Earlier this week, Daily Post columnist Gary Beatty discussed the apparent fact that many school-age children cannot read a clock with hands, due to the proliferation, everywhere, of digital clocks, which are slightly easier to read but in some cases equally meaningless.
I have to confess that I don’t own a single non-digital clock, even though I learned how to read them at an early age. Like Mr. Beatty, my first watch featured Mickey Mouse, pointing to the hour and the minute. As I recall, it didn’t have a second hand. Seconds didn’t matter much, when I was a kid, unless we were having a contest to see how long you could hold your breath.
In fact, time itself doesn’t matter much, when you’re a kid.
And normally, even as an adult, I don’t often need to know what time it is. Most days, I can get by with just an egg timer. If something important needs to occur, my cat tells me.
For most of human history, people designated time very simply, in two distinct parts. Daytime, and nighttime. During the day, you hunted the Woolly Mammoth, and during the night, after a big meal, you slept. You didn’t need even a digital clock.
Gradually, life became more complicated. The experts aren’t sure if the invention of the clock made life more complicated, or if a more complicated life instigated the invention of the clock. I suspect the clocks were to blame.
But either way, anxiety about showing up late for an appointment infiltrated what was once a simple life… little by little, when we weren’t paying attention.
Pretty soon, there were clocks even at the beach.
This is a sad statement about modern life, when you need a clock at the beach.
And that you need a ladder whenever Daylight Savings Time rolls around.
But human progress continues, unabated.
One part of that progress is globalization. Americans are now doing business with people in China and India. Sometimes you don’t even know you are talking to someone in India.
No, I take that back; I can tell when I’m talking to someone in India. But I don’t often think about the fact that it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon for me, and 2 o’clock in the morning for the person in India.
But things have become even weirder than that, lately. Half the time, when I hear someone having a conversation on their phone, they are talking to their ‘virtual assistant’ — Siri, or Alexa, or some other AI-driven voice-activated computer software. As far as I can tell, these virtual assistants don’t care at all what time it is. They’re happy to answer your questions, or give you thoughtful advice, day or night. And they don’t care what kind of mood you’re in. Cranky in the morning? Siri is never offended if I happen to verbally abuse her, as sometimes happens if I haven’t yet had my coffee.
COVID helped pave the way for this transition to a world where time matters less than it did before. For example, a lot of us who were working in offices, started sleeping in, and not even getting fully dressed for the 10am Zoom meeting. You could easily tell who wasn’t fully dressed because they left their video turned off. And even if they had their video turned on, they didn’t have to wear any pants.
I personally consider it to be a sign of human progress, when you can attend a business meeting in your pajamas. Or even, naked.
As mentioned above, people didn’t need clocks for most of human history. You had daytime, and you had nighttime. We seem to be headed for a world where even daytime and nighttime will become irrelevant.
My cat tells me when it’s suppertime. What else does a person really need to know?