Being time-less: Rescuing the modern self from “wasted” time

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In this article, authors explore what it means to disconnect from the clock and let one’s body, relationships, desires, and needs guide one’s life.

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Whether it be for appointments, exercise or meeting friends or family, we frequently find ourselves living through our calendars. In our contemporary world, the clock governs all temporal phenomena, that is, anything that needs to be anchored in a period of time. From the omnipresent clock on the bedside table to a screen on our mobile device, time has become a tool that structures our lives and rushes us into experiences. It is a constant reminder of not having enough time. Time is now a commodity and an economic resource. When time is considered scarce – “not having enough time” — it seems obvious that individuals are compelled to rigorously budget this valuable resource, and therefore to choose and prioritize tasks. Thus, clock time has become a source of authority and oftentimes anxiety, as it has come to signify that we are not being efficient or productive within the allotted amount of time.

The 24-hour cycle is not enough to live the day.

In this industrialized time – given to us by social structures that prioritize work – eating, sleeping, or waking are not regulated by the rhythms of the body, but by the hands of the clock. So ubiquitous is this idea today that these forced templates appear to be more natural and habitual than our bodily needs. Often, we deny or get confused by our bodily desires when they are incongruent with clock time – “Why am I hungry, it’s just 12 pm? Why am I sleepy, it’s just 10 pm?”

We, the authors, contend that the modern self is the clock-self and is loaded with information on the shoulds of the body. We displace, withhold or dismiss our bodily needs in accordance with this time. We become bound by this clock time, unable to be time-less, or free of this scheduled life. 

Clock time disconnects us from the body’s natural logic and its rhythm, which disconnects us from ourselves and therefore the world our bodies live in – this is an unworlding of sorts, a removal of us from ourselves.

This disembodiment is furthered by modern technology such as a smartwatch, which surveils not just the quantity of one’s sleep, but also the quality and tells us how we slept, keeping us disconnected from relying on our own subjective experience of restfulness. Or perhaps a device tracks the productivity of a trek, taking us away from the lived experience – boredom, joy, sadness, relationality with nature or the other beings – of walking in the woods. As modern selves, we seek validation of our subjective experience from the productive clock and its surrogates, which reduces the depth, density, and multiplicity of our experience to statistics and achievements. Numbers rule our lives.

When did we lose our own sense of time to clocks?

This alienation from and control of the body was the result of industrialization – organizing and controlling the daily cycles of the workers for the needs and demands of those in power. The rhythms produced under such circumstances, even though they appear natural, are actually controlled by a capitalistic ideology and neoliberal anxiety (Adya, 2024).

From birth, clock time begins to shape the rhythms of the organism producing disembodied and disengaged subjects (Fuchs, 2001). For example, the child must breastfeed every 2 hours regardless of the child’s need or mother’s intuition, because this is what is scheduled by powers that be. These subjects are governed by, say, the WHO’s standardizing and homogenizing guidelines instead of defined by cultural knowledge and relational cues. Unsurprisingly then, the rhythms regulated under these circumstances are rigid and with little room for individual subjectivity, relationality, and spontaneity.

The perceptive body, which has a living engagement with places and the natural rhythms of time, has little space in a capitalistic system that needs to perpetuate a disembodied and isolated self. 

This efficient, human-centric time makes us believe that this is the only time that exists. It cuts us off from, say, the time of the land, the cycles of nature, of non-human beings.

We see this divide most strongly when we deny the seasons of nature and impress upon agricultural land to produce unendingly for us. This human-centric time is costly to the ecosystem in the service of efficient, capitalist production. From the lens we’re talking of here, this couldn’t be farther from efficient.

The installation of clock towers in urban architecture during the industrial revolution represented the need for a synchronous time that would rule urban life. This was in stark contrast to the needs of agricultural time.

The factory workers needed to be in particular places and time for efficiency and the looming clock towers ensured a steady pace. But more than that, the towers changed the rhythm of the body and made the factory workers walk faster.

Interestingly, colonial architecture was marked by the clock tower atop town halls which symbolized how clock time replaced the local felt sense of time in many cultures (Rossum, 1996).

This led to a turn towards an interiority of the self, turning our interest predominantly towards privileging a self that is individual, rational, and separate from the community. This focus on interiority of the ‘industrial self’ mandates an investment of one’s time and effort. Now, the ‘self’ became a project that required continuous growth, actualization, and awareness. This is still seen in the seemingly innocuous everyday advice that we give each other: ‘take time out for yourself’ or ‘spend quality time with yourself’. Time, then, becomes a monetized commodity to be used efficiently towards this project.

