Surrounded by clocks

My grandmother used to tell me the time of day, especially in summer’s sunny afternoons, by looking at the shadow of the furniture on the living room floor. It is only recently, some 50 years after, that I realise how beautiful, how simple, how poetic it was. Not that she didn’t have a wristwatch or that there were no clocks at all in the house; she just found it nice and convenient to read the length and the position of the shadow this way and to teach me how to. It’s the old sundial principle. It has been here almost forever and is as old as the Earth and the Sun themselves.

Fast forward 50 years and forget about anything natural or poetic. This is the age of the Internet, of wireless and high-tech. Today technology surrounds us with clocks and the aggressive display of the time of day wherever we look. These clocks are more insidious than e-mail, SMS, online ads or social networking combined, for we do not necessarily take the measure of their impact on us. They are simply telling us to “hurry up”. The level of the stress this creates is largely underestimated.

At any given moment, there’s at least four or five clocks displayed before your eyes. The one on your wristwatch, on your smartphone, on the computer’s screen, on the TV screen, on the satellite receiver, on the car’s dashboard, on the office desk phone set... Most kitchen electric appliances also feature a clock, the central heating timer has a clock, and many of us also have a clock on their bathroom’s shelf so that they do not get late going to work in the morning. Wall and ceiling projecting clocks follow you at night to help you to sleep, or quite the opposite, to cause insomnia in some cases. Oregon Scientific, for example, makes fantastic projecting clocks.

It is one thing to know the time of day and it is another to be constantly reminded of it, in multiple instances and countless formats, however attractive they may look at first sight. It is not anymore about “Time is money” but rather “Time is running out” and the psychological effect this has on us.

Multiple clocks also make us work more to maintain them and to keep them in time.

For all those models that are not digital and directly linked to the Internet where they take their settings from and are synced to, we have to adjust them manually twice a year, when we shift from summer to winter time and vice-versa. Indeed, more than half of them still are not part of the world of IoT (Internet of Things). Most car clocks for example, still need to be adjusted manually.

Some watch manufacturers, like Japanese Seiko, make models that wirelessly follow the closest geographically available atomic clock to sync to it perfectly and never miss a second. We’re far, far away from grandma’s “furniture shadow on the floor”.

It is hard in such circumstances not to go wandering about the very notion of time and what technology is doing to us. Right now three things come to my mind.

The first is lyrics excerpts from Time, Pink Floyd’s legendary song from the album Dark Side of the Moon: “And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking.”

The second is these few hundredths of a second that make swimmers at Rio de Janeiro’s Olympics win or lose.

The third is about all the statistics that undeniably confirm that the average life expectancy is continuously increasing. We’re living longer it’s agreed, but are they taking into consideration the fact that we’re also living considerably faster? Is there any real benefit in the end?