"Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out." - Mitch Albom
A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour.
Every organism has an internal clock.
The human brain keeps track of many different lengths of time, but we don't have a single mental clock to experience reality as a whole. This is how capitalism can exploit us
Sometimes I like to imagine what life would have been like before modern time keeping. Sure you were still a serf suffering under capitalism but imagine your most specific scheduling being "sunrise" or "high noon". No stressing about leaving your house by a certain time to commute, no worrying about being reprimanded for 2 minutes tardiness, no packed full schedule of back to back meetings... Even if you are doing hard manual labor, I imagine the ambient stress levels would be quite different.
Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes.
"Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out." - Mitch Albom
Every organism has an internal clock. The human brain keeps track of many different lengths of time, but we don't have a single mental clock to experience reality as a whole. This is how capitalism can exploit us
Sometimes I like to imagine what life would have been like before modern time keeping. Sure you were still a serf suffering under capitalism but imagine your most specific scheduling being "sunrise" or "high noon". No stressing about leaving your house by a certain time to commute, no worrying about being reprimanded for 2 minutes tardiness, no packed full schedule of back to back meetings... Even if you are doing hard manual labor, I imagine the ambient stress levels would be quite different.