What's Changing? - Time

Please see below recent time-related change.

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June 2024

Our experience of time is changing. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the early 21st century has left us ‘whizzing without a direction’. Our world is shaped by the restless, disorienting rhythms of near-term deliverables, social media impression counts, technological obsolescence, shallow electoral cycles, rapid news cycles, frenzied culture wars, sudden stock market shifts, gig economy hustles, and occupational burnout.

April 2024

According to cognitive neuroscientist, Martin Wiener, we experience the passage of time at different rates. Time can speed up or slow down depending on our focus, our environment, or the familiarity of an experience. It can also be affected by factors like age, mood, and stress levels. For example, studies* by brain researcher Robert E. Ornstein in the 1960s revealed that time passes more slowly when we process a greater amount of information. This helps to explain why during an accident or other frightening experience, time seems to almost stand still around us - because our brain is working hard as it tries to process lots of critical information linked to our survival.

March 2024

We experience the world from inside time and attempt to think about what time is like generally. We know what it is like round here, for us. But what is it like in other parts of the Universe, for other creatures, indeed for the other people we live with? The experience of lengths of time varies according to different moods in the same person, and it often varies between people, and among different animals.

February 2024

Space-time is one of the dimensions on which we comprehend and describe reality. Time neither flows, nor flies, or drags on; it doesn’t run out and is not a commodity that can be wasted. But human feelings and sensations of the passage of time are diametrically different: human time flows, speeds up or slows down. We can also be short of it, or we can be called time-wasters. So, human time does not appear to be in the least like physicist’s time. And yet they are intimately related: the first emerged from the latter, together with humans, their consciousness, societies they built, and languages they speak.
‘Timebanking’ is where exchange is based on an alternative currency: time. Simply: for every hour you give to your community, you receive an hour credit, and the bank stores and trades your credits. This could include gardening, IT support, home repairs or errands: tasks that aren’t always traded in the formal monetary economy but useful nonetheless. Timebanking’s position in the middle ground between voluntary reciprocal support networks and monetary economy can bring powerful benefits, including building relationships and trust in communities, as well as enabling people with low incomes to access services that might otherwise be unaffordable – particularly valuable during times of high inflation.

July 2023

Psyche noted a study in Current Biology, cognitive neuroscientist Irina Arslanova and her collaborators focused on the connection between the experience of time and the beating of the heart. They found that people’s perception of time was affected by whether their heart was currently in the process of contracting to pump blood (known as systole), or if it was relaxed after a contraction (known as diastole). The results show how our perception of the passage of time is both subjective and elastic and, effectively, "embodied".
Psyche also pointed to Félix González-Torres’s art piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), two clocks are hung side by side - initially set to the same time, but eventually they fall out of sync, illustrating the asynchrony that inevitably occurs between lovers, and serving as a metaphor for the subjectivity of our experience of the passage of time. In any moment or event, the person next to you may be experiencing duration slower or faster than you, in part because of what their body is doing.

May 2023

According to the idea of the block universe, the passage of time is an illusion. The past, present and future all coexist, along with space, in one big frozen block in which nothing ever happens. But the emergence of life and the existence of genuine novelty in our corner of the cosmos contradict this picture. The passage of time is not an illusion, it’s a fundamental aspect of reality, something that existed before even The Big Bang. By studying the nature of novelty, the life sciences could help us prove time fundamentalism, argued Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry, University of Glasgow.

January 2023

On average, workers save 72 minutes a day in commute time from working remotely. About two-fifths of this time goes to the employer; about a tenth to caregiving activities, according to Exponential View.

