Feeling
Time

Author’s note — I wrote this more than 20 years ago as a college sophomore. I was confronting — without language for it — the fact that my experience of time was unstable, largely due to my brain revving on a high dose of an SSRI I was misprescribed for depression. A year later, I was committed to a psych ward and bestowed a bipolar diagnosis. Researchers would validate my interoception 14 years later in The Temporal Experience of Mania.

The essay didn’t know what it was. But what I was actually doing was writing the phenomenology of mania from inside it.

Societal assessment

In the American media, the term “fast-paced life” gets thrown around often without any regard for its meaning. The topic behind this catchphrase is very complex. Essentially, it raises the question of “Slow down America, what’s the rush?” Indeed, life in the Information Age has reached a dizzying pace. I believe that the cause of this acceleration of cultural tempo is our underdeveloped understanding of time and its many shapes and forms.

We all live by a schedule. As children, the public school system moves us through stages of learning. The time we spend in school as students is in preparation for adulthood. Upon graduating high school we are expected to continue developing along a common path that usually leads to more education at an institute of higher learning. Our society imposes this schedule on us. Those whose paths do not lead directly to a college or university after high school are expected to enter another arena of preparation — the Armed Forces, the Peace Corps, etc. — or to join the workforce to better contribute to the national economy.

As I progress into adulthood I feel more and more pressure to perform. Even worse is the sensation that I am not moving quickly enough through the steps of this popularized agenda. I have felt the need to stay on schedule with my studies. This has been quite a task, as I entered VCU in the fall of 2000 with no AP credits and I even had to take a remedial math class. I have spent the last two years here “catching up” to where I should be. I feel the monetary pressure to enter the private sector as quickly as soon as I graduate. Once I’m employed and thereby a bona fide “adult” I feel I am to invest my earnings wisely so that I will be able to retire early and enjoy the remainder of my life at my own pace. The short of it is that I want to maximize my time on this planet but with every anxious glance at my wrist I lessen my unique and individual total by another evil little increment.

Through talking with my peers and participating in extracurricular activities I have found that others feel this pressure too. I have come to realize that the motives society has imposed upon me have my head spinning faster than the ride I’m on, and leave me wondering why I can’t live at my own pace now. To understand why not we must consider the socio-economic implications of living in the United States, an industrialized first-world economy with very high standards of living.

As consumers, Americans play a huge role in the global economy. In fact, the United States is the largest economy in the world and our demands and expectations control much of how the rest of the world operates economically. The business world creates schedules to achieve economic success by maximizing resources. Without schedules there would be no shifts; there would be no deadlines; there would be no concept of tardiness or lateness. These schedules are well suited for Americans as consumers, but perhaps now we are finally realizing that for Americans as individuals with families, hopes, and dreams, these economic schedules can be quite askew.

Everywhere I look I see efficiency elbowing itself in front of quality. What ever happened to craftsmanship? Our society has become preoccupied with production. Our culture has become our economy. In many ways we have become more capitalist than American. When did we ingrain this flippant sense of urgency into our lives? Certainly, our economy relies on the clock but must our lives be governed by clock-time as well? Life does exist beyond the second-hand but this idea grows more foreign to us with every appointment we make, traffic light we sit through and time-slotted television broadcast we endure. Keeping a schedule is an excellent way to work efficiently and maximize time spent but there is a point when living by the clock fails us.

We cannot apply the same economic principles of productivity and efficiency to our individual social lives. A person’s value cannot be surmised by their yearly earnings, or material worth. An array of factors are taken into consideration when one values personal achievement. And if a person has failed to achieve a particular set of goals, that does not mean that they are a failure. There are simply too many things to do and too little time to do them, and each of them carries a different value for all of us. (Burns 58)

I obey the clock and the schedule it dictates out of fear of being absent for something so terribly important that it supersedes common sense. This constant worrying becomes a mental prison that even when I focus I cannot escape. (Donaldson 28)