The impact of living in clock time & the collusion of psychology

To think technology is neutral and passive is a mistake. We might have created a tool (clock time) and a machine (watch) for a limited purpose, but it has taken a life of its own. It is quite capable of changing the habits of our mind and impacting the experience of a new self – one that is predictable, uniform, and mechanical.

Human-centric time has created a sense of (debatable) urgency that cannot bear a lost second. In the world around us, this is reflected in emerging technology and services that promise to deliver things expediently, even when not required (half an hour pizza delivery, delivery apps that deliver goods in 10 minutes often with live GPS tracking).

Such de-alienation of time also has real consequences in how we respond to our inner worlds. It is reflected in how we label psychological disorders, especially in our culture’s obsession with attention-based diagnoses – your attention should be quick, linear, and productive, and time should not be wasted in the inner world of your daydreaming — we have successfully commodified attention.

Notwithstanding the struggles that come with adapting to neurodivergence, I (SD) feel that our flights of attention, often negatively considered annoying diversions, force us to not cooperate with this time demand. I offer, in a moment of poetic hope, that these flights are resistances to a strong demand on our attention. We do not minimize the importance of sustained attention, but I do hope that when possible, our daydreams can offer us a switch-off from the constant pressure of overproduction. 

Psychology as a field has been compliant with capitalism in other ways too. Ilouz (2008) showed that psychologists, desperate to find recognition in the capitalistic world, trained managers to make employees engage in self-care by using ideas such as burnout, work-life balance, and so on. By using therapeutic techniques such as mirroring, active listening and validating, these managers effectively undercut worker resistances that could have otherwise led to real change.

And so the problem shifts from being that of inhuman demands made by management to one of employee’s inability to manage their well-being. By calling workers their families, employers don’t have to change or challenge the structures that cause distress to their overworked subjects.

Women & Mothers: Who has the time?

We’d like to bring particular attention to mothers in whose lives this “dual temporal burden” is often visible. A mother often navigates two types of time – industrial and domestic. Women tend to experience what Bryson (2007) calls “time poverty” in having to shuffle multiple tasks and relational demands. Rita Felski (2000) points out that this dual temporal burden has often cast women into being the ardent “clock watcher[s]” in our society.

Many women nowadays are, if anything, even more preoccupied with time measurement than men. Caught between the conflicting demands of home and work, often juggling child care and frantic about their lack of time, it is women who are clock watchers, who ‘obsess’ about appointments and deadlines, often for their selves and on behalf of others, who view time as a precious commodity to hoard or to spend. The reality of today is, they don’t have much choice in being this way.  

In my (SD) work as a clinician and in my research (Dixit, 2018), mothers often complain about continuously thinking and worrying about ‘the unattended’, and being forced to perform the invisible mental labour (Walzer, 1996). While the obvious visible tasks might include household responsibilities such as cooking, feeding, taking care of others, career demands (the list is truly endless), there are a number of invisible engagements as well. These include time spent thinking about the future needs of self and others, planning and allocating responsibilities that others are oblivious to.

A ‘good’ partner might be willing to get their child ready for play, but the invisible labour around thinking about what’s suitable (socially, climate-wise, child’s preference and comfort), usually falls on the mothers. Indeed, the mothers’ time is also others’ time.

Thus, after finishing the industrial shift (the working hours), mothers are confronted with another shift: the “second shift” (Hochschild, 2012). Moreover, housework follows a temporal order that is in contrast with the industrial structure. It is often pre-scheduled and requires attending to others without a definite time frame. While industrial work has clear guidelines, household work often requires being sensitive to the nuances of the moods and preferences of others. It might be said that in being predominantly responsible for housework and their contact with children’s time, mothers live both in industrial time and in a temporal order that is at odds with it (Odih, 1999).

Here is also where psychology adds to this dual burden. As therapists, our advice to women is often to take out time for themselves, thus reinforcing an efficiency in attending to the project of the self. This is another impossible demand that then makes them feel that they are solely responsible for the time poverty they experience and that they are not doing another task that they need to do – taking out time for their well-being. This now becomes a chore or a demand in an ever-decreasing pool of resources. If only they were more efficient in how they managed their time, they’d be better… If only they could also take care of themselves while being excellent at work and as mothers (and friends, and daughters), they’d be good feminists.

By reinforcing these messages as therapists, we place the burden of care on them. We also place on them the responsibility to talk to their partners or workplaces to understand and ‘help with’ the many demands on their time. In a world where they are already struggling for time, this fight for social justice becomes yet another chore.