December 2022

Further reading:

September 2022

Nick Young from Centre for Philosophy of Time at the University of Milan argued that we tend to mistake the feeling of doing - moving, thinking, focusing - for the feeling of time passing. We experience ourselves as perpetually active. However, this is likely a product of our neurophysiology. Brains don’t stop: information is continually being received, recalled, processed and responded to, but we are not consciously aware of this fact, so rather than blaming our neurophysiology for the feeling that we must constantly act, we mistakenly think that some outside force - like a flowing river of time - is responsible for the ever-present feeling that we are being ‘pushed along’.
A University of Essex professor interviewed over 200 people and surveyed hundreds more to understand how they balance time and money. She focused on people going through major life transitions: recent retirees and new parents, and people preparing for those moments. While we expect retirees to have all the time in the world, she found that in reality, retirees are often pressed for time. Over a quarter of them feel time poor, with not enough hours left in the day for all they need to do. This is regardless of the amount of money they have. Although wealthy retirees generally have more control over their schedules, both rich and poor retirees are impacted by time poverty in older ages.

June 2022

Further reading:

May 2022

In Four Thousand Weeks, Journalist and psychology writer Oliver Burkeman reflected on time, noting, inter alia, that humans can expect to enjoy, on average, around 80 years, or 4,000 weeks, of life, while people’s perceptions of time radically changed with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

November 2021

When we discuss time, we generally frame it as a series of discrete units. The philosopher Henri Bergson believed this drastically misrepresents and misunderstands what time feels like. He preferred the word "duration". Bergson was a forerunner of "phenomenology," and popular phrases like "lived experience" owe much to his philosophy.

June 2021

“It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her enquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments - is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people reported that their experience of time had become warped and weird. Being trapped at home or labouring unusually excessive hours made days feel like hours and hours like minutes, while some months felt endless and others passed almost without notice.

February 2021

Journalist Alan Burdick delved into the philosophical roots of time. Drawing on the work of leading researchers, Burdick presented discoveries about how the brain processes input, effectively “making time” as it goes along, and he covered circadian clocks in biologic cells, organs and bodies, as well as how people calibrate and standardise time in social interactions. Philosophers - and later psychologists and neuroscientists - questioned time’s inherence. Albert Einstein revealed its relativity and indivisibility from space, whereas some of today’s experts consider “time perception” a purely mental phenomenon, related to consciousness.

January 2021

In researching his book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, Roman Krznaric spoke to dozens of experts - psychologists, futurists, economists, public officials, investors - who were all convinced of the need for more long-term thinking to overcome the pathological short-termism of the modern world, but few of them could give a clear sense of what it means. Krznaric himself thinks in terms of a ‘The Tug of War for Time’. On one side, six drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilisational breakdown. On the other, six ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind.

December 2020

Visual Capitalist reports that, while we all have the same 24 hours in a day, we don’t spend them the same way. Some prioritise family time or household chores, while others cherish a good night’s sleep or seeing friends. A chart from Our World in Data compared the average time allocated across various day-to-day activities, from paid work to leisurely activities. Basic patterns - work, rest, and play - emerge across the board. When it comes to paid work, for example, Japan emerges the highest on the list with approximately 6.5 hours per day. However, the country also has some of the highest overtime in a workweek. In contrast, European countries such as France and Spain report nearly half the same hours (less than three hours) of paid work per day on average.

November 2020

In his book Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Mark Rifkin argues that Native people exist in a timeless space, everchanging between referential frames of time. Native people exist in a “precontact” past or within a “postcolonial” current, depending on which consciousness and gaze are being employed. It is through memory that Native people reclaim a history both individual and collective, both personal and communal, both deeply intimate and extremely political. Memory is woven in a unique matrix with land, language, and time. Native people have already "mastered time travel": they are able to conjure the deepest parts of humanhood through the act of memory.

September 2020

Everything we do as living organisms is dependent, in some capacity, on time. The concept is so complex that scientists still argue whether it exists or if it is an illusion. In a video, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, science educator Bill Nye, author James Gleick, and neuroscientist Dean Buonomano discussed how the human brain perceives of the passage of time, the idea in theoretical physics of time as a fourth dimension, and the theory that space and time are interwoven. All the experts touch on issues of perception, definition, and experience.

