Time is Worth Wasting
Confronting the harsh reality of a productive life.
If we were to time travel prior to the invention of the mechanical clock, we would experience a radical shift in people’s relationship with time. Most people worked in agricultural labor, and their sense of time was more fluid than today. Their work corresponded to available sunlight and season. Their leisure time would be intimately tied to season and harvest. Their concept of time was less linear and more cyclical.
As generations pressed on and technological innovations developed, a new orientation to time emerged. During industrialization, time became a metric to compress as much labor into the day as humanly possible. Crushed by the often brutal working conditions, the gruelingly long work days and weeks began to be challenged by labor movements looking to liberate workers from harsh working conditions.
At the turn of the last century, there were visions of a future where technological advancements would relieve workers of excessive overwork. Liberated from the daily grind, workers would need to transition their lives in such a manner as to carefully attend to goals of their leisure rather than the stress of overwork.
The realities of our modern world ended up being less romantic than predicted. Instead, every innovation that supposedly promised savings in time or work has…
