How This One Invention Made You Regret Wasting Time

Acknowledging and understanding the contributions of nature to human sense of time

Attention Restoration Theory — evidence that exists for the attention restoration values of exposure to natural environments and images.

How the Atomic Clock works

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Ever feel stressed for not having enough time? Proud for saving time? Guilty for wasting it? You’re not alone. 

We perceive time subjectively, emotionally, influenced by our world. An hour waiting in line is interminable, the same time spent with friends goes by in a flash. 

And in modern life, it was the invention of the clock that made time a commodity, an asset, to be spent or saved. Clocks tell us when to eat, record much we’ve overslept, dictate best to save time and call out just how much time we’ve wasted. We have lost any sense of a boundary with the clock. In a perversion of its original purpose, Clocks now define Time, not the other way around,  and we just follow along. 

And yet time defines our lives. Consider your proudest moments, your biggest regrets. These memories shape what you call your past. And your future is carved by your hopes, dreams, or worries, all of which determine the sacrifices you made today for a better tomorrow. And this fleeting present moment which was once your future, will soon be your past. so indeed, how we perceive time, is how we understand the passage of life — which defines who we are. 

So if life is defined by time, and time is driven by the clock, then in many ways it is the clock that drives our lives. 

But what if there was another way to be? What if notions of “saving”, “spending” or “wasting” time don’t really even make sense? By the end of this episode, you’ll understand how you were naturally meant to perceive time, and how modern life, with its clocks and calendars, robs us of the attention we need to enjoy the passage of time. And finally, we’ll see how Nature helps us reclaim our focus and attention. As I’ll explain, a walk in nature may be the closest thing to escaping the clock that we can find. 

How is Time Even Measured? 

So, before we get into how we perceive     time subjectively, how do we even objectively measure time? Well, to measure anything, you start by finding some standard thing, and use that to compare to anything else. In the 16th Century,   sailors measured nautical speed dragging a rope with knots behind their ship. The faster the speed, the more knots rose out of the water. We measured length using the average foot or finger, and so on. 

In the past, we measured time based on constant geodynamic movements — A day is one rotation of the earth, divide that into 24 parts to get hours, and further into minutes and seconds. Not perfect, but these methods were more than sufficient for Eratosthenes to measure the curvature of the earth in 250 BC. It was sufficient enough to schedule your lunch date in Alexandria, sail a ship across the Mediterranean, and organize a full scale war. 

However, today’s technologies, like GPS, require far more precision. To address this, we’ve invented atomic time measurement. Far more accurate, but far more technical. My brain kind of exploded researching this. If you want to learn more about Atomic electron transference I’ve added my research in the show notes. Basically, 1 second is the time it takes for 9 billion electrons to change state in a Cesium atom. See how simple that was? Well, anyway, this is incredibly precise. So precise, it only wavers by one second every 100 million years. Atomic clocks make possible everything from computing, to astrophysics, space exploration, and satellite navigation. So, the next time you need to find an alternate route through LA traffic, thank the atomic clock. 

A Watched Pot, Eventually, Boils

But, the thing is, with all this modern precision, most people today would struggle to make an accurate guess by looking at the sun. We simply don’t perceive time objectively. One day passes far faster than the next. In fact, time has never felt constant to us at all. As Shakespeare said “time travels at different speeds for different people”. Latin phrases like “Tempus fugit” / "Time flies”, or “a watched pot never boils” are famous for a reason. When I was a kid I actually did sit and watch a pot until it boiled. Not sure what that says about me. It did eventually happen. But it felt like it took forever.  

Our perception of Time is vulnerable to outside influences, to our moods and experiences. Still, we try our best to follow along. For example, we try to track the order in which things happen: a light should turn green before I step on the gas, or if I see lighting, expect thunder. Magic tricks prey on misdirecting this understanding of Time. You saw a coin go into her hand, her hand now has the coin, but wait her hand is empty, and the coin is now drawn from your ear. The coin’s journey subverted such a deeply held expectation for a common string of events, that it seems as if magic is the only explanation for where it ended up. 

And not just the order of things, we also try to follow the duration of events, but this is also quite fluid. An afternoon spent at the DMV is doomed to last forever, while your 3-day weekend holiday always feels, well, way too short. And duration doesn’t equal happiness. As we’ll discuss later, we all have found ourselves in 'flow' states where we concentrate deeply and time passes quickly yet joyfully. Driving in traffic requires our attention, yet it is slow and exhausting.

