And yet Americans tend not to recognize this as a conflict. Instead, the virtues of regimentation and time-discipline have become second nature – they're parts of modern identities. Rather than seeking a balance between getting things done at a natural pace and conforming to the expectations imposed by the clock, people tend to conform, and feel guilty about it when they can't.

It's ironic that we've chosen to swing to this side of the equation. As time has become more and more important in our lives, the ways we measure it have become increasingly artificial and remote from natural experience, forcing people to hurry, and to adopt standards of productivity that would have been completely alien to our ancestors.

How did we end up not just as the sorts of people who feel guilty about being late, but who actually have a concept of "late" in the first place?

You don't have to look so far into the past to find an age when the measure of time was a tool to help people describe the events that surrounded them. More recently, though, we began to use measured time to master one another, and, increasingly, to control ourselves.

Not On the Savanna Anymore

My friend Chris loves his career, but it's killing him.

His work is interesting and meaningful – an oral surgeon, he corrects a wide variety of things it never occurred to me could go wrong with someone's mouth – so it's not the job itself that's the problem. It's where it is.

"The commute is ruining my life," he explains. He has a strict nine-to-five job, Monday to Friday, and a commute that begins in Pasadena at the start of LA's notorious rush hour, and ends an hour and a half later. He spends the day operating, then reverses the commute during the evening rush.

And so an eight-hour job becomes an eleven-hour day. Unless you count the time it takes him to get ready, and a quick stop at the store on the way home. And maybe a shower to wash the day's accumulations off.

And a little mandatory decompression time before bed.

It's not the work itself that leaves him so exhausted his partner has taken to asking him why he never wants to do anything.

And it's probably a far, far cry from the amount of time our ancestors evolved to be comfortable committing to hunting and gathering on the African savanna. A study anthropologists often cite found that one group of hunters and gatherers in South Africa needed to devote only thirty to thirty-five hours a week – and some anthropologists figure it took as little as fifteen hours of what we might call "productive work" – to live comfortably.[i]

Money is Negotiable. Time is Absolute.

But that's not us.

If you look through the literature on feeling good, you'll find all sorts of books about work – finding meaning in the most menial tasks, managing your managers and so forth – but nothing about loving your commute.

There's a reason for this. For the most part, it's the work itself that matters, people say – not the time that work takes, or the things you have to do around the edges that make it possible.

When I talk to my students about what they want to do with their lives, they always tell me about what careers they want. Aside from a few prospective parents, the idea of doing something with their time other than work rarely comes up. It's taken for granted that a successful career involves full-time work – and "full time" doesn't include what happens before you enter the office or after you leave.

What, exactly, makes a work-week full? What makes one-third of the day, five-sevenths of the week (for a variable number of weeks each year) the proper amount? Of course, for many people it's no longer one third of the day. While other developed countries have been shortening their work-time expectations, in the US they've been growing longer and longer. The idea feels more than a little arbitrary. It has nothing to do with optimizing work-life balance or heath.

But we do it. Most of us, at any rate, put in the hours, and many others wish they could. If it isn't because it's a good thing – and, as the links in the preceding paragraph suggest, it's really not – then why have we, as a society, allowed ourselves to become the sorts of people who think it's OK to schedule our days so full of activities that aren't really good for us?

Lots of people negotiate with their employers over pay. Very few even think to negotiate for time. Asking for more money is often seen as ambitious. Asking for shorter hours is seen is the opposite. Why, in these negotiations, is money relative, but time absolute?

Part of it is probably due to the fact that, in the early 20^th century, labor organizations and factory owners agreed that negotiating over pay was easier and more efficient than negotiating over hours. And part of it turns on what we've come to expect we need to own to be happy. (You'll find my discussions of the connections between money and happiness here. and here.)

But a lot of it, I think, has to do with the fact that, while people complain about the fact that they're hog-tied and hamstrung by the clock, we don't have much language that would allow us to rethink our relationship to time. And unless people understand how our ideas about it work – is it in charge of us, or are we in charge of it? - those ideas will, by default, be in control.

Descriptive Time and Life Before the Clock

For many centuries, standardized time played no role in daily life – not least because it couldn't be measured accurately enough to standardize.

Like the idea of "full-time work," the twenty-four hour day seems a bit artificial. It reflects a standard that still exists, but has fallen into profound obscurity. Go ahead – try to think of why we don't measure time in units of 10.

