The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.
"Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. 'Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,' Birth wrote in his book 'Objects of Time.' That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.
"The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us 'fatally confused' about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of 'hours' or 'weeks' do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans." - Joe Zadeh
Article: The Tyranny of Time
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