Counterclockwise

Social platforms, mainstream media and conversations around the dinner table and at the workplace are buzzing with debates about social constructs like race, religion and gender. However, somehow the true nature of time in general and clock time in particular has escaped the attention of wider society. The clock has become, much like money, the thing it was only meant to represent. Well, it isn't, and maybe it's time to reconsider our relation with the clock.

We are taught that our clocks and calendars are based on the rotation of the planet around its axis, and the planet around the Sun. One rotation around the axis takes 24 hours, one hour is divided into 60 minutes, and 60 seconds make up one minute. None of that is true though. The Earth isn't a perfect sphere, it wobbles while it spins, and a day isn't exactly 24 hours. Also a rotation around the Sun, which isn't a perfect circle, doesn't take exactly 365 days; our calendars have changed throughout history, mostly due to changes in calculating "leap days" and making important religious days fall on specific dates.

For most of our species' existence, we have accepted the irregular rhythms of the universe and nature, using the sun, moon, and stars to understand and record the passage of time. Take the sundial: the hours expanded or contracted according to the interval between sunrise and sunset, making the days seem shorter or longer depending on the season. These clocks didn't determine hours, minutes, and seconds, instead they simply reflected the surrounding environment and indicated our place in the cyclical rhythms of nature.

This all changed when we started to produce our own time, like we do to this day. This probably began in European churches and monasteries in the 14th century, where bellringers, aided by crude mechanical devices, let people know when it was time to pray, visit the church, or get out of bed. From their inception, mechanical time devices were made to keep track of the regular intervals between strictly human, social activities and necessities. This was the start of a completely different attitude towards time. No longer was it a natural rhythm shaped by a combination of various phenomena, but a homogenous series of perfectly identical intervals provided by one source; here we get our first glimpse as to how societies are literally ruled by the clock, and how the clock has become a tool for exercising power.

Both the clock and calendar are products of the urge to regulate individuals and societies into the rhythms imposed by the ruling authorities that shape our daily lives, be they of religious, political or economical kind. The time on our mechanical and digital clocks is not what most of us think it is. It's no longer a reflection of natural phenomena, nor is it a true and absolute time that scientists are measuring. It was created and frequently altered to fit social, political, and economical purposes. The clock, in other words, doesn't measure time but produces it. Clock time is a social construct and a very specific way of looking at time, and as a global system, it's only about a century and a half old.

It was only in the 1800s, as railroads spread across the United States, that people began to think about regulating time to international standards. In the early nineteenth every city in the US had its own time zone – there were a mind-boggling 300 local sun-times in use. Running trains to a reliable timetable with this system was almost impossible, so time zones were introduced in the US in 1883. The international 24-hour time-zone system, which serves as a time reference for the world, was established the following year with the adoption of Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT).
_{source: BBC}

With the development of quartz clocks and atomic clocks, clock accuracy kept increasing. Nowadays we use 400 atomic clocks in labs around the world, the average of which is used to keep International Atomic Time accurate. In America, the official time is kept by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in Boulder, Colorado. From there it's broadcast to various points across the country and fed through computer networks and cellphone towers to our personal gadgets, all ticking perfectly synchronous. This national and global agreement on time makes trains and airplanes take off on time, smooths communication, and enables the 24-hour economy to run at a pace it's never run before.

Pace... I'm sure you've noticed a difference between the "pace of life" in rural and urban areas, or between the global north and the global south. In regions where people are more clock-oriented, they walk faster, drive faster, and talk faster due to the near-constant time pressure in their lives. This also contributes to chronic stress, and workplace stress, leads to poor food choices, and leaves us vulnerable to various (mental) health problems; I'll talk about our neglect of our biological clocks later. But for now, it's important to understand that our current maniacal adherence to "official time" stems mostly from the industrial revolution.

During the industrial revolution, the tyranny of time really took off:

But with the industrial revolution, employers needed a way to synchronise factory workers, to coordinate the arrival of raw materials and optimise production. The answer was clocks and it fundamentally changed our relationship with the clock.
_{source: BBC}

It is not a coincidence that our current public schooling system was developed alongside the needs of post-industrial revolution employers. Children have to get out of bed early at a time when their biological clock tells them they need more sleep. Then at school, they obey the school bell, telling them when they're allowed to have lunch or take a short break. And while in class they have to ask permission to do anything other than pay attention to the task at hand. Of course, they're given a reprimand of some sort if this task isn't finished within the allotted time as well. School isn't used to produce free and critically thinking citizens, but obedient workers which is the intended future for 90 percent of those children.

