Last year,I was banned from thinking about time.
Well, rather, I was banned from posing completely unprompted existential questions about the unquantifiably complex nature of time to my unsuspecting friends.
Of course, whilst my friends were saved from my moderate freakouts, this intervention did nothing to stop the questions and anxiety trickling through my own mind. The pendulum was already set in motion and I became obsessive.
Though you might think this fixation odd, or even unhinged, there’s a perfectly logical rationale behind it. You see, I have a largely ‘Type A’ personality.
If you’re unfamiliar with ‘Type A’ and ‘Type B’ personality types, allow me to broadly categorise them by the following tendencies.
Type A: goal-oriented, ambitious, organised, anxious, proactive, and deeply concerned with time management.
Type B: approach tasks with less urgency, prone to distraction, patience, and flexibility.
In other words, if you identify more strongly with Type A qualities, you’ve probably never been chill about anything in your life.
Growing up, it wasn’t unusual to find the phrase “Holly often has trouble working collaboratively on group projects” in my school reports. These subtle criticisms of my control issues never particularly fazed me, so long as I got an A.
But last year, something happened to me that I didn’t have any control over. And so, in reaction, I sought to control the uncontrollable — time.
This is not the time (ha) to delve into a deep psychoanalysis, but after an intentional and necessary break from temporal ponderings, my reflections on this fraught period of my life led me to question what actually contributes to the way we perceive time.
Recently, I came across a study conducted by Dr. Jeff Conte, an Associate Psychology professor at San Diego State University. After a personality assessment, participants of this study were placed into Type A or Type B categories and then asked to estimate a minute. On average, Type A individuals counted a minute in about 58 seconds, whereas Type B participants estimated that a minute lasted 77 seconds. This revelation caused something of an epiphany for me: is my personality the reason I’m so worried about time running out?
We live in a culture where time is measured as a finite resource — as something that can end. Think for a moment about all the daily phraseology we use when referring to time:
- Save time
- Find the time
- Living on borrowed time
- Wasting time
- Time is money
Western cultures tend to view time as finite because time is perceived as linear. This linear understanding of time is just one of many different spatial representations of time that exist. If I were to ask you to draw me a timeline of an average day in your life, chances are that, if you grew up with, or have had significant exposure to Western cultural constructs, you will depict your morning on the left and your evening on the right. Even the word timeline insinuates this linear perception of time. This horizontal spatial representation of time was influenced by the widespread dissemination of Christian theology throughout Western nations, wherein God created a world that will end on the day of Judgement.
On the other hand, a person who has grown up predominantly speaking Mandarin may map out their day with a vertical timeline, reflective of the language’s writing structure, which flows vertically from the top to the bottom of a page. This understanding of time is evident in the language too, with the direct English translation of “下个星期” (next week)” being “down (下) week” in Mandarin.
But to leave the comparison there would be to undersell its complexity. In the Hindi language, the word “कल (kal)” translates to both yesterday and tomorrow, reflecting a cultural philosophy of time that observes the circularity of nature. However, this is not the only type of circular representation of time. Aboriginal concepts of time also follow a circular structure, but place the individual at the centre of the temporal experience. Events are positioned in accordance with their relative significance for the individual and their community, with the more important events existing as a closer ‘time-circle’ to the individual.
Contradictorily, the more I researched these alternate perceptions of time, the less panicked I felt about its uncontrollable nature. Even though you may not feel as uncomfortable as I do when thinking about time, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t play a large role in the way you go about your life. In fact, the word ‘time’ is the most frequently used noun in the English language. Our spatial construction of it almost seems to encourage obsession, yet this only fuels a futile competition to do everything before time runs out, and when you have a Type A personality, this competition is all-consuming.
There is no avoiding the deeply ingrained temporal constructs in this society, but we can shape the impact we allow them to have on us (and the people in our lives who we force to listen to our crises).