A Matter of Time
“Hard to say, time doesn’t exist in my world right now,” she wrote me.
My friend is saying goodbye to her father as he moves on to another world. This unknown destination may resemble the photo of Mt. Rainer that rests on his bedside table.
If time exists, it will surely feel differently wherever he’s heading.
Prisoners of the Present
Time perspective (TP) is the typical lens through which you see yourself and the world. The good news is that, unlike your age, you can change your TP. Adopting a perspective that fits the situation you find yourself in is the name of the game.
Maybe you give yourself a week to pull together a big pitch for work. Or you gift yourself a day off to completely unplug (to rest without being restless). Perhaps you purposefully take the longer scenic way home.
If your TP is well-balanced you’re easily adapting to different scenarios — toggling from being present to future-oriented and back again.
Present-oriented types: Immediate gratification. Pursue pleasure and novelty. Appreciate life, nature, and the people. Often find flow and lose track of time. Playful, impulsive, and sensual. Better at helping others than helping themselves.
Future-oriented types: Delay gratification. Driven with self-discipline to reach future goals. Exercise, invest, and go for preventative health exams. Better at helping themselves, but worse at helping others.
The brain comes with a strong built-in bias toward immediate gratification. Life was short for our ancestors and the urgency to get food and not become it was paramount. Compound interest, dieting, and retirement — Bah!
Today our personal futures aren’t as bleak. Goal setting is something we do on a regular basis. Future scoping is a thing. And yet, many still suffer from temporal myopia: the inability to consider the long-term consequences of actions when making decisions.
I should know — I’ve got a pretty severe case of it.
The most famous example of temporal myopia is the Stanford marshmallow experiment. Subjects choose between an immediate reward (a marshmallow), or a bigger reward (two gooey delights) if they wait patiently.
Temporal Culture
Countries, regions, companies, and families also have a default mode. This temporal model is how culture operates most frequently and how members feel most at ease.
The Indonesian concept of Jam Karet highlights this well. Jam translates as time while Karet means rubber — so we get rubber time. Time moves slowly here, or it moves at the same speed as the rest of the world but it feels slow.
Indeed many locals don’t wear watches in Asia (at least that’s what I’ve observed) and the general vibe is to live in the moment and sense into the next activity.
The reality is that we can live in two different worlds. You could be here now with me but your mind is elsewhere. You can play a nostalgic song or spritz a memorable perfume and then close your eyes. Instantly you’re transported to another time and place.
Likewise, we can switch our temporal bias to better harmonize between present pleasure and future fulfillment. But to do so we need practice.
Losing Time
Losing track of time seems more difficult as we age. Our perception of time is linked to how much we’ve already lived and time moves slower when we’re young. Today, you have oodles of more memories to draw upon than your 5-year-old self. As a kid, every minute is packed with a plethora of mental images but as you age you have fewer novel experiences. And with fewer frames per minute in the movie that makes up your life, time begins to move faster.
Our current attitude towards time can also be distinguished between clock and event time. My dad generally lives and works by the clock. The only activity that seems to be an outlier is nap time. This can happen almost anywhere at any moment except while driving or operating heavy machinery. Perhaps that’s why my bent has been so present and event-oriented: a silent rebellion against time governed by the clock.
The last watch I sported was an OG Casio calculator model. I eat lunch when I’m hungry. I respond to people when I’m ready. I jog as long as I feel like it.
And yet as I type this, it’s this ability to shift to clock time — to be more future-oriented that I must learn to cultivate.
Grolar Bears
Time is the crisis of our time. The biggest threat to our survival is short-term thinking. In our age of Target and Tiktok brain, we’re witnessing collective temporal myopia.
Over-indexing to present-orientedness can have devasting effects. Consider this: Grizzly bears rise prematurely from their slumber because of global warming. They bump into and mate with, their polar bear cousins. The result is, you guessed it, ‘Grolar’ bears. These hybrid bears are ill-equipped to live in camouflage and are yet another reminder of our barbarous impact on the natural world.
While the predictable patterns of our planet are breaking, so too are the rhythms of our inner worlds. The natural states governed by our circadian rhythms are under siege through binge-watching, substance abuse, jet lag, anticipatory grief, and workaholism. The results are plenty from insomnia, to obesity, to diabetes, to depression, and more.
The gala event we’re all invited to now is to cure the earth.
Reimagining Time
While writing this piece my pal Sal asked me why I was squinting so hard. I told him I was pondering time (which I was) but I also just really needed my glasses. After 18 years of writing this newsletter, it’s become a part of me. It’s a way to think, a chance to connect, and a mechanism to mark time. Ironically though, writing this has relatively speaking, taken me wayyyyy too long.
To gain a better perspective and peer over the horizon to overcome my temporal myopia, I did what anyone else would do. I asked ChatGPT:
Overcome short-term thinking: Work towards future goals. Consider the long-term effects of your decisions, both on yourself and on the world.
Not bad. Not great either. One of the responses generated that I found fitting was to talk to a therapist or coach. How all of this AI business will unfold, well, only time will tell.
This jazz about adapting your time perspective is surely easier said than done. In the world of the Algonquin people, there is no word for ‘time’ as life simply moves with the rhythm of nature. Time is really in the eye of the beholder. You’ve heard it countless times before — it’s all relative.
I sometimes take solace in Heidegger’s view that we are time. It’s in this spirit that Einstein wrote to the widow of his best friend. He explained to her that time is a landscape and that if you have the right perspective you can see all of time laid out in front of you. The past, present, and future all happen at once. “Your husband, my friend, exists just as much as he ever has. He’s just over the next hill,” he declared.
I wonder if this thought, this perspective on time, might console my friend as she says goodbye.
You can sign up for my monthly newsletter (where this was first featured). It has a whopping 50% open rate and is full of awesome other nuggets too. Get it here
I love sharing and gifting books. I just finished Of Mice and Men (again) and am currently reading Henry Miller and Gabor Mate. I love hearing from people about what they’re reading and recommending so leave a comment and let me know what you’re feeling and reading.
Please consider spreading the love 💚 and clicking Share
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
