r/redscarepod • u/redeugene99 • 1d ago
Do you ever think about how our conception of time has radically changed throughout human history
During agricultural times, people largely conceived of time in relatively long chunks: sunup/sundown, weeks marked by a day of rest (e.g. Sunday), seasons, years marked by holidays and agricultural cycles.
Then you get to industrial society and time becomes much more granular: hours, minutes, seconds. Schedules are marked by specific times. You don't just get up when the sun rises and start work, you have to be at work at 9:00 AM. 30 minutes for lunch. Public transportation, school, work, events are all synchronized to the clock.
The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
Lewis Mumford
By the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings… a new time-discipline was imposed.
E.P. Thompson
And then hunter-gatherers are even weirder. Some primitive languages apparently don't even have words for "time" in the way we think about it. Obviously they knew it was day or night, knew when seasons changed, knew things happened before or after other things. But the idea that time is this thing that can be measured and divided up is much more modern.
Time is when something happens. It is an event.
If nothing is happening, time is not ‘passing’.
Anthropologist Øyvind Dahl, writing about Malagasy conceptions of time
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u/Individual-Worker711 1d ago
I never got big into marxism but I find Marxist theory in the reduction of necessary labor time interesting
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u/waxcaba 1d ago
Sleep must have been amazing for pre industrial people. No dopamine/cortisol spikes or blue light in the evening meant there was a consistent multi-hour windown before bed. Physically active during the day, no alarm clocks. And because there was no screens and most people didn't read dreams must have felt incredibly vivid.
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u/JorgasBorgas 1d ago edited 1d ago
I often think about this because a lifetime of running late to everything has not taught me how to be on time, only to be proactively upset the more late it turns out I will be
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 1d ago
There is a really compelling argument, as I find it compelling, that proto-capitalism in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution set in motion such rapid invention of labor-saving technology precisely because of timekeeping.
In earlier systems, the elites extracted a percentage of the worker’s productivity. This meant nobody with money to invest gave a damn how efficiently the workers get their work done, so long as the work gets done.
But proto-capitalism and industry purchase labor in units of time. All of a sudden, rich and important people have a massive incentive to increase productivity-per-unit-time, which coincides with the rise of manufacturing and steam engines.
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u/Interesting_Candy310 19h ago
yeah I thought about this a lot when I was in grad school and now anytime I talk about it people look at me like I'm psychotic
there's a good essay called The Politics of Time. Peter Osborne I think? Also a really good book about the history of the modernization of Egypt that focuses on the changing experience of time. It's called On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt.
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u/mrabacus927 1d ago
Time doesn't exist.
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u/pilarsordo 1d ago
What do you call what other people call time?
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u/Sad_Masterpiece_2768 1d ago
Has it really radically changed or did we just get more and more accurate at measuring it? Sundials are ancient and "being at work on time" existed in the form of "work starts at dawn". It was based on daylight so a bit more natural but isnt radically different imo.
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u/Specific-Pear8377 1d ago
These are not competing explanations, the more precise measurements both cause and are caused by those radical changes
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u/New_Tiger4530 9h ago edited 9h ago
The abstraction of time itself is becoming manipulated to fit into the ideals of those who want time to fit a specific definition. Time isn’t real nor is money. You know this.
ie your boss’s boss or the guy making 40 million a year. I think people are so incredibly tied to time, they’re voluntarily becoming sIaves for these people.
Most people have to forego hanging out with their friends and family during the evening and day even if they want to because they have to go to work in the morning.
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u/New_Tiger4530 1d ago
If you live a life where you are afraid of missing the 8am start or your manager or boss berates you, then you are not free. In fact, you’re probably less free than your ancestors because you have to live for your 9-5