Over the month of February, the RADAR Community explored the question: "What constitutes a good use of time?" (cue existential crisis, we know)
Through dedicated research channels and a series of events, we collectively challenged how we think about time both as individuals and as a society. In the reflection below, Agalia Tan — February's Campfire Lead — captures some of the key tensions and ideas that emerged as we thought about what kind of better future might emerge from this process.
We hope you enjoy, and if you'd like to explore topics like this in the future with us, please apply to the community — you'll find the link at the bottom of this newsletter 😊
How might we redefine our relationship with time?
As our culture of hyperproductivity butts up against a desire to engage in slower, softer ways of living, it’s our perception of time that might take the biggest hit — begging a whole host of questions. What’s a good use of time? What’s a waste of time? Hell, what even is time? And how will all the many forces at play change how we think about it and relate to it into the future?
This February, our RADAR community gathered around the campfire, grabbed our mushroom seats and huddled around to tackle the question: what is our relationship with time, and how can we make it better?
Here are the three key shifts that we are collectively hoping for.
FROM CHASING TIME TO BASKING IN TIME
Productivity has been worshipped and helmed as the thing to achieve in life. And don’t get me wrong, being productive is not a bad thing. It’s more so that the majority of us have a very skewed idea of what being a productive human being actually looks like.
In this current zeitgeist, productivity is alternate versions of this: waking up at 5am to fit in a workout before your 9am meeting, and then using lunch to network, and then carving out time to work on one of your side hustle, and then maximising your free time during the weekend to listen to podcasts and read books that adds to your professional competency. Heck, even our rest is designed to be productive.
We are constantly running in this hamster wheel, pining and chasing after the next goal. According to Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time at Liverpool John Moores University, it is this obsession with the future that makes us instrumentalise our time as a means to reach our next goal, and the next, and the next, to avoid ‘falling behind’.
What if we went from chasing time to basking in it?
If we begin to view time less like a funnel towards our goals and more like a space where we hang out, the world will be very much different. Work, for one, could begin to look different, where people begin to embrace their truest aspirations rather than conform to ambitions that have been deemed by society as ‘productive’ and ‘respectable’.
How we go about living our lives will also differ. In our Signals Garden, we’d collectively penned down hopes to sync back with nature, meet couch friends, space out, take a walk in your city or simply vegetate. It is having more siestas where rest and relaxation are the goal, and brunches where the morning seamlessly blurs into the afternoon.
This is a world where we can simply just exist in time, and bask in the sweetness of doing nothing (‘Il dolce far niente’).
FROM CLOCKWORK LIVING TO INNER-CLOCK LIVING
Contrary to how we may find time a natural phenomenon, clock time is in fact a manmade construct created and adjusted to keep the wheels of capitalism turning.
To quote Marshall McLuhan from his seminal book ‘Understanding Media,’ “the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern…Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs.”
As these timekeeping tools begin to mediate our relationship with time, we get entrapped in the mechanical march of the ticking minute hand, and are made to pretend like we are all experiencing time in the same way.
But, quoting our RADAR member Nik, even if we strive to have the same understanding of time, it doesn't flow the same way for everyone, and has neither started at the same time for everyone. In fact, time perception is highly personal, with it being influenced by your heartbeat, your digital devices, gender, and neurodivergence.
What if we let our inner clocks dictate the way we move through the world?
At RADAR, we imagine a world where you eat when you’re hungry and not when it’s lunch time; you sleep when you need rest rather than when you are supposed to; and you work when you have the energy and mental capacity to rather than during the default 9-5 work day.
Rather than create clocks that produce uniformity and ensnare us in regularity, why not create clocks that suit your pattern of being, whose minutes follow the length of your breath, or match your circadian rhythms?
In our world – to paraphrase an idea that has been resonating throughout the community for months now – there’s no need to summer when it’s winter for you.
FROM TIME AS COMMODITY TO TIME AS WHATEVER-YOU-WANT
In order to get to that world of tuning into our inner rhythms and basking in time, there has to be a broader shift in the ways we are framing time – both in our language and design.
Inundated with capitalist tools and productivity culture, we have learnt to speak about time as a commodity that can be bought, used, spent, given, taken and wasted. Think of the common phrases you hear everyday: ‘let’s put some time in to talk about this’, ‘thanks for taking the time’, or ‘giving you back 5 minutes of your time’.
Calendar tools have also further reinforced this understanding of time. In his piece ‘Fools and their Time Metaphors’ Aaron Z. Lewis expounds on how digital calendars have misrepresented our default state of time, with its blankness-by-default becoming an open invitation to others to take away your time.
Overall, time has been made out to be a fungible resource for others to take and utilise as they deem fit. This approach of viewing and perceiving time has neglected two things.
Borrowing the words of RADAR member @goldenGM, it has neglected how time is richer than just unfolding seconds. It’s textured, charged with emotional valence and energy that are arguably more indicative metrics to consider besides its objective duration. In its focus on the quantitative measure, it forgets the subjective quality of time – otherwise known as kairos – that is not measured, but experienced in deep exhales, a shared laugh, or a colourful sunset.
Secondly, this understanding of time as a shared commons neglects how time is something personal that ought to be protected and cultivated. During our cosy campfire, we heard personal anecdotes of how blocking one’s time on their calendar is seen as something selfish and thereby frowned upon, and how scheduling time for yourself to reflect and rest is also accompanied with an overwhelming sense of guilt.
What if we reframed time?
What if we changed the default to prioritise time for ourselves?
What if we created multilayered calendars that can more fully embody our subjective experiences of time?
What if we reframed time as a gift?
What if we leaned into nature to talk about time (e.g. ‘see you in orange leaves’)?
What if we spoke less of time, and more of energy?
When we stop approaching time as a container to be filled, or a fungible resource to be exploited and instrumentalised, we can make room for new approaches to understanding and experiencing time.
Wanna keep delving into time? Here’s some further food for thought:
Come join the ongoing discussion at RADAR, there’s no better time than now.
