How technology changed our relationship with time

The different ways we experience time

When we talk about time, a few different concepts are sitting underneath the idea.

There is the human-constructed idea of time: the date, the year, the month, the hour. We have collectively agreed that this is what time is.

Then there is our personal experience of time. What does five minutes feel like to you? That can change completely depending on what you're doing. If you're deeply immersed in something that you love, time seems to fly. But if you're doing something you don't enjoy, five minutes can feel like an eternity.

And then there is this third idea that doesn't quite fit into either of those categories. It’s the idea that time may not be as linear as we experience it, and something more quantum.

Think about the end of Interstellar, when Cooper enters that strange space where he is able to interact with different points in time and send clues to his daughter through the bookshelf. 

That is the third concept of time: those moments of déjà vu, and the strange experiences where you feel as though you've somehow pierced through the veil of what we understand time to be.

These different ways of thinking about and experiencing time allow us to ask: What if time is more malleable than we think? And what does technology have to do with that?

How technology changed our relationship with time

Before clocks, humans looked towards nature. We followed the seasons, watched the moon change, and used the movement of the sun and shadows to understand the passing of hours. We lived within these cycles and responded to the natural world around us.

Then we started breaking those cycles down into precise units. Seasons broke into years and months. Our days broke down into hours and minutes.

But our technological advancements forced us to come to a consensus about what those measurements actually meant for us as a society. The development of railways is a particularly fascinating example. Once trains were connecting different places, we couldn't simply rely on everyone having their own local understanding of time. We needed to agree on when a train would arrive and when it would depart.

If we wanted to get from A to B together, we needed to know when to depart together. So we took this intangible thing, and suddenly we needed a shared definition so we could work to a schedule. We went from understanding time through the natural world to building a synchronised world. And technology has continued making that measurement more granular ever since.

Today, we can measure time at scales that are almost impossible for the human mind to comprehend. In 2020, the shortest period of time that has been captured and measured is 247 zeptoseconds (a zeptosecond being a trillionth of a billionth of a second).

Technology now allows us to measure forms of time that we cannot actually experience or even comprehend in our ordinary experience of time. And that makes you think more broadly about time itself: What happens when technology can measure things that humans cannot perceive?

The anxiety of the immeasurable

There is something visceral about encountering something that breaks our understanding of the world. Think about the introduction of electricity into everyday life. People were terrified of having electricity in their home was completely outside the boundaries of what felt familiar and safe. 

And there can be a similar reaction to these increasingly granular understandings of time. Because on one hand, it makes time feel almost completely irrelevant. If we can measure something happening in 247 zeptoseconds, then suddenly our human concept of hours, days and years feels rather arbitrary. 

But on the other hand, it creates the opposite feeling. If every tiny moment contains another possibility, then every decision starts to feel incredibly important. Every micro-decision could open another potential path. That can become overwhelming.

How do you make sure you're making the right decisions? How do you stay on track? How do you make sure that you are becoming the person you want to be when there are seemingly infinite possibilities available to you?

Technology is beginning to challenge our very definition of what time is. And perhaps that opens up an even bigger question: what if time isn't as linear as we think? 

If we can break time down to something that humans cannot perceive, what could that mean for the future of technology? Could we encounter another moment like splitting the atom, but instead of creating nuclear bombs, we create something that allows us to break linear time as we know it? To move backwards, forwards, or even sideways through time? 

Should we be measuring patterns, not time?

This is where the conversation gets more interesting for the everyday person. Because measuring time isn't necessarily the important thing to live a good life or helping build the future. But understanding patterns might be.

Pattern recognition is fascinating because when you start paying attention to your own life, you can often see patterns that weren't obvious while you were living through them.

As we mentioned, this is what nature does best. Summer becomes autumn, autumn becomes winter, winter becomes spring, and then the cycle begins again. There are always patterns of emergence, patterns of growth, and patterns that repeat but never in exactly the same way.

And humans are not so different. If you look backwards through your own life, you may start to notice that certain experiences tend to arrive in sequence. Certain ideas keep returning, and certain things appear at specific moments in a familiar sequence. 

These can feel like little breadcrumbs. Not necessarily signs that tell us exactly what is going to happen, but moments that invite us to pay attention.

Why am I noticing this now? Why has this person appeared in my life again? Why does this idea keep coming back? What is happening around me that I might not have noticed before? Once you start noticing these patterns, you begin to see that it isn't necessarily about the time itself. It is about timing.

The timing wasn't wrong

There are moments in life when something can feel as though it should happen, but the conditions simply aren't right; when the time wasn't wrong, it was that the timing was wrong. And that distinction has become increasingly important in thinking about technology too.

We are in a delicate moment with how we’re building technology. We could move very quickly down a path without fully understanding the consequences, or we could take a little longer, look at things from multiple perspectives and think about the impact of what we're building.

Perhaps there isn't always a single right or wrong answer. Perhaps sometimes we simply need enough space to understand what we are doing before we decide where to go next.

What do we do with the time in between?

So with all of this little understanding that we've done today, I think the really important thing to remember isn't how fast we try to get to the future. I think the more interesting question for us to think about is when we are moving through this time and space, how do we actually want to experience each moment?

What do we do with the time in between? So the thing is, you can't force everything into existence. You can have a vision, you can have a dream, you can want to build things, but from my experience, the end goal, the end state, isn't what is important. It's the journey. It's the bumping into things. It's the learning. It's the exploring. It's the making mistakes. It's figuring it out as you go, but also creating something from all of those experiences. 

So again, it's not how fast we can get there. It's how we can learn to move when we want to move. How can we learn what feels good for us in each moment, when to wait, when to execute on something? 

And I think the idea of like if you feel like you've missed your own train in life, there is another one that will be heading right around the corner for you. We built train schedules for that reason: to know when to pack your bags, when to arrive at the station, and when to hop on board. And if you missed that train, there'll be another one in 20 minutes. So, if you feel like you've missed out on something, you probably haven’t. You might just need to wait around and fill your time. Go to a cafe, go read a book, go explore where you are right now, because another one will arrive in about 20 minutes. 

And that's why it's important to keep the vision and kind of build up that vision in your mind because that's the anchor that will keep you going, especially when things feel like they are taking their time. Do the things that feel really fun, that speed up time for you, things that make you learn, that make you look outside of the box. That'swhat's important when you're waiting around for the future to arrive. 

So again, it's not about the time itself. It is about the timing. So if our shortest period of time that we can experience and capture is 247 zeptoseconds, that's an extraordinary amount of micro decisions and micro moments that we need to be experiencing every day. 

Perhaps it is not worth worrying about time at all. Instead, perhaps hold on to the vision of the life that you want to live and bump into it. Bump into the experiences that will lead you to that vision later on the track. Doing the things that feel expansive, doing the things that feel fun, being able to tell a better story once you arrive at the destination itself. 

Our final question for today: If you stopped asking whether you're running out of time and started asking whether you're on the right timing, what would you do differently?

We dive deeper into time in this podcast episode: