time

As the ancient Greeks knew, time is not just one thing. They had a concept, chronos, for time as we commonly understand it: a regular succession of equal divisions, the minutes, hours, days, and years, etc. But they had another concept, kairos, for time as we experience it, in which time passes faster or slower in proportion to its importance, and in which all moments are emphatically not equal.

There are decades in which nothing happens, and there are weeks in which decades happen. (Lenin)

This ties in with wu wei, the practice of waiting for the right moment in which to make a change in order to minimize effort and maximize one’s chance of success. And I wonder if mindfulness and living in the present moment might be about shifting our experience of time away from chronos and toward kairos.

Linear vs. Cyclical Time

From Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 novel Flights:

She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique, no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.

Emergence Magazine podcast on W.B Yeats and linear and circular time: https://overcast.fm/+M3F6UDVWw

Monochronic vs. polychronic time

Anne Helen Petersen:

But that itself, sometimes referred to as a “monochronic” understanding of time, is no more or less “natural” than other ways of conceiving of time, like “polychronic” culture, which understands time as dynamic, flexible, and filled with several tasks at once, each of which will take the time that they need. Monochronic cultures may be more “efficient” in their use of time, but in their treatment of time as a commodity, they lose the richness that comes with allowing tasks, conversations, and interactions to move forward at a more natural and sustainable pace.

And that:

resisting someone else’s understanding and organization of time is a power move.

Monochronic time is entwined with Taylorism, whose methods include dicing up factory work (and workers’ time) into small, interchangeable increments to fit as much work in as possible. While this approach does tend to increase raw productivity, it undermines any sense of craftsmanship, the quality of the product, and workers’ satisfaction.

Wasting Time

I love Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey on how we must waste time with all our heart:

John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process]….The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can’t use your time.” In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation. And I am wasting your time, and I am aware that I am wasting it; how could it be otherwise? Many others have spoken about this. Tess Gallagher: “I sit in the motel room, a place of much passage and no record, and feel I have made an important assault on the Great Nothing.” Gertrude Stein: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” Mary Oppen: “When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.” The only purpose of this lecture, this letter, my only intent, goal, object, desire, is to waste time. For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart.

Time And Totalitarianism

Oliver Burkman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, on how total control over our time isolates us, and isolated individuals are tinder for fascist movements:

We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project – nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band – that takes place in a setting other than the workplace. …

All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics – the world of meetings, rallies, protests and canvassing – are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronised population finds it difficult to get round to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected – alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. ‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Michel Foucault examined this in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: the ways that controlling someone’s time and routine can lead to dominating their will.

In physics, time exists only because of entropy

The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder. (Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)

Rovelli followed with a small, rich book on time itself, The Order of Time, from which come the following lessons:

Time passes more slowly in gravity wells

It is an observable fact that a clock ticks more slowly on the floor than it does on a table. This is because it is closer to the Earth’s center of gravity. It would tick more slowly still on Jupiter, because it has more mass. Mass alters the fabric of spacetime, which alters the passage of time itself.

Time passes more slowly for objects in motion

A friend who flies around the world on an airplane and meets back up with you will have aged less than you did. A crucial question is “motion relative to what?” since any two objects whose distance changes may each be said to move relative to the other. The answer is “relative to the point at which they meet back up,” which they must do if their relative age is to be compared.

Relatedly, all objects move through 4-dimensional space-time at the speed of light. The faster you move through 3-dimensional space, the slower you move through the 4th dimension, time. At the extreme, if you were to move through 3-dimensional space at the speed of light, time would stop for you.

Hartmut Rasa’s Social Acceleration and Resonance Theories

Hartmut Rosa has put forward social acceleration theory, a critique of modernity which examines the causes and effects of our experience of time growing faster and faster. He identifies three causes of our perception that time is moving faster and we have less and less of it: technological and economic acceleration, acceleration of social change, and acceleration of the pace of life. He hihglights the irony that the proliferation of “time-saving” technology has meant in practice that we have less time than ever, as more effort is expected of us.

Rosa’s work on time also includes the concepts of resonance and alienation (talk on Youtube). He points to three different scales of time: daily life, one’s entire lifetime, and the epoch in which one lives. Rosa diagnoses that we feel alienated when we experience these three timescales out of alignment, for example when our day-to-day work feels unconnected to the meaning we want our life to have, and what the historical moment in which we live needs from us. By contrast, we feel “resonance,” a kind of connection and satisfaction, only when these three timescales are in alignment: when some of what we do each day contributes to the meaning we want our lives overall to have had, and to play our own small part in the human story unfolding before and through us.

Rosa’s concept of resonance, ahem, resonates with Annie Dillard’s beloved quote that “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” Perhaps Rosa would extend that to “how each of us spends our lives is how humanity spends an epoch.”

Further Reading

• Did the future already happen?, an introduction to eternalism, the theory that every moment in time exists at once and the “passage” of time is just a quirk of how we humans experience it