The time you see on your watch or your phone wasn’t handed down by the heavens. It was set by people who wanted trains to run on schedule, and it has been running your life ever since.
For most of human history, the answer to “what time is it?” was a local one. You looked up, found the sun, and if it was directly overhead, it was noon. At least, it was noon where you were. The next town over had its own noon, arriving a few minutes earlier or later depending on which way you’d travelled, and nobody minded, because nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere at a time that another town had decided on.
This was how humans lived for a very long time. And then it all changed the moment we invented the railway.
Why? Because a train has to leave the station at a particular time, and it has to arrive at another station, in another town, at another particular time – and if those two towns disagree about what “12 o’clock” means, you have a scheduling problem that ends in a collision.
In 1840s Britain, the railways simply overruled everybody. They imposed a single standard called “railway time” across the whole network, and towns that had kept their own noon since Noah were told, politely but firmly, to get with the programme. The United States followed in 1883, when the railroads carved the country into time zones by fiat (government decree).
Within a year the whole planet followed. In October 1884, delegates from 26 nations met in Washington and agreed to slice the entire globe into zones measured from a line running through a little London suburb named Greenwich, chosen not for any cosmic reason, but rather because that was where most of the world’s ships already pointed their clocks. The meridian of the human day was set, by vote, in a single conference.
The time you see on your phone right now was not handed down by nature or ordained by the heavens. It was set by a committee that wanted trains to run on schedule.
The invention of being late
Once time became standard, it could become a schedule, and once it became a schedule, it could become a leash.
Before industrialisation, a farmer worked by the task and the season. You milk the cows when the cows need milking, you bring in the harvest when the harvest is ready, and the rest sorts itself out. There is no such thing as being three minutes late to a wheat field.
But a factory runs on synchronised human beings, all of them present at once, all of them starting together and all of them downing tools together at the end of the day. The mechanism that makes coordinated factory work possible is the clock on the wall and the whistle that answers to it.
This was roughly when punctuality got reclassified from a personal quirk to a moral virtue. Being on time became a sign of good character, while being late became a small crime against your employer. As a species, we’ve absorbed this so completely that most of us (but definitely not all of us) feel a flush of guilt at a delayed arrival, as though we’ve wronged the universe when in fact we’ve merely disappointed a scheduling convention invented to keep looms running.
Eight hours for what we will
The eight hour workday, which we now treat almost as a fact of the natural world, was hard-won and surprisingly recent. Through much of the 19th century, a working day of 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours was normal, for adults and children alike. The demand that finally changed this came from the Welsh reformer Robert Owen’s slogan, which has a pleasing symmetry to it: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.
Note that third eight – “for what we will”. That’s not eight hours to recover so you can work again, but eight hours that simply belong to you, to spend on whatever a human being decides is worth spending a life on. It took decades of strikes and a fair amount of blood before the idea of an eight hour work day became standard in the 20th century. Henry Ford, factory line enthusiast, adopted it in 1914 partly because he’d worked out that exhausted workers make worse cars, and rested ones have the energy to go and buy them.
This is how the day you live inside was negotiated. The morning belongs to the railway (or the commute), the working hours belong to the factory (or the desk), and the evening belongs to you – but only because someone fought to carve it out.
The man outside of time
So what would happen if we ditched the convention of time completely and allowed ourselves to be led by our circadian rhythms? Fortunately we don’t have to guess, because we already know.
In 1962, a 23-year-old French geologist named Michel Siffre climbed down into a freezing cavern beneath the Alps to find out what would happen if a man lived completely out of time. He took food, a tent, scientific equipment and a telephone line to the surface. He had no clock, no calendar, no daylight and no way of knowing what time it was. His only rule was to live entirely by the rhythms of his body: sleep when tired, eat when hungry, and let his team above ground do the timekeeping in secret.
He stayed in the cavern for two months, and his body adapted in unexpected ways. Cut off from the sun, Siffre’s internal clock slipped onto its own schedule, stretching his “days” well past 24 hours without him ever noticing. When his team told him the experiment was over, he was convinced they had made a mistake and that weeks remained; he thought the date was in August when it was in fact the middle of September. He had lost around 25 days without feeling their absence. When asked to count to 120 at one-second intervals, he took five full minutes to get it done.
He repeated his experiment in 1972, this time for six months in a cave in Texas, while wired to electrodes. The result was the same, only stranger: his days sometimes ballooned to 48 hours, and he could not tell the long ones from the short ones. “What is time?” he said, decades later. “We don’t know.”
What Siffre’s research suggests is that your unshakeable sense that a day is a day, that an hour is an hour, that time is a steady external drumbeat, isn’t your body reporting a fact. It’s your body being cued by the sun, the clock, and the calendar. Remove those cues and the apparatus doesn’t stop so much as slide. Siffre’s internal clock kept running, it just ran wrong, and he never felt the error. Our sense of time turns out to be far more externally scaffolded than it feels. We don’t so much sense time anymore as get told it.
The last schedule
Which brings us (inevitably) to the machines.
For two centuries the deal has been simple: time is money, and the working day is the container we pour our labour into. Eight hours in, a day’s output out. But now artificial intelligence is beginning to sever the link between the hours and the work. If a task that once filled an afternoon now takes a machine four minutes, the afternoon itself does not disappear. It just stops being full.
The question nobody has answered yet is this: when the work no longer fills the container, do we shrink the container? Do we introduce a four day week, or a six hour day? Do we cancel the eight hour workday, finally admitting it was always a little arbitrary? Or do we do the thing we’ve done every single time before, and simply find more work to pour in, so that the schedule survives even after its reason for existing has evaporated?
The schedule has never really been about the work. It’s about control of the day, and who gets to own your hours.
The machines are promising to hand us a great deal of time back, and the only real question is whether we’ll have the nerve to keep it, or feel the pressure to fill it.
Time was once something you looked up at the sun to find. Then it became something a committee decided. Soon it may become something you get to decide for yourself again – if, that is, you can remember how.
About the author: Dominique Olivier
Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.
Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.
She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.
You can learn more about her work at dominiqueolivier.com and she can be reached on LinkedIn here.
