Our obsession with time

And a personal, temporary goodbye to Saturday

Erin Pfeifer

Published in

RE: Write

4 min readFeb 23, 2018

A brief history of time

For a long time, timekeeping wasn’t a priority for us humans. Those were the good ol’ days.

Eventually, though, we took to tallying the number of days passed on cave walls, and later, we would dig moon-shaped pits into the earth to track the lunar cycle.

Around 3500 BCE, an Egyptian who we can presume was of above-average intelligence created the first gnomon, a basic instrument meant to break down the amount of daylight earth receives into smaller portions. This was essentially a stick stuck vertically on a flat-ish surface (like the ground). One of the oldest gnomons found was excavated from China and dates to around 2300 BCE.

Then the Greeks, always one-upping other peoples with their mathematical smarts, developed the sundial around 575 BCE and, over time, got super fancy with it. The this point, we humans were pretty “dialed in” to the concept of an hour, and soon, we would be breaking those down into the minute, and then the almighty second.

In 1267 CE, English philosopher Roger Bacon decided that since the Julian calendar (developed by the Ancient Romans) was 11 days out of sync with the equinox, he would do some math and declare that henceforth, 1 second = 1/86,400 of a solar day.

Nowadays

In the 1600’s a Dutch guy created a pendulum clock, to enhance accuracy. A little later, in 2001, we started using light waves in optical clocks so that we’d only be “off” 1 second out of every 140 millions years. Hallelu.

For most of our US history, we kept our own time.

Cities mostly measured and kept their specific local time, until our current time model, the National Time Standard, came around in 1883. The railroads kind of forced it on everyone so people would know when to be ready at the platform.

Now, 135 years after we all finally got on the same page of time, many of us find ourselves without enough of it.

But how does one acquire more of a social construct (i.e., concepts that lack inherent value and therefore only have meaning because society agrees to collectively pretend it has meaning?

I didn’t have much time, so I simply Googled “time.”

The vanishing Saturday

So now we have this construct we created (time), and all these uber-accurate devices to track it with, and we’ve evolved enough to where we’re actually buying products (by exchanging our time + labor for money) to save us time so we can rest more and enjoy more quality time.

Think on that for a second.

My current life situation is dependent on me completing more tasks than is reasonable for a human. You probably relate.

As such, most of my waking existence (and let’s be honest, many of my sleeping hours, shadowed by dreams of being late or failing to meet a deadline) is dictated by time.

I find it both depressing and trippy to have something as man-made as time ruling my life, but I can’t exactly excuse myself from the construct, or else I suspect I’d be without my degree, without income, and therefore without food, shelter, or hiking boots.

It’s really too bad we’ve tied all of these biological necessities to time.

I like graduate school, but as you probably know, it requires a lot of time. So much time, that what was once known as “Saturday,” that open-ended day at the end of the week wrapped in possibility and joy and hope and freedom*, has now become Tuesday2.

For someone who derives their creativity and soul fuel from unscheduled freedom to play and explore this world, saying goodbye to Saturday has been pretty tough for me.

Instead of reinitiating the mourning cycle each week, I’ve decided to temporarily lay Saturday to rest. I am moving on without my companion, hopeful that our paths will cross again in the future. Specifically, this summer.