Time pressure is built into our lives from a very young age, as well as the neglect of our biological clocks. As with all other life on this planet we've evolved in a 24-hour day-night cycle, in accordance to which we possess genes with instructions for a biological clock that marks the passage of approximately 24 hours. Our biological, or "circadian" clocks prepare our bodies for sleep when the sun sets and for waking, active life when it rises. The intimate connection of our bodies with the natural rhythms of the planet and nature is vital for our health. Building our lives around man-made non-biological clocks, and the availability of artificial light makes us stay awake when our bodies and brains are expecting sleep. For evidence of why this is a bad thing, look at shift workers who sleep during the day. Their sleep is usually shorter and of poorer quality because the circadian system is instructing the body that it should be awake, and vice-versa at night.

Short-term circadian rhythm disruption can have a big negative impact on memory, problem solving, emotional responses and attention. And years of night-shift work has been shown to increase the risk of heart disease, infection, cancer, type 2 diabetes and obesity. So we ignore our circadian rhythms at our peril.
_{source: The Conversation}

Mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression; neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, stroke, and multiple sclerosis; developmental disorders such as autism; and serious disorders of the eye (including the development of cataracts) are all associated with circadian-rhythm disruption. It's even said that divorce rates are high when one partner is involved in shiftwork:

Multiple studies have shown that the divorce rate is higher and that social interactions are more negative when one partner is involved in shiftwork
_{source: The Royal Society}

Our sense of time has changed radically since the industrial revolution and we've been increasingly stuck on a treadmill that has us running constantly, chasing after ever-increasing growth and profits that benefit only a very small portion of the human population on this planet. Growth of an economy and an economic model that's just as much a human construct as clock time or money. "Time is money" is a product of rewarding time spent on work, when we used to measure time by nature, our own, and the environment we live in. Another way you can see we increasingly equate time and money is in the use of "spending time", as opposed to "using time". And it has made us forget what time really is.

In physics time isn't absolute; instead, it is connected to space in spacetime, and it behaves differently under the influence of gravity and speed. Time moves slower closer to Earth than in orbit where the gravitational force is weaker; this difference must be incorporated into the Global Positioning System to be accurate. I already mentioned the natural time kept by our biological clocks. And then there's our subconscious experience of time and cultural time. In places where the clock hasn't yet taken over daily life, time is measured in how long it takes to accomplish certain tasks for example. There's this Aboriginal tribe in Australia I often use to explain this. I don't remember what they're called since I saw it only once in a documentary, and it isn't important anyway. One of the elders of that tribe was asked, with the help of a translator, how many sons he has, and his answer was "many". The interviewer, wanting to know an exact number asked again, and the answer was again "many". Pressed by yet another attempt on the same question the elder tribesman said four names, drawing a stripe in the sand for each name, and concluded: "Many!"

This tribe, it was revealed later in the documentary, doesn't have words for numbers, only a word for "one", "many", and "all". They don't even have a word for "zero", because what use is there for a word for something that's not there? They do have a word for "not anymore"; they can express something that used to be there. Also, they don't have our classical wind directions like north, south, east and west. Instead, they express directions related to landmarks they know, like a hill or a tree. Distances aren't measured in kilometers or miles, but instead in songs, like: we've been singing a long time, or many songs. That's a culture that's alien to us, but try to imagine nevertheless how free these people are, living without the need for exact measurements of any kind. That's the exact opposite of the modern, western, capitalist mindset in which something simply doesn't exist if it can't be measured (read: monetized).

Well, since my time is running out, I'd like to close with a quote from the article "Researchers say time is an illusion. So why are we all obsessed with it?" with some wise words from theoretical physicist Prescod-Weinstein:

The ever-advancing NIST clock is one way to understand time. But theoretical physicist Prescod-Weinstein bristles at that definition. She says this version of time is just the time the government wants you to think about.

"The management of what counts as correct time and what time it is in any given place is deeply related to authority," she says.

The time from this lab is used to run our lives. It says when planes take off and land, when markets open and close, when schoolchildren arrive at class. It controls computer networks, navigation tools and much, much more.

Governments around the world aren't just providing the time as an altruistic service to citizens, Prescod-Weinstein argues. It's about keeping society organized and efficient. It's about increasing economic productivity.

And this is why people feel so tense about the time — it's actually a technology being thrust upon them. "Capitalism sucks, and I think a lot of people's relationship to why time is not cool, is structured by the resource pressures that we feel," she says.
_{source: NPR}

I hope this little rant hasn't taken too much from your time, and if it has I hope it was worth your while... If you haven't had enough of this very interesting and important subject, look below the video for the sources I used for this post.

Researchers say time is an illusion. So why are we all obsessed with it?
The ancient clock that rules our lives – and determines our health
Sleep, circadian rhythms and health
How to escape the tyranny of the clock
Shift Work and Sleep: Medical Implications and Management
The Tyranny Of Time

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