We are not saving time. We are only changing it. We are shaping time, all the time, with technology and its effect on our perception. Before the first mechanical clock ticked its first 'tock', a second was only a concept. Everyone might agree that a second is roughly equivalent to a moment, but how long is that? As Einstein pointed out, a moment with a pretty girl does not seem nearly as long, relatively speaking of course, as a moment sitting on top of a hot oven.
Songs about trains and cowboys, about ships and sailing, stories about long journeys, all resonate with a past in which time moved differently. Communication was not ubiquitous and immediate, and travel required an involvement with the land. Relationships formed more slowly and, if they prospered at all, strengthened by the necessity mandated by a smaller world. One cannot afford to burn too many bridges if one lives on an island.
Our expectations of instantaneous gratification, immense global change and a society that listens to every voice are simply unrealistic. We have asked our brains to accelerate and condense time in exponential leaps of scale within the last three decades, compared to the million-plus years of human development.
Humans have the unique ability to project a future and store a past. It is what allows creativity, complex decision making, risk analysis, all the things that make us, we presume, the predominant sentience on our planet. And that imagination also allows us to project our own truth, like a home movie, into past, present or future. Maybe we have only fooled ourselves into thinking that we can process our new hyper-dense society in real-time.
Civility between persons has not really prospered significantly from global, simultaneous communications. We have built better foundations for society, but often the rules still seem to break down at street level. In the time before time was counted, trust and intimacy could only exist between family or tribal groups, persons known to you from the beginning. While it is to our credit that we learned to wield our intellect in accepting strangers, we may have overreached our abilities to 'know' someone.
Today, from customer service encounters to Internet "flame wars", people assume a more thorough understanding of the motives and intentions of strangers than they could possibly attain through a brief exchange. Invective and enmity would not be such easy tools if the anonymous recipient were a neighbor or family member, or even a citizen in a small town. Just when the human race was on the track to common friendliness, our ability to alienate ourselves from others without consequence, through travel and anonymous communication, has give us another path. And by choosing the easy path of moral malaise, we lose a little of our humanity, the thing that has made us unique and viable.
I am not suggesting that people be nicer to each other, not in the immediate sense. Our busy, invasive society will still continue to aggravate each of us, in some way. We must make quick judgments about all the new people with whom we interact each week. But I might suggest that we remember that time is a concept of our choosing, as is our idea of how big our society really is. Can we afford to alienate one another? Do we really not have time to empathize? Can we not think about our own ideas and opinions in the reflection of past and future? Things change, and to the universe, a thousand years is much the same as a second.
Here are my only suggestions. Accept change. Luxuriate in travel. Be slow to judge. Remember that you are the director of the movie of your life, editor of hopes and dreams. Allow your happiness to exist in the moment, the only true time.
Songs about trains and cowboys, about ships and sailing, stories about long journeys, all resonate with a past in which time moved differently. Communication was not ubiquitous and immediate, and travel required an involvement with the land. Relationships formed more slowly and, if they prospered at all, strengthened by the necessity mandated by a smaller world. One cannot afford to burn too many bridges if one lives on an island.
Our expectations of instantaneous gratification, immense global change and a society that listens to every voice are simply unrealistic. We have asked our brains to accelerate and condense time in exponential leaps of scale within the last three decades, compared to the million-plus years of human development.
Humans have the unique ability to project a future and store a past. It is what allows creativity, complex decision making, risk analysis, all the things that make us, we presume, the predominant sentience on our planet. And that imagination also allows us to project our own truth, like a home movie, into past, present or future. Maybe we have only fooled ourselves into thinking that we can process our new hyper-dense society in real-time.
Civility between persons has not really prospered significantly from global, simultaneous communications. We have built better foundations for society, but often the rules still seem to break down at street level. In the time before time was counted, trust and intimacy could only exist between family or tribal groups, persons known to you from the beginning. While it is to our credit that we learned to wield our intellect in accepting strangers, we may have overreached our abilities to 'know' someone.
Today, from customer service encounters to Internet "flame wars", people assume a more thorough understanding of the motives and intentions of strangers than they could possibly attain through a brief exchange. Invective and enmity would not be such easy tools if the anonymous recipient were a neighbor or family member, or even a citizen in a small town. Just when the human race was on the track to common friendliness, our ability to alienate ourselves from others without consequence, through travel and anonymous communication, has give us another path. And by choosing the easy path of moral malaise, we lose a little of our humanity, the thing that has made us unique and viable.
I am not suggesting that people be nicer to each other, not in the immediate sense. Our busy, invasive society will still continue to aggravate each of us, in some way. We must make quick judgments about all the new people with whom we interact each week. But I might suggest that we remember that time is a concept of our choosing, as is our idea of how big our society really is. Can we afford to alienate one another? Do we really not have time to empathize? Can we not think about our own ideas and opinions in the reflection of past and future? Things change, and to the universe, a thousand years is much the same as a second.
Here are my only suggestions. Accept change. Luxuriate in travel. Be slow to judge. Remember that you are the director of the movie of your life, editor of hopes and dreams. Allow your happiness to exist in the moment, the only true time.
Comments