Relationship with Time

The way of the tourist is to consume; the way of the pilgrim is to be consumed. To the tourist the journey is a means. The pilgrim understands that it is both a means and an end in itself. The tourist and the pilgrim experience time differently. For the former, time is the foe that gives consumption its urgency. For the latter, time is a gift in... See more

I didn’t fancy the linearity of conventional biographies,” he said. “Lives don’t run in straight lines, and every time we think about them in retrospect (i.e., every time we start remembering) we actually rethink them. Our lives are stories we write and rewrite. There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.

The internet embodies this carnival temporality with startling clarity:

• Cyclical bursts : meme cycles, outrage waves, and news frenzies erupt, fade, and return with variation.

• Inversions : anonymous users become viral, while experts, CEOs, and politicians are mocked, parodied, or dethroned.

• Acceleration & simultaneity : the timeline collapses

... See more