And not just the order in which things happen, and their duration, but also even our perspective of what time is changes proportionally with our years of experience. At age 5, a year until your 6th birthday is another 20% of your life to date, but at age 50, adding two years until your 52nd birthday is just another 1% of your life. Running my first mile felt so impossibly long, but after running maybe thousands of miles in my life, a mile now feels quite short. Our life experience becomes a gauge for how slow or fast time feels. 

So, again, who we are, what we’ve done, what has happened to us, where we’ve come to and what we think tomorrow will bring. This is all just the perception of time that we call our “life”  . 

Wired for Time

And every day, we use nature’s cues to understand this passage of time in our lives. In fact, we are hardwired to it in our biology.   

Sunlight tells our body when to sleep, to wake, when to focus, brainstorm, relax and daydream. Daylight activates our engines, spikes us into action and its disappearance cues us when to sleep. And not just day to day. Studies show we also abide by the seasons — our moods and the amount of deep sleep we need change, on average we require 30-60 minutes more each day in winter. But we each also carry another special clock within us, called the ultradian clock, which slices out short bursts of focus and calmness throughout the day. You may already have some sense of this, when your peak focus time is, when your brain can consistently fire on all cylinders for deep, challenging work, creativity and concentration. You may lose sense of time during these moments, as it’s affectionately described as your flow state. Your ultradian clock can count out bursts lasting about 90-120 minutes and then, remarkably shut off, and put you into a downtime mode to recharge. Heeding all of these clocks is essential to our health and productivity. 

Like Clockwork

These beautiful timers run in the background, meant to passively guide us as we move through time. On the other hand, modern life has been doing its best to replace these natural systems with a much more active sense of time. The clock, and by proxy, the ever-present schedule, ensure our constant measurement and attention is given to time. 

Before the clock, the time between sunrise and sunset was available, to accomplish whatever planned goals and events you had. Like most animals, we aligned our habits vaguely with dawn, morning, afternoon, dusk, or night time. In a time before clocks, our natural clocks took cues from sunlight and seasons, from our natural flow states, These clocks were tapped into all quite naturally. 

But clocks re-defined existence. According to many historians, it was the presence of clocks that moved us away from natural life rhythms, and towards the industrial age. In the same way the print press made writing accessible to everyone, clocks made time something tangible, simple, accurate, and portable enough to pervade culture and synchronize us socially, in a way that was not experienced ever before. 

As I mentioned earlier, clocks made time a commodity, something that could be ‘used’, 'saved', or 'wasted'. People were now eating meals and going to bed when the clock said so, because of the schedule they were following, not when they felt inclined to do so. 

What do I mean by that? Well, ok, your day today was likely completely governed by the measurement of time. You woke up at some certain time. This was either your ‘usual’ time, or, you intentionally planned last night the time you ‘needed’ to awake today. Probably you used an alarm to make sure, or had one set in case you ‘overslept’. You certainly wanted to make sure you could spend enough time to get ready. Maybe you left your house for work, school or another destination. You used a car to "save" time vs. walking. A meeting was canceled and got back a little “extra time”. You used that time for something else. Cars, Grocery stores, eCommerce, dishwashers, laundry machines all ostensibly gave you more time, and your daily planner helped you squeeze more out of each hour. And no matter when you fall asleep tonight, you will be getting to bed either "too late,"at the usual time”, or maybe you’re “getting in bed a bit early." 

The Modern Shame of Dawdling

Not surprisingly, as modern life replaces natural biology with rules about how we ought to spend our time, there’s considerable impact to our well-being. 

Our circadian cycles are disrupted by night shift work, by working remotely and across different time zones. The artificial light of phones, screens, and offices confuses our clocks, little sunlight suppresses our production of melatonin, causing insomnia. Our bodies don’t know what time to think it is.  And forget about seasonal rhythms, getting more downtime and sleep in winter. Likewise, our ultradian clocks are ignored. Each hour is the same as the next, and our unique, beautiful productive times are not honored, killing our flow.

And so, we are taught to feel shame, to feel guilty, to feel lazy when we waste time. We can’t blame ourselves, it is the world we live in. Even Charles Darwin, one of the most famous naturalists ever, wrote to his sister in 1836 and said “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life”. Like most inventions, clocks began with good intentions: originally meant to help us coordinate, we now use them to denigrate each other when we dawdle. 

The word dawdle popped into the English language about 1750 AD, right at the start of the industrial revolution when being punctual was everything. Likewise, being punctual only meant being exact until the 1750s when it picked up the new meaning of being “on time”. 

