“The pace of our lives governs our experience of the passage of time. And how we move through time is, ultimately, the way we live our lives.” – Robert Levine, A Geography of Time

In this blog, I’ve talked about swimming in an ocean of breathing, of air, of thoughts, of life, surrounded so much by these things that we don’t even see them. Another aspect of existence that is so abundant that it is invisible to us is time. We are so immersed in time that we think we know what we’re talking about when we talk about time. But time is full of so many assumptions about what we agree on. It’s said that time is money. It’s said that time is the only thing we have. Like life itself, time is the most abundant thing on the planet, and the most scarce. 

In his marvelous book A Geography of Time, Robert Levine points out that constructs of time vary wildly from nation to nation, and that time has both caused and been affected by huge shifts in culture. Some civilizations revolve around event time – time marked by human needs and natural cycles. Recently, many civilizations have picked up the standard of clock time. With the rise of the industrial era, factory workers had their motions examined to the nearest second by Frederick Taylor and his researchers, and for decades, people have worked under increasing expectations of hyper-efficiency. Now we all have an atomic clock in our pockets at all times in the form of our cell phones, and globally, we are likely to make some very interesting strides in adherence to clock time.

Not everyone has the privilege of working from home, but for those of us who do, working from home has changed our relationship to time – maybe more than it’s changed our relationship to how we work, our interpersonal relationships with our colleagues, and where we need to be geographically in relationship to work. In the history of revolutionary shifts in how we work, the pandemic is a big one. 

When I went into the office, I was hemmed in by the schedule I needed to keep to catch my commuter train. My world was full of demands on my time, and clock time dictated when I woke up, when the cat had to get off my lap, and how stressed I was about what time I left work. I felt starved for time, all the time. Ethnographer Leslie Perlow calls this a “time famine.” 

Without external restrictions, it’s up to me to decide when it’s time to start work. I have to decide all day every day when it’s time to stop petting Fatberry and get work done. It’s more freedom than the old way, but it comes with a lot of choices – and I’m getting decision fatigue. Without the external pressures to run interference, I have to ask myself – can I spend that 5 extra minutes? What if it turns into an extra hour, and now I’m an hour behind on my work? Now I have to be on a time diet – in a world of limitless options, the pressure is on me to make the most virtuous choice.

Time famine extends to the little people who most need to live on event time. We Taylorize our children – this is when you play outside. This is when you eat. This is when you poop. We do this with toddlers – two-year-olds. Wake up, we have to get you to school. Hurry up, we’re going to be late. You can’t have a snack, we’re having dinner soon. 

I used to work a job where I gave advice to preschool teachers about what to do about tantruming children. The number one cause of tantrums – more than “She took my toy,” more than, “The peas are touching my sandwich” – number one with a bullet – was rigid adherence to a concept of time that the child didn’t agree with – children who wanted to live on event time. The number of teachers who were in constant conflict over schedules was outlandish. Imagine – children didn’t think it was time to stop playing! Explosions of temper were about this more often than any other thing. 

COVID took a lot of families outside of an inflexible distribution of time. For most of us, it was absolutely bizarre. We talked about it all the time – it’s like the world stopped. If we were lucky, we were working from home. Lucky or not, our children weren’t in school. As we uncoupled from our schedules, a lot of WFH types also uncoupled their children from schedules. Sure, school-age children needed to sign onto the Chromebook by 9am, but that was easier when we didn’t have to wake them at 6am to get them in the car by 7 to get to the babysitter’s by 7:30. The rhythms got a lot gentler, and the stakes for missing the precise time got a lot lower. 

And now we’re back to it. How do we feel about it? During shutdown, we saw that life could be different. Is the Great Resignation about having glimpsed another way, a way outside of any schedule at all? Is a different relationship to time a bell that can’t be unrung? Are people leaving their jobs in part because they want to decide what they will do with time, the only thing we have, even more than they want economic security? Having tasted time affluence, are we vowing to never go hungry again?

And you know what else? The robots are coming. In a world where rote tasks used to be done by inefficient humans who bridled at being slaves to the clock, in our near future, mechanizable tasks are likely to be done by machines. I wonder what this will do to humanize our relationship with time, when making choices about time becomes a very human privilege. 

Scarcity and abundance run our economy – they run our behavior and how we feel about our time, too. How we feel about our time is how we feel about our lives. Those of us who get to make endless choices about how we spend our time experience a freedom that is denied to people who still have to show up to work on time, and take their breaks when scheduled instead of when they have to pee. In a world where most of us used to feel the same pressures, many of us have thrown off the shackles while many more of us are more chained than ever. What will we want from our time in the future? Is there a chance for our ideas about time to become more expansive, less constricted? Or will the widening divide between the haves and have-nots extend to the basic building blocks of living a life, one minute, one breath at a time?