The Time Rebels: Reclaiming the Future by Slowing Time
Image courtesy of Spur Magazine
The following article was originally published in SPUR magazine in my Tomorrow column.
As we enter the 2nd quarter of our century, it seems apt to reflect on our notion of time, its importance for our species, our future, and why it has become so warped in a fast society and fashion system with ridiculous timelines. In our 'Everything everywhere all at once' decade, time feels as if it has collapsed and traditional linear progression has given way to simultaneous, overlapping realities. The counter trend is wanting to slow down, and as part of this learning from the past. With ultimately the question: how we will be remembered by future generations?
'Memory is for the Future' to quote the book The Invention of Tomorrow.
It centres on why we as homo sapiens create the future and as such, why time is fundamental to the evolution of our species. We uniquely engage in 'episodic future thinking’ - the ability to mentally project ourselves forward and simulate future experiences and therefore, plan and build the future. Timekeeping devices have been central to our technological advancement.
Starting with ancient civilisations' sundials and water clocks, progressing through medieval mechanical clocks and pendulum-based precision instruments, this technology has enabled crucial developments like industrialisation. In 1967, we replaced astronomical with atomic time.
In his Flourish podcast conversation Brian Eno discusses how time is increasingly fragmented into nano metrics. Today we’re developing ever so smaller units of time with femtoseconds (100 quadrillionths of a second). Eno co-founded The Clock of The Long Now to do the opposite. The clock is built to last 10,000 years and embodies the notion of deep time, the vast scale of geological time over 4+ billion years. It’s made so people can understand time on a whole other scale, similar to how our understanding of Earth changed when we saw its first photos from space.
This deep time understanding opens a window into why we should learn to see the world in whole systems not trends.
In fact one of the habits of a systems thinker is to look for changes over time, to map not just the current state but the evolutionary patterns of a system's lifecycle. This allows us to identify critical intervention points in a system and develop solutions that consider immediate impacts and long-term adaptations.
Our hyper-fast-paced current society and consumer needs a fresh perspective because we live in an era of ridiculous time perceptions. Zero Waste fashion pioneer Danielle Elsener shared in my 2022 interview with her, "It was kind of a harsh awakening, as soon as I changed my role from designer, which I still am, I became the owner of a manufacturing facility and people start to treat you different. All of a sudden everyone's nickel and diming you and expecting insanely ridiculous timelines."
This shows how our fashion industry suffers from an extreme lack of whole systems thinking and ignores long term consequences, whilst expecting the unreasonable to make more clothing - fast, at any human and planetary cost.
To intervene in this insane system we’ve built, one solution is to radically slow down.
On a personal level, this means guarding our mental space in a world overwhelmed with commentary and indigestible amounts of information. Gurwinder Bhogal writes about The Intellectual Obesity Crisis, explaining how our natural curiosity has become maladaptive in the age of information overload. 2019 research from Berkeley revealed that information triggers the brain's reward system similarly to food, regardless of its quality. The solution involves cultivating "digital mindfulness" - being intentional about what information we consume and how we process it.
On a community level, we slow down by focusing on zero waste, something that could be achieved in fashion if we tried, and is now being pioneered in urbanism. Kamikatsu in Japan is on track to become the nation's 1st zero waste city . The solution also may lie in past success stories. Social philosopher Roman Krzanic’s book History for Tomorrow explores thinking for the long-term future through historical lessons. Japan's Edo period demonstrated one of the world's first large-scale low carbon, low waste circular economies, while in pre-colonial Hawaii, communities had the ‘ancestral circular economy’.
But how will we be remembered by future generations?
A recent MIT Technology Review article "The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age" highlights this critical challenge in a digital era when our data storage is so ephemeral. Ironically, while we generate unprecedented amounts of data, our ability to preserve it long-term is surprisingly fragile. Important digital platforms frequently disappear or purge their archives, from MySpace's pre-2016 media deletion to MTV News's decades of journalism vanishing overnight. Archivists are sounding the alarm. Some preservation efforts are underway such as The Internet Archive with its 800 billion web pages, while in Norway, GitHub stores crucial software code on specialized 500-year film in the Svalbard vault.
The importance we've placed on constantly creating, storing and digesting the NOW is highly obsolete. Our time compass is deranged but we can solve this crisis. To quote Roman Krznaric "Let us not be trapped in the tyranny of the now."
Slowing down empowers the wellbeing of the ME and the WE. It brings intentionality to everything we do and makes us feel whole again. What if we parked socials, doom scrolling, constantly being on a platform or a device’s schedule rather than our own, and prioritised slower, more intimate exchanges with the world and people? Even just for a week?
Resources from my archives
By Geraldine Wharry
