Our powers of mental time travel make this possible. They endow us with the riches of culture and knowledge, not to mention aeroplanes that (in theory) run on time, as well as computers, virtual worlds and machines to roam outer space. And how wondrous it is to be able to walk outside after a hard day and – if you are lucky, if the night sky is not cloudy or gelded orange by city lights – turn your eyes heavenward, as I just did, spot a white smudge hovering above the shoulder of Pegasus, and appreciate that there is Andromeda, our nearest major galaxy, one trillion stars and 2.5 million light years away – a vision that began travelling to earth around the time that your immediate ancestor, Homo habilis, ‘handy man’, first picked up a tool, 2.3 million years before a mind like yours or mine existed.
And here we are. Here is your hospitable consciousness, meeting mine, leaping through time, long after I flung these words into a laptop, late one summer’s day. It is impressive, given that we started out as apes and, rather longer before that, as stardust.
Time travel – the ability to understand and organize our actions – is a commonplace marvel. It matters because each conscious instant of our life presents a decision: where to allocate our time and attention. Consciousness enables this, not only by performing the feat of simulating our outside environment inside our head, but also furnishing us with an inner reality. Our every moment is infused by previous moments, anticipated moments – giving life depth and perspective, and us our sense of self.
Grace of these riches, our mind’s eye, as if wearing magical spectacles with lenses fashioned from a clairvoyant’s crystal ball, is able to serve as a questing prosthesis for our other five senses: it supercharges the insights they glean from the world around us to let us see beyond where we are into the possible future, supplementing it with information drawn from memory and knowledge to plot a wise and (it is to be hoped) safe course through space and time.
The desire to peer around life’s corners is surely the evolutionary mechanism that summoned consciousness. Certainly, it distinguishes humanity from other animals, freeing us to control our path. These faculties enable you to remember birthdays, plan a surprise for somebody you love, cook a meal without burning down the house, force yourself to study for exams, judge exactly how long it is safe to loiter in Starbucks before running to catch that plane, know you will never like liquorice, watch Dirty Dancing, sing along and have the time of your life. Time is the foundation of your sense of self. Your sixth sense.
Strangely, although everyone agrees that time is scarce and precious, it is remarkable how readily we give it away. Statistics suggest that whilst we wonder where the time goes, in truth we have plenty to spare. In 2013 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey found that on average men aged 15 and over had 5.9 daily hours of leisure. Women had 5.2 hours, and employed workers an average of 4.5 hours – a sizeable chunk of the waking day.
This does not tally with how busy we feel. Are we deluded?
What these numbers do not reveal is the form this leisure comes in: whether those free minutes are scattered through the day or available in useful blocks. Time leaks from us in many ways, after all. Count them, however, and you may feel queasy.
In 2014, Ofcom found UK adults spent 8 hours 41 minutes a day on media devices, 20 minutes longer than they spent asleep. Of this tally, four hours went on TV – the same for children. (On average, Britons donate nine irreplaceable years to box-goggling.) Across the Atlantic, in 2014 the average US citizen watched six hours of TV per day, spent an hour on a computer, another on a smartphone, and almost three listening to radio. Tot them up. It sounds a lot like leisure.
Yet other information suggests that the pace of life is accelerating. The rate at which we walk is a good indicator. In 1999 sociologist Robert Levine led a study of cities and towns across thirty-one countries and found that urbanites march significantly faster than their less wealthy country cousins. London, one of the world’s richest cities, topped the speed list. A decade later, similar research concluded that the average tempo had risen 10 per cent. Far Eastern cities accelerated the most, with Singapore (up 30 per cent) becoming the new global leader.
Why are we hurrying up? Researchers concluded that several factors increase a country’s pace of life: economic growth, large cities, rising incomes, accurate, plentiful clocks, an individualistic culture and a cool climate. (Asian tiger economies sped up with the spread of air conditioning.) Imagine those lonely hordes, their collars upturned as blistering wind chases them into their skyscrapers to put in another twelve-hour stint.
The picture these statistics paint is confusing: of fast-moving, exhausted individuals, who spend half their existence slumped in armchairs while imagining they are hurtling about at full throttle. This contradictory image begins to add up when you consider the engines behind economic growth: flexible hours (of employment and consumption) and hyperfast communications.
If the steam engine fired the industrial revolution, the driver behind wealth in recent decades has been semiconductors. As they got cheaper and faster, so did computers, enabling us to do more, faster, without moving an inch. The possibilities are endless. What is less obvious is that acceleration has psychological, physiological and practical side effects which are increasing time pressures, with complicated consequences.
Speed has long been both the goal and the index of human progress. The history of civilization hops and skips in innovative leaps that let us do more in less time: from the invention of the wheel, to bank notes that let us transmit funds without trundling about caskets of gold, to machines for washing clothes. Swift communication unleashed scientific discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries via epistolary relationships between the likes of Galileo and Kepler, thus hastening the Enlightenment. In the same way, great cities are superconductors of knowledge, gathering together like-minded people – as in California’s Silicon Valley, where dreams of the future led to where we are now, with the boundaries of space and time defeated, and more or less every idea under the sun available more or less instantly, Wi-Fi server permitting.
It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary today’s fast is. When the Royal Mail relaunched in 1662 after the restoration of Britain’s monarchy, a letter dispatched in London would reach a continental city between three and twenty-five days later. Postmen travelled on foot at a regulated seven miles per hour between March and September, five miles per hour in the winter months. (Horses were not used, since they lacked staying power, while ‘footmen can go where horses cannot’.) Priority was given to letters of state, carried in a separate bag known as the ‘packet’. If the packet went astray, an official letter was easy to recognize by the forbidding motto on its exterior: ‘Haste, Post, haste for thy life’. In case the postboy was illiterate, it was accompanied by a grim sketch: a gallows with a corpse hanging in a noose. Arguably today’s fast should also carry a health warning.
Undeniably speed enlarges minds and fortunes. It is an article of faith among management consultants, citing a popular study, that a product that runs 50 per cent over budget will be more profitable than one that strolls in six months late. Fast technology conjures myriad new businesses, some great, some questionable – such as high-frequency stock trading, in which tech-savvy individuals exploit differing lengths in computer cable between exchanges to skim lucrative sales data milliseconds ahead of the pack, thus creaming off millions. We are a long way from this complaint, made to the Royal Mail in the seventeenth century, about a conniving merchant who ‘has had most singular advantages, having had his letters many hours before a general dispatch could be made to all the merchants’.
But the advantages of acceleration and unfettered access via digital media bring new time pressures. Businesses routinely purloin customers’ time, cheekily passing this off as being for our convenience. Is it liberating to have a dehumanizing supermarket experience, swiping produce at the automated till, or to act as data inputters, filling in forms to order something online, then lose ten hours indoors awaiting the delivery, or to go to the shop and wait ages for a runner to disembowel your item from the store? Each unpaid minute we work for the retailers, freeing them to employ fewer of us.
Worse burdens fall on employees. Lengthening working days reach into the home, as companies swallow the creed that staff should be on standby on their portals