It slips away, and we can do nothing but go with it
Can we really keep time?
Whether it is the impatience of a bus stop wait, or the anxiety of an impending result, the anticipation of a film’s resolution, or the drip-drip-drip of the intravenous medication, or even just lying in bed doing nothing, we are conscious of the thick presence of time. It slides by, seeps through our minds and fingers, sometimes thick and heavy with the sense of its inevitable loss and at others, light and joyous, taking us along in an effervescent spin through a slice of life. Studied by astronomers, geologists, philosophers and poets, measured by light and sound and consciousness, time is at the core of both science and the arts, it drives our existence and frames our imagination.
The Atlantic, in its How To— series took on the puzzle of time in a set of six episodes that began by exploring How to Waste Time and ended by asking Can we Keep Time? Treating these questions materially rather than [only] metaphysically, hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost speak to a wide range of thinkers and researchers about how we might understand human practices around time. Our ability to control how we manage time, the pockets of a day we can own for leisure, or convert to economic activity, are often governed not just by privilege and capacity, but also by our ideas of what constitutes good and bad use of time, notions of productivity and wastefulness, and obligation and self-care. Time is at once intensely personal and entangled with the political—it intersects with and is intersected by law, regulation, gender and other socio-cultural norms. Many of these complexities emerge in the conversations between Rashid and Bogost and their many guests.
In the opening podcast of the series, they answer the question “How to keep time?” with the provocation “Try wasting it”. They argue that technology has significantly changed our relationship with time, making it “harder to tolerate wasting time—just doing nothing, or being alone with your thoughts.” This makes me wonder about the idea of “occupying time”—our ability to fill it in specific and random ways...but do we occupy time or does it occupy our lives?
Moving through popular psychology hacks that are supposed to help you work more purposefully and with a consciousness on “good” or smart use of time, the series also gets us thinking about other framings of time—or life cycle—that we tend to build mythologies around. Rashid and Bogost speak of, among other things, the “social clock”—a sense of what we are supposed to be doing at different points in our life. This leads to a more generalized sense of anxiety, such as women worrying about the biological clock and reproductive politics, or careerists of all genders worrying about reaching professional milestones within a given age range.
Some years ago, I noted in a review that author James Glieck, in his book Time Travel: A History, attempted “to trace the ephemera of intellectual and imaginative pathways through an idea that is as elusive as it is mundane.” While Glieck focuses on the “grand” idea of traveling through time—which implies in some way the ability to move intentionally—Rashid and Bogost approach their object of interest in a more pragmatic manner, seeking to ground their understanding in the everyday micro-negotiations we undertake to keep up and stay ahead in our life journeys. Of course, they also go wide-angle at times, as in the Episode dated January 8, 2024 titled Time Management Tips from the Universe featuring a conversation with theoretical physicist Janna Levin. But even here, they keep it real, using life experiences of the most mundane kind to build our understanding. Bogost asks Levin:
I wonder in your job—which is to think about cosmic things—how does that impact your daily life? Like, when you’re, you know, commuting or going to the grocery store, what is your knowledge or understanding of the nature of the universe? How does it contribute to your day-to-day life?
Levin’s response avoids flippancy and draws us into the complexity of applying these concepts to our everyday relationships and activities, leaving us with much to think about, without resorting to a series of glib how-tos.
The series balances science, philosophy and pop psychology/self-help in equal proportions to result in something that could appeal to a range of listeners who are inclined to spend that time listening to what it means to spend time!
If you are a time nerd, you may enjoy reading Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman’s quirky reimagining of Einstein’s evening in the office as he completes the paper that changed everything, and/or listening to the conversation I recorded with him some years ago. Lightman has since written a provocative book In Defense of Wasting Time in which he emphasizes the need to break free from our regimented days and instead make time for doing nothing.
That seems harder and harder to do these days, given as we are given the means to do more with less time. Listen to podcasts as you cook or iron, answer emails and texts as you commute, catch up on phone calls as you take a walk, pull out your laptop to finish that presentation on the last leg of the flight. Even as I yearn for the stillness of unbroken attention, where I can sit with my thoughts (or with emptiness), there is the consciousness of time passing, slipping away, and in my eagerness to grasp it, hold it, do something with it, I forget that the only way to deal with time, to act on it, is to act within it. You cannot hold it still, but you can hold yourself still.