Not sure? In ancient times, there was some interest in base-12 numbers, possibly because the moon cycles twelve times a year, which isn't a bad place to start – hence the prevalence of 24 and 60 in measuring time. Ancient Egyptian astronomers identified thirty-six stars which rose at equal intervals, and, therefore, could divide the day into equal parts. During the era of the New Kingdom, the stars that marked the night were reduced from eighteen to twelve, and the idea of dividing the day into two twelve-hour periods stuck, even after the star-measures themselves were abandoned.

Of course, days and nights wax and wane over the course of the year, and the lengths of the hours would accordion along with them. As a result, in many places in mid summer, each of the twelve daylight hours were much longer than the ones that measured the night, and would slowly attenuate as winter drew near. If it took two hours to cook a cut of meat for dinner in summer, then it would take a good deal more to cook the same recipe again in December. So using hours as a guide for cooking times didn't make a lot of sense. But reversing it, and using cooking times – which could be a lot more dependable than hours – worked better.

And that, apparently, was just fine.

So for the first part of its history, time-keeping was usually descriptive, not prescriptive. Anthropologist E. P. Thompson explains that, in Madagascar, "time might be measured by 'a rice-cooking' (about half an hour) or 'the frying of a locust' (a moment)."[ii] Measures of time described what people did. They didn't prescribe what people should do. Insisting that a rice-cooking should take less time than it took to cook a pot of rice, after all, wouldn't do much good. Time measurement was linked to the steady, imperturbable laws of physics and astronomy.

In the same way, in Europe, centuries ago, work-times were defined by the task, not the hour. People worked when there was work to do, and relaxed when there wasn't. As a result, there was no such thing as a "work-day" – there wasn't a clear distinction between time to work and time to rest.[iii]

It wasn't until the 14^th century, when mechanical clocks began to harness the laws of physics to create reliable clocks, that hours all became the same standardized, customary length. Even then, most clocks only had one hand.

Prescriptive Time: He Who Owns the Clock Runs the Show

It wasn't until relatively recently that it became possible to be "late" in a way that really meant anything. Many early clocks weren't especially reliable, so it was probably for the best that they only had an hour hand, as the minutes would most likely have been off. This meant that being punctual was less a matter of demonstrable fact than one of personal conviction.

As economies developed, though, this vague-and-easy partitioning of the day was bound to come to an end. It wasn't until time became money, Thompson writes, that employers began to look after it in the same exacting, and often stingy, way.

When it came to measuring time, the laws of nature were replaced by the demands of employers.

When clocks began to be used to prescribe tasks rather than reflect them, it became easier to see the arbitrary nature of our measurements of time – as a tool of capitalism, or communism, or any other collective endeavor. Thompson quotes one early factory worker's memories of the special clock that governed the half-hour lunch and dinner breaks in his factory dining room:

"If the clock is as it used to be, the minute hand is at the weight, so that as soon as it passes the point of gravity, it drops three minutes all at once, so that it leaves them only twenty-seven minutes, instead of thirty."[iv]

(From a practical standpoint, of course, losing three minutes off a thirty-minute break means something. But in the abstract, does it really make much more sense to run on schedules dictated by clocks that don't play tricks?)

Consistent clocks with dependable minute-hands were the next step in the de-naturalization of time because they allowed employers to create clearer standards of timeliness and speed.

 

The final step in the divorce from nature came with the trains.

Since the world is round, noon – at least as measured by the sun – is a little later in Albany than it is in New York City, and later still in Buffalo. Before the advent of trains, someone in each town would look at the sun and decide when it was at its highest point, so each of those cities would have a slightly different noon.

So: If one train heads west from Syracuse to Rochester at 12:00 going 20 miles per hour, and another train leaves Rochester for Syracuse, also at 12:00 and also going 20 miles an hour, the one from Syracuse will arrive earlier than the one from Rochester.

The rail companies were not amused. (Maybe if this had happened in the 20^th century rather than the 19^th, they would have been a little more comfortable with this vaguely Einstein-esque relativity.) So they seized control of the train station clocks and synchronized them – that is, they centralized time – and here we get the most counterintuitive element in time measurement yet. Each time zone in the lower 48 states is about 800 miles wide (depending on where you measure) and in every place that isn't on one single line of longitude somewhere near the middle, it's never astronomical noon at 12:00 p.m.. A big step backward when it comes to connecting the clock to the cycles of nature – but at least the people in Poughkeepsie can know when to expect the office in Tuscaloosa to be on the line.

