Stop Anthropomorphizing Time

Thinking back to when you were young, do you remember how an hour seemed to last forever? Perhaps you’ve experienced the same as an adult, though the circumstances were likely very different than when you were young.

Time is an interesting construct. I believe it’s more nurture than nature to cast decidedly human traits on time:

Time is my friend.
My only enemy is time.
Time is on my side.

Time is not your friend. Time is also not your enemy. Time is neither caring or indifferent.

Time just is.

You can’t bank it for use later.

You can’t really even spend it or waste it because that implies being able, somehow, to hold onto it, even for just a moment.

As we hear so routinely, we all have the same 24-hours in a day.

From a temporal perspective, that’s absolutely true. No one on earth can move fast enough or slow enough to impact the passage of time. Even if they could, it would only impact them. No matter the activity, the clock ticks 3,600 times per hour; 86,400¹ times per day for every living thing on the planet.

In Western culture, specifically, and many other industrialized nations, there is an almost overwhelming focus on making the most of the time we’ve been given; being ultra-productive about everything we do. Some very strong personality types have a forum to influence the masses to believe that we have so much stuff that we have to accomplish; we run ourselves ragged in pursuit of using time to the best of our abilities.

These days, I routinely wake up before 4:00 am with thoughts of the day’s pressures.

It’s exhausting.

I often joke with my wife and children that being tired is my super power.

I eat a protein bar, exercise, prep myself for the day, do some studying, and typically start my for-money work by 7:00 am. It’s not uncommon for me to work until 6:00 pm, and squeeze in a few hours on Saturdays.

Why??

Somewhere along the way, I started drinking the productivity Kool-Aid. As a concept, productivity pre-dates the establishment of the United States. In the 1970s, with the advent of the personal computer, it became an industry unto itself. More recently, statisticians and political soothsayers started quantifying the value of lost productivity in the workplace. In 2021, the value was estimated at $544 billion! Yeah, that’s a b.

There’s an ever-increasing body of science that suggests — not surprisingly — that the attempt to be productive all the time is leading to mass burn-out. That’s even more pronounced right now — during the Great Resignation — as people are being pushed to do even more work for the same (or sometimes lower) pay.

Cue the burnout.

This is another one of those big, societal issues, and a topic for another day. With hyper-productivity waiting in the wings of our short term memory, let’s get back to this question of anthropomorphizing time.

How does breaking the habit of giving human characteristics to time help?

Never name the cows; an old, anecdotal key to avoid attachment to the farm animals — you know, the ones that would eventually end up on someone’s dinner table. Bessie isn’t your friend. She’s dinner.

Let’s look at time for what it is.

Time is relative to the sphere on which we live. We measure days in terms of the earth’s revolution and years in terms of trips around the sun. All the other planets in the solar system, however, spin at different speeds, and travel around the sun either faster or slower than we do: different days and different years.
We don’t really have a clear grasp of when humans started measuring time.
We have a notion that time only goes one direction. Does it really? Does it?
As far as science is concerned, time will continue to proceed indefinitely; a progression of existence and events — past, present, and future — all regarded as a whole. (My brain hurts.)
Time won’t wait for you to tie your shoes or slow down to help you improve your 5k personal record.

The task is to listen to our bodies and know what they are saying as we pass through time. Sometimes, a long nap is in order. Sometimes, hard work. Sometimes, it’s play.

Business leaders (and those of us drinking the punch) — anxious to make as much money as possible — push people (and ourselves) to operate outside of the natural order of our bodies. For example, my body tells me promptly at 2:00 pm every day that it’s time for a nap. I can take a quick 20 minute siesta and be productive the rest of the afternoon, or I can slog through a 90 minute exercise in futility. Most of the time, I give in to the notion that I need to get stuff done so I power through.

In a perfect world, everyone capable of working would do so and there would be no greed anywhere. Marry those two things and I would be willing to wager a large sum of money that nobody would have to do for-money work for more than 24 hours per week. The rest of the time could be passed improving ourselves as individuals and serving each other which would dramatically improve society as a whole.

Of course, I could also binge watch Netflix for 3 additional hours a day.

Thanks for reading!

¹ We could, of course, get into the technicalities of leap year, but they’re not important here. Also, the way we measure time is simply a human construct as well. We could just as easily measure days in entirely different units.