality became a virtue. Units of hours and minutes became a virtual currency embedded in our lives (instead of sunlight).

Today that virtual currency is at a premium. So using Waze to beat traffic, Amazon for shopping, Instacart for groceries, Uber Eats for most of your meals becomes more efficient than doing it yourself. Like the old analogy that if Bill Gates accidentally drops $10,000 on the ground he loses money by bending over to pick it up. How sad. If you never go to the grocery store, a restaurant or buy your own coffee do you lose some part of your humanity?

Perhaps seeing time as a currency is why the United States fell from 15th to 23rd place in the international rankings of happiness. Our lowest score ever. The more we focus on our productivity, the further we drift from the small human rituals that ground us.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans had more reverence for darkness. Candles and oil for lamps were expensive. Without artificial light, there simply wasn’t much you could do after dark. Most people went to bed shortly after sunset.

See, continuous sleep is a modern habit. Our ancestors divided their sleep into two segments: first sleep and second sleep. People went to bed with the darkness (first sleep) but woke around midnight. That period of wakefulness was called “the watch”. It was a period of quiet contemplation. During this period, which typically lasted one to two hours, people would engage in various activities like praying or meditating, reading (by candlelight) or talking with their family.

Given that most beds were shared by multiple family members, opportunities for intimacy were slim. “The watch” time was often used for sex.

But many people simply used this time for prayer, meditation and quiet contemplation. Something we wouldn’t dream of doing today. After an hour or two of wakefulness people went back to sleep (second sleep). If this practice had continued, we would undoubtedly use that time to be more productive: to create, analyze and communicate more information.

We’ve lost that quiet space between the first and second sleep—the intermission where the mind could wander, imagine, or simply be. Instead, we demand continuity, efficiency, and control.

In the ultimate irony some even use sleep trackers today to measure how “productive” their sleep is. When we do wake at night we often fight to get back to sleep. It’s stressful and frustrating. How will we be productive tomorrow if we don’t get our eight hours? It’s an example of how our relationship with time has changed. Our ancestors didn’t fight the clock the way we do.

The irony is that in our pursuit to be more productive, we’ve managed to squeeze in more productivity and less living. And, the more we squeeze time the more it slips through our fingers. As AI begins to make us more productive, let’s not fall into that trap again. Let’s use the newly found time and productive to wander, imagine, or simply be. After all, as J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “not all those who wander are lost,"

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