Is there a different way of being in time? 

That’s the question that this reflection begs. This article’s aim is not to dismiss the importance of clock-time, schedules, or routines. We recognize the demands of our workplaces and don’t recommend rejecting those. What we’re offering instead is to bring awareness to what it’s costing us to live only through clock-time — there is no absolution at the end of the productivity and efficiency that it demands of us. It is a capitalist construction, and certainly other constructions, other ways of living, are possible. Even as we live through clock-time’s hegemony, we encourage alternative paradigms that might rescue us from it, and shift our attention towards other ways of being, even if just in pockets. 

In such a system as given by industrial time, things such as leisurely walks (the Indian ‘saer’), spending time with one’s self or loved ones without purpose, or simply playing can feel unproductive and wasteful, and thus can only be allowed under the banner of self-care. When we adopt a commodified notion of time, time is not passed or lived but spent. It becomes spoken of in economic terms.

Despite these restraints in our modern culture, different rhythms of time co-exist that resist clock time. For example, we could consider a more event-oriented and interpersonal time. For instance, Indian Standard Time has two meanings. One, it is the official time zone of India and two, it is the way Indians joke about their idea of time as always, a little later – a little more leisurely – than clock time. It is a slower time.

It can also be event based, where it can be respectful to a social and interpersonal context. For instance, it’s common for people to say, let’s meet “after lunch”, “at tea time”, or “in the evening” rather than “at 5pm”. It is also seen when people meet a friend or neighbor on the street but stop to talk, even if you have a commitment later. It shows that things such as conversations on the street can take precedence to reaching a meeting on the appointed clock time. Not being aware of these differences leads to stereotyping of groups of people. Indians who wish to follow these other rhythms may be construed as incompetent, unprofessional, lazy, and irresponsible by multinational corporations that rely on clock-time (Bhatia, 2017).

Thus, an event based interpersonal time is a call to adhere to a different mode of time and can be an alternative or addition to clock-based time. This widens our felt sense of time – our temporal repertoire – where time is intersubjective, intertwined with the time and life of others

An invisible result of this reorientation is how this involvement of others allows for care to enter and oppose a mechanistic way of being. Caring involves learning to “waste time” with others. This could be in the form of just sitting with a friend, or playing with a child where learning and teaching are not the goals – just the time together is.

As Bryson (2007) suggests, “caring work involves a distinctive temporal consciousness that is in many ways at odds with the dominant time culture of contemporary capitalist societies” (p. 129). The valuing of this type of time contradicts productive economy-based time. It is a time that builds relationality. One is reminded of the advice about wasting time that the fox gives to the little boy in The Little Prince:

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important […] But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of your other roses: because it is she that I have watered…because it is she that I have listened to when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. (de Saint-Exupéry, 1943/ 2013, p. 21)

This ‘taking out time’ transforms time from a commodity in an exchange economy to an experience of care and love and living with. We stop “investing” time in the roses of our lives; rather, we exist with and through them as time passes by, as it must. 

So, is it possible for the modern self to honor ‘relational time’ in order to re-experience time in a de-alienated way?

Honoring relational time is to create an ample amount of regard for things, people, and places around us, with careful and nurturing eyes. This relational time requires us to take a step back from our habitual rituals caught between tasks and activities. This will allow us to recognise what captivates us, makes us come alive, much like a child for whom time is for fairy tales, day dreams, and dramas to unfold. This child’s time is closely woven with the time of others (friends), with the body’s needs, with wonder.

By taking a break and stepping away from one’s day-to-day temporal practices in the world, we are called to experience new rhythms and attunements, and to come to live ‘time’ more consciously and more fully. This call to time, is to be in time, with time, and move through time.

Sugandh Dixit

I received my doctoral training in clinical psychology from Duquesne University, Pittsburgh USA. I have worked with survivors of interpersonal violence at Sakhi for South Asian Women, New York, and worked with students at the Carnegie Mellon University Counseling center, Pittsburgh and Pace University counseling center, New York. Most recently, I was the Program Leader for the community mental health program at Bapu Trust, Pune, where I work from a socio-psychological lens with individuals from low-income neighborhoods.

Nivida Chandra

Nivida is a therapist and mental health researcher. She's the founder
of KindSpace Center for Mental Health. She specializes in working with
parentification & complex trauma, and death & bereavement. She holds a
PhD from IIT Delhi, and is a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Scholar. More
about her can be found at kindspace.in

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