The ticking time bomb

My father has often narrated an incident that happened years ago when he was visiting with his niece.  It was approaching dinner time and his niece suggested that he eat.  Especially because of the old tradition, my father wanted to dine with the niece's husband.

The in-law asked my father to go ahead.  My father was barely done with dinner when the in-law sat down to eat.

This would come across as strange to anybody.  So, of course, my father remarked about it and wondered why the in-law didn't join him at the table.

I will give you the time to read this for you to come up with your explanation.

It turned out that the in-law would eat only at the designated time.  He wouldn't advance it by even a couple of minutes.

While that person's behavior might be extreme, the reality is that we are all conditioned by the clock.  A strange Pavlovian behavior modification that compels us to get up by a certain time, eat at a certain hour, work at designated times, ... instead of eating when hungry, going to bed when we are tired, ...

What if we had no structure that coordinated all our clocks?  Of course humans have marked the passing of time.  But, the clock that we look at is a modern construct.  Clocks across the world being coordinated is even more recent.  Like with everything else that we humans have created for ourselves, we don't pause to consider our relationship with the clock that we invented:

[Kevin] Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on. 

So, what is really going on?

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. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time.

The confusion shows up in daily and long-term behaviors.  Ordering young ones to bed, for instance, when it is still light outside during these long summer days is as odd as waking up teenagers at six on cold and dark winter mornings so that they can get to school at eight!  We fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.  Our construct of time through the clock also warps our understanding of long-term issues like the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change.

"For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time."  Nature has rhythms, yes, but is not bound by the seconds of the clocks that we use.  While we debate about the "daylight time" versus "standard time" of the clock, it has no effect on the flora and the fauna around us, which is why farmers operate on a different schedule from us urban dwellers.  Cows have to be milked not when the daylight savings clock-time says they have to be milked!

We live in a strange world in which we even have meetings in which people across the world participate, which means that some of the participants are interrupting their sleep and dinner and sex and whatever in order to be at the meetings.  And then we wonder why we have physical and health problems!

There's no going back to a way of life without clocks that are coordinated.  There's no possibility of operating with a local measure of the passing of time that depends on the movement of the sun and the moon, and our minds and bodies responding to the local stimuli.  But, we should certainly assess our own relationship with the clock that controls us.