It is not the clock that traps us, it is our constant need to control every minute.
As Mr. Mumford says the modern man’s watch is his handcuff, he is not living time, only measuring it. The modern man has become a timekeeper, constantly recording moments instead of experiencing them. When he started getting late in noting time, he tied the clock to his wrist.
Once, we aligned our lives with nature — with seasons, sunlight and harvests. Life was not counted in years. We lived in continuity, not in numbers. But now, we divide life into decades — forty years gone, fifteen left — and in that counting, we have lost the art of living. We think too much and live too little.
We have turned life into schedules
Every meeting, plan and dream locked in calendars. There is no space left for wonder or surprise. We no longer wait for the rain or spring to decide when to meet someone. Now, time dictates everything. Socrates and Plato believed wonder is the beginning of wisdom, but today, wonder has no place, everything is just predetermined.
Night does not arrive with darkness anymore; it arrives when the clock says so. We don’t wake with the sun; we wake because the office demands it. Life has become Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: every day repeats the same meaningless circle. Look at a classical clock, it doesn’t move forward, it just begins again and again.
This is the myth of Sisyphus — punished to roll a stone uphill, only to see it roll back down every time. And he keeps doing it, believing it matters. Our lives are the same. We wake, work, sleep and call it progress. Those who perform best in this cage, we call “successful”. But as someone said, “The problem with winning the rat race is—you are still a rat.”
We carry the burden of time. It ages us and grows old itself. We say, “I have time,” but really, time has us. We try to measure it with seconds and minutes, but how can we measure something infinite? Mumford said the true capitalist revolution was not the steam engine, it was the clock. Because time became a commodity, divided into triple-8: eight hours of work, eight of rest, eight of sleep.
We even plan our deaths, pensions, retirements, graves, every moment scheduled. No one has time to simply be. We have lost the capacity to feel life flowing like water. Even physicists cannot truly define what time is, where it begins, how it flows, or what fountain it springs from.
Our obsession with measuring time has stolen our ability to live it. We have forced the infinite into little boxes – seconds, minutes, hours. The moment we are born, the countdown begins: finish school by 15, college by 25, job right after, marry, retire. Life is just moving from one box to another.
“By the passage of time, indeed man is in loss.”
Philosophers have written volumes on it, yet we have reduced time to clocks and calendars. Just trying to understand the ocean by measuring it with a jug.
Iqbal quoted it beautifully: “Ishq is the creator of time, and time itself has no name.” It flows endlessly, unconcerned with our joy or sorrow. When we are sad, time feels slow; when we are happy, it races. But time itself does not care. It moves on, indifferent.
Our nights now belong to clocks, not to darkness. Our mornings begin with alarms, not sunlight. We have chained time to our wrists, but imprisoned our souls.
Maybe it is time to reconnect with natural time, to feel the rhythm of days, seasons and silence again. If not everyday but some day for some time. Maybe freedom from time does not mean abandoning our schedules completely, but remembering they are only tools, not masters. We can still meet deadlines and keep alarms, but once in a while, we must step outside the clock. Sit under a tree without looking at the phone. Watch a sunset without taking a photo. Let a moment just be, without trying to measure or record it. That is when time stops owning us and starts belonging to us again.
Remember wde wear the clock on our wrist, but the real prisoner is the mind.
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Peace 🕊