October 2019

Many working people think there aren’t enough hours in the week. In fact, when McKinsey asked some 1,500 executives about the way they spent their time, they found that just 9% were “very satisfied” with it, less than half “somewhat satisfied,” and about one-third “actively dissatisfied.” Above all, only a little more than half reported that their allocation of time matched the strategic priorities of their organisations. This suggests that companies should stop thinking about time management as mostly an individual problem and start addressing it as an organisational one, with roots deep in corporate structures and cultures.

September 2019

People who value time over money tend to be happier, according to multiple studies. And research in the journal Science Advances shows that this is particularly true as a person leaves education, facing weighty career choices while perhaps saddled with debt. Graduates who value time over money are more likely to pursue things they enjoy, including hobbies, social relationships, internships, and careers that provide intrinsic satisfaction rather than merely seeking compensation.
The biggest and most destructive myth in time management is that one can get everything done if only one follows the right system, uses the right to-do list, or processes your tasks in the right way. However, we live in a time when the uninterrupted stream of information and communication, combined with our unceasing accessibility, means that we could work every single hour of the day and night and still not keep up. For that reason, choosing what we are going to ignore may well represent the most important, most strategic time-management decision of all.

April 2019

In Why Time Flies, journalist Alan Burdick delved into the philosophical roots of time. He presented discoveries about how the brain processes input, effectively “making time” as it goes along, he explained circadian clocks in biologic cells, organs and bodies, and he investigated how people calibrate and standardise time in social interactions. Burdick noted too that philosophers - and later psychologists and neuroscientists - questioned time’s inherence. Albert Einstein revealed its relativity and indivisibility from space, while today’s experts see “time perception” as a purely mental phenomenon, related to consciousness.
The efficiency delusion argued that efficiency in modern societies is paradoxical: on the one hand a quick shortcut is beneficial, helping us better allocate time or resources. On the other, efficiency can lead to implicit trade-offs with other values, like systemic effects, autonomy, sustainability, or emotional regulation.

February 2019

Harvard Business Review found that people who value time more than money are happier and more productive. But actually shifting to a time-first mindset is really hard. Partly, it’s because of how our brains are wired. Partly, it’s because we don’t know how to measure what time is worth. A $10,000 raise is easy to understand; calculating the value of an extra 30 minutes isn’t so simple.
Many organisations consider the future, but often their planning timeframes aren’t optimised for strategic foresight, argued the Future Today Institute. Leadership get into a rut of three to five-year planning routines, or they believe that planning beyond five years is simply pointless given all the technological disruption. To effectively plan for the future, organisations need to think across a spectrum of time. For any given uncertainty about the future - whether risk, opportunity or growth - leaders should think strategically about tactics, strategy, vision and systems-level change.

December 2018

Most leaders don’t mean to waste their employees’ time. Unfortunately, many of them heap unnecessary work on the people below them in the pecking order - and, according to The Wall Street Journal - are downright clueless that they’re doing it. They give orders without realising how much work those directives entail. They make offhand comments and don’t consider that their employees may interpret them as commands. And they solicit opinions without realising that people will bend over backward to tell them what they want to hear - rather than the whole truth, warts and all.
For The School of Life, our subjective experience of time bears little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into nothing or achieve enduring density. If our goal is to have a longer life, it therefore seems like the priority should not be to add increments of time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial. The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract more years.
Further reading:
- How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive - HBR
- The world is fixated on the past - The Economist

October 2018

The passing of time is an illusion, or so claims physics since Einstein. Yet we tend to think we do experience time passing, noted the Institute of Arts and Ideas.
In Felt Time, psychological researcher Marc Wittmann surveyed scientific findings on the subjective experience of time. He focused on such questions as: How long is a present moment? How does the brain synthesize a series of discrete moments into a continuous flow? Why does time appear to move faster and slower in different situations? Wittman distinguished between individuals who orient primarily either toward the future or the present: people with a present orientation prefer immediate gratification, while future-oriented people delay gratification if waiting leads to a larger reward.
Further reading:
- How Bosses Waste Their Employees’ Time - WSJ
- The time traveller goes backwards – The TLS

September 2018

Further reading:
- The work day should end at 3pm - Quartz

August 2018

One of the most basic facts about time, notes The School of Life, is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, feel as if it were moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And so on.In other words, our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.
The EU Commission is proposing to end the practice of adjusting clocks by an hour in spring and autumn after a survey found most Europeans opposed it.

