If I wear your watch, will I feel your time?
I'm not time blind, this place is.
Is it just me or has there been an increase in Tuesdays that feel like Fridays? Weeks that “fly by”? And months that disappear? Well, I know it’s not just me. Why else would the clerk at 7-11 and the woman scheduling my follow up appointment say things like, “I was thinking it was Friday all day!” and “I have no idea where May went.” Time talk is the new weather talk.
It’s possible that in 20201 there really was a glitch in the matrix that reset our time perception. Time no longer flies by when you’re having fun, it’s just always flying.
I think about time a lot. Correction: I feel about time a lot. I’ve been nostalgic and sentimental as long as I can remember. Yeah, that’s right. I was a wistful 8 year old. Objects and people and places and sci-fi movies send me. I’ve got siblings that are a lot younger than me. My sister is like my constant decade-length reference and reminder of the passing of time and generational differences.
I was and still am into timekeeping, but for things that involve movement and doing. I love a stop watch. I love a buzzer beater shot or timing how fast my 100m sprint is (ok, I used to do that). I’m all flowstate when it comes to filming and editing, all time based stuff. I’m so into time lapse photography I once set up a camera near the turkey at our big family serve-yourself thanksgiving. I really need to find that footage. It was good. You ever see a 20lb bird cut and picked apart by 28 people trying to fill their guts before a Lions game?
I was four decades deep as a human on earth before finding out that there was an actual neurological difference that made me time wild. Up until then I just thought I was a weirdo and everyone else was neurotic about the dumbest shit. I hadn’t considered that time is a thing that you can experience differently from others. Turns out that everyone has a unique perception of time and that is deeply groovy if you let it sink in. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that has a rigid concept of it. I don’t think we talk about the effects of this discordance enough.
Let us ponder time for a couple paragraphs; is it possible that time sense is like aesthetic sense or emotional intelligence? Or even spidey sense? All have huge ranges of ability and interpretation. Isn’t it wild to think how we take for granted that everyone is just time-ing around like we even know what time2 is, let alone that we’re all perceiving it the same way?
When is the last time you told a kid something would take five minutes? Remember how that felt to you when you were young? How did you learn what time is? Your parents? School? Work? And did you learn it in a cosmic way or a discipline way? How do you feel about it now?
Hundreds of years ago we kept track of, or more like experienced, the passing of time through our physical environment and the sun and stars. We’re naturally connected to time, we’re in it. We are part of it. But the modern world dictates its definition of time onto us.
It even assigns moral judgement on people who don’t fit or function within their parameters. Modern time is a corporation, the hours of 8am to 6pm its highest valued asset, the hour is their key measurement for KPI, and you are a piece of equipment. Nearly everyone you know has bought into this and will enforce the corporate standards all kinds of ways.
There’s a symptom of ADHD that is called “time blindness”. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s also known as time agnosia and is defined as difficulty in accurately perceiving the passage of time. It won’t shock you to know that I believe the term to be both inaccurate and totally biased. Ok yeah, that’s why I wanted to write about time in the first place.
First of all, the word blindness means something you can’t see or perceive. Everyone has a perception of time. So that leads us to the second problem, and that is; whose time are we talking about? Because if time is a relative and measurable dimension within the space-time continuum and any living being is in the space time continuum, they are experiencing and perceiving time. It just may not be corporation time. Why is that a disorder?
There were neurodiverse people long before mechanized clocks and man calendars. They couldn’t have time blindness without a manclock to tell ‘em they were defective. The symptom should be called something like “enhanced perception of time relatively” and not “time blindness”.
Do you know what happens to the neurodivergent brain when it has something scheduled, for like calendar and clock time? Our entire being shifts into a state called “waiting mode” and it’s so uncomfortable. It feels nearly impossible to do anything else until the scheduled thing. Even if the thing isn’t until later in the evening.
Waiting mode," or "wait mode," refers to a state where individuals, particularly those with ADHD, experience difficulty focusing on tasks and getting things done when they have an appointment or event later in the day. It's characterized by feeling stuck, anxious, and unable to transition to productive work. Essentially, the mind is preoccupied with the upcoming event, making it hard to concentrate on anything else.3
I put it on the level of how you feel after being moderately emotionally triggered. Have you ever had something really consuming like going through a break-up and had to go to work or a family event and tried to interact with people and do things like play horseshoes or eat bagels, but your mind, your entire soul is preoccupied with the break-up? Yeah well that’s how it is for me all day if I have an eye doctor appointment at 3:45pm. My mind, body, and soul are preoccupied with the eye doctor.
That’s why it’s so dispiriting to see how much of neurodivergent coaching is about how to participate in corporate time. Imagine what I just told you about waiting mode and having to be in a near constant state of that while trying to implement organizational systems that go against your entire being and self-concept, and still be productive. So yeah, a lot of people expend way, way more energy than a normie person just to work a regular, corporate-time-standard job.
I write this for us consider how mental health (and healthcare in general) is treated in a way that uses the ability to work at a job, job as the standard for normal. There is a reason we are seeing attacks, campaigns, legislation, bullshit studies, and data collection on people that are different, that perceive things differently, that live differently, and express themselves differently than corporate standards. They don’t want any divergent, wild minds in the mix. That’s freedom city prep if I’ve ever seen it. Not that I’ve seen freedom cities, but ya get me.
I imagine people will read this and be like well we can’t just let people do what they want whenever they want and how would things work and 401k and responsibility and yada yada blah blah. And to that I say please don’t confuse your lack of imagination with a lack of possibilities.
Yeah this is a wild ramble, but there needs to be many more wild rambles until everyone is ready to talk in a real way about what in the samhillf*ck are we actually doing and why are we letting the corporation run the show?
I appreciate you reading. Would love to know what you think about time, what you know about it, and if you’d like to smash some clocks with me sometime.
And for fun:
I highly recommend this sleep story on the history of timekeeping from Lights Out Library. Olivia, the narrator is my grandmother. No she isn’t but listen and you’ll get it.
And I leave you with the Bangles and one of my favorite songs about time:
Ok, so yeah I’ve been on a weird side of TikTok lately but I like it. Did you know nothing is real, T***p is baphomet, and there’s a guy organizing a rapture like event where we get aliens to come pick up all the people insisting that all this stuff happening in America is part of a biblical rapture?
We like really don’t know what it is.
Waiting Mode... that one hit hard. Lovely piece.
I love this, thank you so much for sharing!
I didn’t know that thing I did was called “waiting time,”… wow! That explains so much. And I’m all in for embracing nature time. The corporate overlord time is actually the “disorder,” not the other way around!