I was just kinda idly going through my drafts folder, and I don’t know what kinda fuckin’ swamp fumes I was on when I wrote this, nor do I even remember writing it, but honestly, mood
I was thinking earlier, what purpose does time really serve?
My first thoughts were about things that rely on the passage of time like cooking, sports, brushing your teeth, etc, and whether the way we time those things necessitate a larger structure of time. Like, brushing your teeth, you don’t necessarily need to know what time it is to count to 30 seconds while you brush them, and to me that demonstrates a functional way of timing something independent of stuff like hours, days, months, etc.
On the other hand, you need a way of tracking the seasons, the phases of the moon, and such, so we need months, but do we need weeks? Or even days? It feels like second, minutes, and hours serve a particular function, months serve another, but days and weeks just feel like a framework for containing the former in the latter, and what purpose is that serving?
And then of course there’s years, decades, etc, and I’m thoroughly convinced that those are just ways of masking the tenacity of cultural norms. Like, what a profound myth the year is! We approach New Year’s with this sense that once that clock strikes midnight, there’s some sort of reset, like we all go into it hoping that maybe this year will be better than the last, ignoring the fact that 2018 is 2017 is 2016 etc. But, where does the real divide occur? Is there one?
We seem to have some sense of “eras”, vague expanses of time where things were a certain way and then stopped being that way, or if we’re being properly dialectical, they gradually shifted into a new configuration. However, eras don’t require years. Years can be used to measure the length of an era, but what purpose does that information serve?
Because my mind immediately goes to what ways capitalism relies on time to function. Like, I remember my first job and learning about 90-day probation, and I wonder what seems like a more unreasonable amount of time, 90 days or an entire season. On the other hand, we have “seasonal” jobs,
You can’t domesticate the concept of human struggle and global tragedy into a schedule, that’s absurd.
Ultimately, time as we know it facilitates the sort of labor relations by which a person can be forced into a certain space at a specific time repeatedly without being able to revoke consent without heavy reprisal.
