We should un-invent the clock!

So, I mean, I have this goddamn alarm that I keep forgetting to unset but get angry when I don’t set it because I always want to know when it’s 11:11 for no reason other than this superstition that disillusioned millennials have that 11:11 is somehow a special time even though time is literally something that didn’t exist in many societies in the “efficient”, uber-capitalistic, and completely unnecessary ways that it does now and, instead, originated with the need to keep trains on-schedule in the US and Europe during the 19th century.

There’s literally a time for everything and, if you don’t make it, you’re socially outcast.

To be fair, there’s a lot of things that make people pariahs, and not being on-time on a consistent basis is just one of them.

But, also to be fair, time isn’t necessarily at fault here.

What’s at fault are the capitalist expectations for us to schedule things so mercilessly to where we have literally no space to take a breather or just relax without either completely destroying certain relationships, sacrificing our career, or to the detriment of something else that we might value in our lives.

Time has given us the burden of having to always be available, whether it be to our coworkers and jobs, or our friends and family, or even complete strangers to whom we bear some sort of professional responsibility.

None of these people are wrong for needing you, but do they really need you as immediately as they claim that they do?

To me, unless you’re a medical professional or, otherwise, literally have a time-sensitive profession that necessitates micromanaging their time or else failing at the objective of doing your job…

I don’t think so.

I think people need to slow down.

I think people need to breathe.

I think people need to get to the point at a pace that’s respectful and reflects serious concern or understanding when it comes to making any sort of decision.

Because, from personal experience, it’s always the decisions that I rush that I end up regretting the most.

Our collective, Western obsession with time literally fails us in so many ways.

It makes us have to schedule even the most intimate moments of our lives because it’s only “normal” to grieve, learn to walk, learn to drive, to cry, to feel angry, or to live life in other ways for certain periods of time and, maybe even limited to specific times of the day.

We also feel like we have to go through milestones, like learning to drive, getting a certain amount of funds in your retirement fund by the age of 30, or getting a house by a certain age, “on time” or else we’re failures.

And that’s literally not how humans evolved. We evolved out of compassion, empathy, respect for each other, and other manners by which we learned to collaborate.

By the way, social constructs are meant to be guardrails for any society, not confine us to only be able to become a version of ourselves that’s deemed acceptable within it.

So yes, that’s why I feel like the clock, and maybe even time itself, should be uninvented.