I know that it’s not all in my head. (Schwartz) I’m not the only one feeling this way. (Olalquiaga 5) The pace of life has reached a speed that is causing millions of Americans to attend seminars and read self-help books on how to acclimate themselves to this societal tempo. But we can’t control clock-time; it controls us. The Italian proverb, “Man measures time, and time measures man” perhaps says this best. (Davies 28)

Clock-time vs. event-time

By separating our social and economic lives it may be possible to live in a world distinct from that which is time-critical. This would allow us to circumvent much of the stresses imposed by the economic clock-time schedule. While a world independent of clock-time is difficult to comprehend in our narrow reality, it may be possible to revert back to select alternate varieties of time-consciousness for our separate lives at work and at home.

Clock-time prevents us from enjoying the present because we are forever preoccupied with what time it is going to be. We live in an eternal present. Our minds are calibrated to take in what occurs as “now,” and “now” never ends. (Levine 81) What “just happened” — for instance, you “just” read the last sentence — indeed happened in the past, but we do not necessarily regard it, the recent past, as such. We live our lives in the current and the lines between the past and the future are not very definite. (Burns 308)

Human bodies function according to a twenty-four hour schedule, the circadian rhythm. (Donaldson 28) However, this same schedule cannot be used to determine how we function as people in society. In order to understand this idea it is necessary to examine the common perception of existence. Before I enter into a verbal conundrum of rhetoric and conjecture I should define a working system in which these concepts can be examined. Firstly, in order to consider time, an ingredient of our existential reality, we must first define our understanding of reality and how it is constructed. (Guthrie 8)

As a species we rely on our physical senses to interact with the world around us. Sight and touch are primarily responsible for constructing our existential experience. Using these, our most heightened stimulus receptors, we, the able-bodied, construct a three-dimensional understanding of the physical world. It is almost instinctive for us to understand the world around us in terms of physical proportions and this is how we define those three dimensions. Those dimensions are: height, width, and depth, and together they delimit the tangible physical world in which we exist. However there is a fourth dimension that must also be considered. We experience this dimension not through our senses but through our instinctual familiarity with movement and gravity. Thus, there are four dimensions or boundaries to our conceived reality: height, width, depth, and time.

We cannot taste or smell time. We can, however, judge how long it seemed to take for something to happen. The expression “Time flies when you’re having fun” is a perfect example of this concept of event-time. The duration of time often seems to speed up or slow down depending on what we are doing. Event-time is a different flavor of time; one that interfaces with human memory and cognition. It is quite natural as opposed to the synthetic clock-time. Clock-time is manmade, yet we, as Americans, assume that it is unflawed and often elect to live our lives by it, and disregard for the concept of event-time. The essential principle of our temporal understanding relies on the concept of many varieties of time prevailing over the ubiquitous signal of the clock.

We often examine the physical world in relative terms. For instance we determine our height as it compares to a ruler or yardstick. In the same way that we use this idea of relativity to describe size, we can use it to describe time. Einstein was quoted as saying “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That’s relativity.” (Levine 26) This basic explanation of his Theory of Relativity illustrates how its applications stretch beyond the world of physics.

The fascination with time is as old as human thought. Time entered science as a measurable quantity with the work of Galileo and Newton but only in the twentieth century has it developed into a subject in its own right (Levine). Albert Einstein is responsible, more than anyone else, for propelling the science of time to progress into a myriad of fields. His Theory of Relativity, now over a century old, triggered a revolution in our understanding of the concept. Pandora’s box has been opened but the implications of considering our physical existence in a temporal dimension is the center of much debate (Davies).

There is much controversy right now in the field of quantum mechanics. Einstein died trying to form a “Theory of Everything.” Today, decades after his death, the scientific principles including Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, Maxwell’s Theory of Electromagnetism, the laws of thermodynamics and a handful of others are on the verge of being accounted for by one simple theory that, as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, can be grasped by any layman. (Davies 14) The race to find the solution has the scientific audience on the edge of its seat.

