Perceived time

We can’t see or hear time. Nothing can touch time, yet everything experiences the effects of its relentless forward march1. Most organisms operate on daily and seasonal rhythms2, at an age-dependent pace of life3. Only modern humans set their schedules by a universal clock.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) imposes a global atomic standard the world over, offset nationally by whole or half hours to align with mean solar time and in some places seasonally adjusted for daylight saving. UTC underpins all international communications and trade. Its clock time regulates, and may dictate, many of our quotidian rhythms.

An accurate wall-clock or watch displays linear time: it will tick over at the same rate later on as it does now. While we might keep an anxious eye on its dial, our minds and bodies also experience time in many nonlinear ways. Time passes quickly when we’re having fun; it drags by when we’re bored, all too slowly in quickening hunger or other want; time stops as the mind races or blanks, in a moment of high drama or heightened awareness. A blissful day in childhood lasts forever, and it seems like only yesterday when now the years go racing by. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”3. And the countryside is a different planet, with less hurried rotations … Only one Amazon, of the multinational warehouse and the pristine forest, requires its people to have time-stamped toilet breaks5. Ironically, the founder and principle beneficiary of Amazon.com has a plan for millions of visionaries like him to live and work in space for the sole purpose of restoring and sustaining Earth6. That time can’t arrive soon enough for me.

Rock strata variably compress, warp and fold back the passage of geological time. And life stuff does likewise to the timelines of our best laid plans.

• Lombardi, M.A. (2011) Celestial, Flow, and Mechanical Clocks. IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine.
• Some of the earliest animals, from the Ediacaran Period 635 million years ago, had sleep/wake cycles.
• Healy, K., Ezard, T.H.G., Jones, O.R., Salguero-Gómez, R. and Buckley, Y.M. (2019) Animal life history is shaped by the pace of life and the distribution of age-specific mortality and reproduction. Nature Ecology & Evolution.
• Hartley, L.P. (1953) The Go-Between, opening line of the Prologue.
• Jordan, D. & Conway, Z. (2023) Amazon strikes: Workers claim their toilet breaks are timed. BBC News.
• Blue Origin Enterprises, Limited Partnership mission statement.

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index