 

It may not reflect nature at all well, but there are good societal reasons to think about time this way. If one worker is late on the assembly line, it can mean that everyone else has to wait. Life in modern, capitalist countries, organized around cooperation and enforced by hierarchies, runs on the clock.

But the idea of punctuality isn't something that springs naturally from human nature. It's a value system that has to be trained in – and usually the benefit of holding that value redounds to the teacher rather than the taught. In fact, the focus on hours rather than tasks can diminish the value of work. Thompson notes that Mexican miners in the 19^th century would only break their backs digging ore out of the ground for a few days a week if they were paid by the hour – but

" [g]iven a contract and the assurance that he will get so much for each ton he mines, and that it doesn't matter how long he takes doing it or how long he sits down to contemplate life, he will work with a vigor that is remarkable."[v]

When the work matters rather than the time, people think about the what they do rather than on how long it takes to do it.

At Peace with the Present?

It can be hard to impose a regimen of discipline that keeps people engaged in unrewarding work for long hours. What would be even better? If people disciplined themselves to work long hours doing unrewarding tasks.

Sociologist Max Weber famously discussed the way that wasted time came to be equated with sin, and then, after it stopped being a sin, became a compulsion.[vi] (You can find my discussion of it here.) When Thompson was writing, the idea that people should want to put in "full" workdays was so prevalent that he felt the need to encourage his peers toward a little cultural relativism. "Too many of the Western engineers of growth appear altogether too smug as to the gifts of character-reformation which they bring to the hands to their backward brethren," he writes. Maybe, he continues, we shouldn't take the positive value of our clock-compulsions for granted.

And maybe he's right. The moral value of putting long hours at work is real – but it's also a product of our societies. And while good things result from it, the happiness that comes with living in a society that depends on disciplining people into an artificially constructed sense of time is rather impractical. It comes with a huge cost as we've oriented of our values, habits, and lives around this collective compromise.

So what can we do?

Start by smashing all the clocks? Probably not. For better or worse (or better and worse, really) punctuality has become integral to modern life. A return to hunting and gathering is no longer an option.[vii] The benefits of our highly-structured societies come with prescriptive attitudes toward time. That said, there's a difference between cooperating with the clock, and feeling compelled to go along with it, even in its unnatural irrationalities.

There's a difference between living in a time-structured society and living with a time-structured personality. It's good to distinguish between recognizing that showing up on time is part of the implicit deal you've made with the people around you, and believing that living like Mike Birbiglia, instead of treating time like a hunter-gatherer might, is good in and of itself.

 

But it couldn't hurt to be more thoughtful about time. Recognizing that ideas like punctuality, the forty-hour work week, and let's throw in concepts like bedtime and standard time – are byproducts of modern life, and weren't designed to fit comfortably into the natural rhythms of human life. If you take a good step back and look at all this in the context of culture and history, it becomes clear that life by the clock may work out well for the institutions we live in, but as it affects the individual, it's one of the absurdities of our cultural realities.

You may have to live with it, but – and this is a point that people tend to miss – you don't have to like it.

Happier people, I suspect, try to fit the clock into their lives instead of fitting their lives to the clock. When I see life by the clock as a necessary compromise rather than a moral imperative, it becomes easier for me to see the subtle ethical messages about time that permeate our society. Following the dictates of time – promptness and long work – look more like signs of respect for the people around me less like little tests of social fitness.

It also makes it possible to have a little sympathy for yourself, and for other people, when they seem more in tune with hunter-gatherer time. It's not always the individual that's the problem – sometimes it's a reflection of an entire way of organizing life. We're all stuck in the same absurd game, after all – and recognizing that has value.

So as Chris, the oral surgeon, treks from Pasadena to Orange County and back each day, he's participating in a central ritual in our society, one that comes about not because we value the time we spend getting to work, but exactly because we don't value it enough to think much about it.

So maybe it's time to think a little bit about how you think about time.

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[i] Marshall Sahlins, 2005. The Original Affluent Society. in M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

[ii] E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, 1967, p. 58

[iii] Thompson, 60

[iv] Thompson, 86

[v] Thompson, 92

[vi] Max Weber, 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Parsons, T. trans. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

[vii] My students don't believe me when I tell them this, but there's broad agreement among anthropologists that switching from hunting and gathering to agriculture was, on the whole, a very bad idea.