Michio Kaku is “an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and also the environment. His goal is to help complete Einstein’s dream of a ‘theory of everything,’ a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, which will unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.” In his article The Physics of Time Travel, he states:

Einstein gave us a much more radical picture. According to Einstein, time was more like a river, which meandered around stars and galaxies, speeding up and slowing down as it passed around massive bodies. One second on the earth was not one second on Mars. Clocks scattered throughout the universe beat to their own distant drummer.

Michio Kaku

Kaku’s eloquence in interpreting Einstein’s theory serves to illustrate just how many flavors of time there are in a relative universe. So which one should we go by?

There are more varieties of time than there are devices to measure them. Evidence that the clock or other conceived timepiece is a primitive tool at best. This reflects the also primitive grasp of time that governs the industrialized American society. In his book The Geography of Time, Robert Levine, a social psychologist, poses that:

Anyone who has traveled abroad — or waited in a doctor’s office — knows that the clock, or even the calendar, is sometimes no more than an ornament. The event at hand… often begins and ends with complete disregard for the technicalities of the timepiece. We in industrialized society expect punctuality. But life on clock-time is clearly out of line with virtually all of recorded history. And it’s not only from a historical perspective that these temporal customs are so deviant. Still today, the idea of living by the clock remains absolutely foreign to much of the world.

Levine, p. 81

That event-time is so prevalent in much of today’s civilized world, and even more in the past’s, is profound evidence to the discrepancy in temporal recognition between the United States and other countries.

An example of event-time would be planning your day by activities instead of hours. I offer some examples: this paper is due today, but I cannot turn it in until it has been written; I will not pass English 200 until my portfolio has received a passing grade and this is contingent on how complete this paper is. Event-time is also the dimension of cause and effect. It exists totally separate from the clock, and cannot be quantified because it is fundamentally subjective whereas clock-time is an abstract and objective representation of time.

As Levine indicated, much of the non-industrialized world is based on event-time. This outlines a cross-cultural incongruity in the recognition of time. “Once time comes to be understood as historically and culturally relative, the symbolized form of clocks and calendars ceases to be all-pervasive” (Young 204). This observation offers hope to those who feel displaced in the realm of clock-time.

The history of the timepiece

To better understand the difference between clock-time and event-time I will provide the following brief overview of the history of clock-time and how it has changed throughout history. A comparison of ancient civilizations and their perceptions of time would surely prove interesting for comparison. However, because of the admittedly holey and mysterious nature of prehistoric research, this comparison would be highly speculative and unfounded. Nevertheless, an examination of time — as humans have experienced and recorded it — is inherently relatable and will facilitate understanding of the claim.

Throughout history we have used a variety of devices and tools to measure the world around us. The ruler and its variants have reigned for ages as the ultimate way to measure distances in the physical dimension. But how have we quantified the temporal dimension? Using calendars based on astrological predictions, ancient civilizations were able to measure time in years and months.

It can be argued, now, that the devices we assemble to measure time are based on our own relative and fallible interpretations. Davies considers this virtue in About Time: “The trouble is, the Earth itself doesn’t always keep good time.” How then, are we as inhabitants of this planet, to create devices that manifest a perfect model of natural time? By analyzing our technological progress on this matter we can see that, in fact, we cannot create a perfect model. Our devices are inevitably inaccurate, even if only by an exponentially slight margin (Davies 23). So, science and innovation progress. We continue to divide the second, but not enough energy is focused toward relating these scientific discoveries to behavior and social phenomenon.

The matter of precision is a complex one in itself, and a lifetime could be spent arguing its finest complexities. But, as technology advances us toward living more precisely, Davies concedes “Only an atomic clock, man-made and mysterious, serves to deliver those all-important tick-tocks with the precision demanded by navigators, astronomers and airline pilots.” (22) True, these time-critical applications rely on a very precise measurement of time, but history has shown us that we have strived to increase the accuracy at which we measure time to the benefit of our species, not just our businesses.

A pattern has formed dictating that we are steadily moving towards measuring the world around us at a subatomic level. Unfortunately, we, as humans, are not (in our current state) aware of the atomic world — we must rely on equipment. That is to say we cannot detect individual atoms and molecules, yet. Embedded in each of us, is an instinctual comprehension of the nature of time, and barring any psychological disorder, we can readily identify it as a fourth dimension. Our quest now is to explore this dimension as we have explored the stretches of our physical world.

