‘Very Long Seconds’: Time as No Longer Our Own
Kitty Ford argues that time has become increasingly homogenised and monetised, and thus is no longer our own to do with it what we need and wish.
Morgan Housel via unsplash.com
I cannot really remember exactly how I fell off my bike. I remember where (the corner of Jesus Lane), and when (6:40pm, Friday Week 2) and why (hitting a curb at far too fast a speed). But the moments between leaving my seat and raising my head from the pavement are not memories I have access to. It transpired the next day, after a visit to Addenbrookes, that I had sustained a ‘minor adult head injury’. My immediate concern was not what this would mean for my health, but rather how this would impact my term. Resting? Staying off screens? No engaging in ‘strenuous activities’? All this spelt a massive loss of time; time here that one cannot afford to lose. Time that belonged, and belongs, to my degree. Needless to say, I was back at my laptop in two days.
I have no idea what the consequences of this will be yet, especially since the suspected light concussion was rapidly followed by quite a severe chest infection. As a result, I have been quite far below the weather for most of this term. Ever since coming to Cambridge, I’ve picked up on a discourse of the impossibility of processing anything personal while in term time. I couldn’t count the number of times a friend or acquaintance has casually remarked “I just don’t think it’ll hit me until I go home”. This kind of emotional offsetting and postponement comes about because people cannot grant themselves the literal time to engage and reflect on their own lives over their academic work. Any such contemplation is riddled with guilt, and is considered time misspent, and therefore time itself ceases to be personalised and pliant. It ceases to be ours.
The expectation that each day can be dedicated in exactly the same way to studious ends not only reveals the strange monopoly that this institution holds over all of our time, but also the devastating distortion of time itself. Long have I felt and believed in - and indeed experienced - time moving at different speeds. COVID and lockdown brought the sensation of time slowing down. Every day felt the same, and the monotony meant all the days blurred into one great isolated empty whole.
As I just indicated, the quality of time in Cambridge feels like almost the polar opposite. Schedules are so packed and degrees so demanding that the question is not how you are going to spend your time, but rather where (read: in which library). I often feel I blink and two weeks have collapsed here. I think this kind of ‘crunched’ condition of Cambridge time can be largely seen as due to the archaic and frankly ridiculous 8 week term structure. Give us a break; give us a reading week, goddammit! Otherwise you get the situation where you ‘lose’ about 3 days to being literally unwell and are then suddenly so behind that boy oh boy is it crunch time. These fears and anxieties evidently manifest themselves to the detriment of students’ experience and wellbeing while at university. Edward Parker Humphreys, CUSU President (2019-2020), released the Student Loneliness Report based on the results of a student survey conducted in Michaelmas Term 2019: 62% of students surveyed felt that their intense academic workloads were a barrier to making friends and having a healthy social life, and 18% did not participate in any extra-curricular activities while at this university. So much should be done about the workloads themselves, but surely a minimal solution would be to offer just a bit more time (in the form of a reading week) to account for our basic humanity, and the reality that one hour, or one day, or one week cannot consistently yield the same results, nor even feel like remotely the same thing. It thus cannot and should not be treated as such.
By no means is this homogenisation of time confined to the University of Cambridge. Citizens’ and workers’ time has been surely and steadily encroached on throughout the joyous advance and domination of the capitalist system. I will confess that I encountered this literature because of my dastardly degree, but I haven’t really gotten over this statistic. Juliet Schor’s ‘The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure’ shockingly reveals that 17th century English peasants worked an average of 1,440-2,300 hours per annum. British and American workers today labour for some 3,150-3,650 hours. Progress who? Our time belongs to other structures, and thus perhaps it is unsurprising that in a system of wage labour where time=money (and this expectation of consistency of productivity again reflects neither the human condition nor our relationship with time) all temporal agency and personal connection is absent. Unsurprising, but nevertheless still wrong. Solutions like the four-day working week again represent a basic measure by which to regain some time on our own terms. And indeed I would beware arguments for such a measure upon justifications of “positive impact on company performance [and] productivity”. People deserve more time for the sake of time itself, not because of how more of it can feed back into a capitalistic cog efficiency.
I was told recently that I simply have a ‘different sense of time’. I do not know against which standard this was being measured, but I do not buy it. No two people’s ‘sense of time’ are the same; the expectations for each hour of people’s lives, however, can be forced to mirror one another. From academic settings to the world of employment, time is now homogenised, monetised, and no longer our own.