July 2018

Humans left Africa earlier than we thought, noted Quartz, adding that our ancestors’ trek across the globe began an estimated 2.1 million years ago.
Meanwhile, researchers at Oxford University's School of Archaeology revealed an alternate story of how our DNA evolved: our species emerged from many isolated populations around Africa, over time got together to interbreed, and eventually all that diversity produced modern humans. What this means, for the Future Today Institute, is that while all of humanity's DNA is linked, we probably didn't all come from a single cradle in sub-Saharan Africa at just one moment in time.

June 2018

"Origin Story: A Big History of Everything" by historian David Christian is a new history of the universe, looking at defining events over the entire 13.8 billion years, with an attempt to redefine our place in the cosmos.
Time tools of the past were based on creating a plan for the week which focuses on priorities and doing ‘first things first’ anticipating minimal interruptions. Yet today’s world has unceasing stimulus from multiple sources screaming for our attention, all claiming to be important. We live amongst so much noise, distraction, urgency, meetings, cc-ing, notifications and interruptions that people can no longer focus, let alone recognise a priority.
“The Order of Time” by the Italian theoretical physicist Carl Rovelli (see below) is, for Big Think, an exploration of time that has been called “dizzying” by the Guardian. This compact read from Rovelli, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory, “uses literary, poetical and historical devices to unravel the properties of time, what it means to exist without time and, at the end, how time began,” writes Scientific American.

May 2018

Time is just a story we tell ourselves, according to Quartz. Building on the work of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, Ephrat Livni offers a mind-shifting perspective on how everything from stargazing to international phone calls prove that time is a fluid, human concept - not a fact of the universe.
Time feels real to people. But it doesn’t even exist, according to quantum physics. “There is no time variable in the fundamental equations that describe the world,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli told Quartz.
Rovelli’s new book, The Order of Time, published in April, is about our experience of time’s passage as humans, and the fact of its absence at minuscule and vast scales. He makes a compelling argument that chronology and continuity are just a story we tell ourselves in order to make sense of our existence.
Stewart Brand’s framework of society and time argues that technology has sped us up beyond the bounds of nature as well as the governance we had in place to manage on that scale.

Pre-2018

According to Thor Heyerdahl, it is almost impossible grasp the meaning of time. He didn't believe it exists and he felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. As Henry Ford said, it feels at such moments that "life is just one damn thing after another".
Nevertheless, in the BBC’s The Wonders of the Universe, Brian Cox argued that, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy means that does indeed flow, and in only one direction.
"As a species, we can never know where our true potential lies until we confront the systems that keep us tied to the past. And that is where the true adventure will begin" - Thomas Frey
This temporal tension between the immediate and the eternal is one of the core characteristics and defining frustrations of the human experience - over and over, we strain to locate ourselves within time, against time, grasping for solid ground while aswirl in its unstoppable flow.
Humans are not good at putting time in perspective. The spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it. If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second.
What if our current clock-centric systems are a major contributor to human health problems, meaning that we live shorter lives, produce less, and are involved in more high-stress and high-anxiety situations simply because of our rigid dedication to a time system that governs every single moment of our lives? And what if we could change this?
Since we can't directly access the past or the future, the present seems to be all we've got. Yet Jacques Derrida denied the existence of the present. And physicists argue the present has no special status. Is the present an illusion? Or do we find in the present everything that is of value, asked an iai debate?

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