The past three centuries’ advancements in temporal understanding and technology have forced us to redefine the terms we use to measure reality. It was only a few thousand years ago that the length of a shadow cast by a stick in the ground provided the most accurate definition of time. Indeed, how far we have come. Today the accepted definition of a meter is the distance light can travel through a vacuum in .000000003335640952 seconds. This level of accuracy is a testament to the wonder of technology. Additionally, the second is no longer defined as the grossly inaccurate, and nature-dependent, 1/86,400 of a day but as 9,192,631,770 beats of a cesium atom. (Davies 22) Interestingly, the accuracy at which we can measure length has been exceeded by our ability to measure time. Only now, in the Information Age, can we begin to question the actual nature of time (Hawking).

Scientific progress in the precision of measuring time will likely never cease. Now, in the Information Age, we can begin to accept that the precision of our measurement of time is not the limiting factor in our growing temporal awareness. Therefore, perhaps we should consider other nonscientific approaches to solving the problem of understanding time.

Bullet-time and the slowing of time

As with all exploration, a first step must be made, but now comes the question of how exactly do you walk through time? American culture has been fascinated with the concept of the speeding up or slowing down of time for some decades. The idea has existed for far longer, however. Eriksen considers this:

When Time is partitioned into sufficiently small pieces, it eventually ceases to exist as duration. All that is ultimately left, is a screaming, packed moment which stands still at a frightful speed.

Eriksen, p. 150

The topic has appeared in some of our favorite stories and epics. Superman is said to be able to move faster than a speeding bullet. It seems sometimes we too urge to be superhuman.

In the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix, a special effects technique was employed to depict how many imagine this phenomenon of “bullet-time.” Using experimental special effect techniques, the directors were able to simulate this slowing of time. During the action sequences the characters in this movie are able to move so quickly that from the viewer’s perspective they are actually in a paused reality. This superhuman ability allows them to make quick work of their mortal enemies in the carefully choreographed martial arts sequences of the film.

Perhaps as our understanding of the nature of time evolves someday we too will be able to achieve a slowing of time. For now, simply finding an agreeable balance between clock-time and event-time will yield results. We may not be able to slow our economy but we can learn to distinguish when we are acting as consumers and when we are acting as individuals. In doing so, we can also separate our economic and personal motivations and obligations and decide when to use which schedule to pursue and complete them.

According to Plotinus, a third-century pagan, to exist in time is to exist imperfectly. Pure Being (i.e., God) must therefore be characterized by the utter absence of any relation to time. For Plotinus, time represents a prison for human beings, separating us from the divine realm — the true and absolute reality.

Davies, p. 24

We have millions of years to go on our evolutionary timeline. Someday we’ll conquer the temporal dimension. When that day comes we may have already realized a higher state of consciousness — and become an entirely different species. Only time will tell.

Works cited. Burns, Lee. Busy Bodies: Why our Time-obsessed Society Keeps us Running in Place. W.W. Norton, 1993. · Levine, Robert. A Geography of Time. BasicBooks, 1997. · Davies, Paul. About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 1995. · Donaldson, Mike. Taking our Time: Remaking the Temporal Order. Western Australia Press, 1996. · Eriksen, Thomas. Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2001. · Guthrie, James R. Above Time: Emerson’s and Thoreau’s Temporal Revolutions. University of Missouri Press, 2001. · Hawking, Stephen, and Robert Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton University Press, 1996. · Kaku, Michio. Explorations in Science with Dr. Michio Kaku. mkaku.org, 2002. · Olalquiaga, Celeste. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. University of Minnesota Press, 1992. · Schwartz, Jeffrey. Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior. HarperCollins, 1996. · Young, Michael, and Tom Schuller, eds. The Rhythms of Society. Routledge, 1988. · The Matrix Revisited, dir. Josh Oreck. Warner Bros, 2001.