• Are we [or should we be] slaves to time?
    7 replies, posted
I remember quite a while ago, my English teacher told me a story about one of his friends who came from a coastal area in Vietnam. Back where this person lived in Vietnam, clocks didn't exist. You'd get out of bed at sunrise, and go outside to socialise with others and work all day until sunset, where you would go back to your home and go to bed. Anyways so he came to Australia sometime later, and told his new friend (my English teacher) that the most surprising thing about Western culture was time. We were all apparently "slaves" to it, because time determines the exact (or at least a little rough) time where we get up, leave for work, have a lunch break, make dinner and then go to bed for example. So this raises the question, should our daily routines be enslaved by the time? For me, there would be some understanding with living our lives to a routine influenced by time, because we might need to get on a bus that arrives at a certain time and then turn the TV on at a certain time to watch a program for example. However, this story did raise a very interesting point when I first heard it, because I never considered it before. I suppose that time didn't matter for this person though, because he was a fisherman. Anyways, what do you think?
Well even if you abandoned clocks you would still be governed by time, only it would be the sun you used as measurement instead, and your life would be shaped around that. It'd be simpler but it would be the same in principle. Having clocks around is a necessity in our kind of society, although it reminds me of how every day is the same shit. Get up at a certain time, leave the house at a certain time, take the bus at a certain time, etc. Every single day.
we are aware of it and plan around because its sensible. we're not slaves to it anymore than the fisherman is a slave to nature because he wouldn't go out in rough seas or something. [editline]22nd November 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Chrille;33383522]Well even if you abandoned clocks you would still be governed by time, only it would be the sun you used as measurement instead, and your life would be shaped around that. It'd be simpler but it would be the same in principle. Having clocks around is a necessity in our kind of society, although it reminds me of how [b]every day is the same shit. Get up at a certain time, leave the house at a certain time, take the bus at a certain time, etc. Every single day.[/b][/QUOTE] thats a really negative way of looking at it. yeah you can boil down everyones life to waking up, eating, and sleeping, but its what you do when you get there that makes you who you are.
It's because life in coastal Vietnam is so much different from what I assume is city life. Things are a lot easier there. Easy in a way that simply won't work in a busy city life such as this.
Yeah, we are. One of the criticisms of industrialization was that crafters were unable to produce quality unique goods, and must pump out the same homogeneous stuff within a certain time limit [editline]23rd November 2011[/editline] We certainly think of time in a specific way, different from pre-industrial cultures.
It would be amazing to live in a place without clocks and time measurement, imagine the feeling. I mean this in a recreational sense, not as in, 'lol have fun coming to work on time'.
I wouldn't really say we are "slaves" to time. We are more pre-programmed robots following our own routines. We don't follow it because we need to, we follow it because that is how we feel we should act like. We are all just following this invisible line shaped path through life which can be bent, but will always curve back and go straight. You know the term of doing something different, thinking outside the box or just stepping outside your habits. No matter how big you make it you can still break it down to that you are just following your primary needs (eating, sleeping, etc) and if you try to change it, it will still be the same anyway. This is why we try to keep changing it, keep trying to break out of this circle even if it doesn't change any much. You might think for example: "I usually eat dinner at about 17.00, let's see what happens if I do it at 19.00 today" or "I shouldn't stay up too long or I'll get tired for school/work/whatever, still, I'll try staying up a bit longer to see if it is adaptable". You might think I may be a bit off-topic when I talk about the path of life and how we try to constantly change it to prevent us getting bored, but the fact is that the whole path isn't a physical path, but it is time itself. We can't change time. There is no such thing as a time machine where we can go to a specific point in time and do something or change something. That's for the past or the future to decide. The only way we can do something with time is to follow it, sometimes it feels it is going slow and sometimes it is going fast, but it is still time, and you can't do anything about it. I think that the Vietnamese person did have a schedule and he was in fact following time, just in a different manner. Every single living person have a clock built in our brain, it is just too hard to figure how to use it. It is like instinct, but too easy to control that we don't even notice it is there, still, it is this which tells us when to eat and when to sleep without us knowing it ourselves. A man locked in a room with no windows would still sleep at night and a blind person would know exactly when to eat, even if these two people can't see the sun or any other expressions of time. My point is; Yes, we may be "slaves" to time, but that isn't because we have any choice. We follow time simply because it is the only thing in life we can not change and in that case, we are all bound to time anyway.
We're no more slaves to time than those Vietnamese villagers are slaves to the Sun rising and setting. We just live by it more precisely. Plus the world of science would be crippled without accurate timekeeping.
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