The Money Is On The Table

And the biggest reason we feel this shame of wasting time, is because time is no longer just a commodity, it is, quite literally money. We work for hourly wages, or in some way, we trade income for giving an expected number of hours. To waste time is to waste opportunity, to leave money on the table, and squander your chances: quite the cardinal sin in a capitalist society. 

But now, traditional 9-to-5 workdays are increasingly obsolete. Even traditional boundaries with time have been broken, we now work remotely, flex schedules, with an always on digital connectivity that forces a blur of work and personal life. Multitasking and constant connectivity are the norms and now time itself is inflating. Email, social media, and instant messaging create a relentless cycle of interaction and response that makes days feel simultaneously fuller and shorter. We bombard our brains with data, ensuring every second is valued and not wasted, and yet paradoxically this saturation makes time feel like it races by with never enough to process our experience. 

Reclaim Attention By Letting Go

And this at last is the key to what’s going on here. A modern life, without any boundaries on our focus, and yet a constant pressure to make the most of every minute, has robbed us of something even more valuable to our perception and enjoyment of time. That thing is Attention. It turns out, how we use our attention is the most critical factor to experiencing a rich sense of time. 

We are built with two kinds of attention, involuntary and directed. Involuntary attention we can’t really control. It is meant to draw our focus to threats and opportunities in the wild. And then, if necessary, we decide to use our directed attention to focus and address a certain thing as required. 

In times past, perhaps this looked like hearing the sounds of birds, deciding to wake up, or hearing a crack of branches in the woods, and evaluating what’s there, a deer or a bear? But in the modern world, our involuntary attention is on high alert, non-stop, constantly working through a saturation of incoming signals. And our directed attention attempts to address an unreasonable number of things at once, in too short a timeframe, we sort of adopt a triage mindset (like in an emergency room) triage for attention in our lives. This cycle of attention literally exhausts our ability to process time. And to enjoy time. As Socrates said, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

The Boundaries of Nature 

So if attention is what we’re missing, then how in the hockey sticks can we possibly reclaim it, when we can’t even find our focus? Turns out, one solution to the problem is right outside your window. A growing number of studies show memory, attention, focus, and an overall happiness improve by simply being in nature. Studies show a 20% increase in short term cognition among Nature walkers, vs. those subjected to walking on a busy street. Coastal environments have been shown to have the greatest effect, but city parks work well, too.. The study links are in the show notes. 

And a second study even simply asked participants to look at pictures of trees, fields and hills, vs. streets, industrial units or complex geometric patterns and then each group took several cognitive tests. Guess which group won out? 

Even just this week, National Geographic posted the happiest cities in the world. The top US city was Boulder, a city whose population has fought against highrises, in favor of low skylines, explicitly to make sure the views of the mountains are available constantly, for everyone.  

I’m pretty excited about all of this. For one thing, this aligns well with my mission as an artist. My furniture purposely studies and steals from the recognizable, asymmetrical forms found outdoors. I’m obsessed with interiors that bridge the gap between nature and the grid, bringing the outside in, just for the sake of peace and joy. I’ve long believed these forms create a sense of calm, and happy to see there’s some science backing this up. 

But, what is it, then, about simply being in a natural scene that improves a sense of time? Compared to a modern street or office, a natural environment engages our involuntary attention more as it was meant to be, that is, quite modestly. We’re certainly not bored, but we aren’t in a frantic emergency mode. Gazing at a sunset gives our involuntary attention a rest, and so now our usually otherwise directed minds can now relax — even wander. 

It is this healthy dose of ‘wandering’ that the clock stole from us; a life outside of the oppressions of a measured time is, ironically, exactly what we need to reclaim our focus, to be more present, more aware, more thoughtful of every moment passing. 

So this is actually a fascinating paradox — to reclaim our attention by letting go of our attention to the clock, and instead gazing upon something transcendent, something existing quite out of time, like Nature. The 20th century poet Wallace Stevens famously  said, “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” 

This makes sense to me. When I think of all my moments spent for days, or weeks, in forests and mountains, I find myself aware but no longer alert, with softer eyes and ears realizing how cluttered and noisy my daily life really is. Those moments when the silence is deafening and yet,  you can hear yourself think. It’s not that time slows, but really it is as if ‘time’ stops ticking altogether, and brightens, and widens, and hangs in the air in a way that makes everything feel more possible. 

Not to mention, I think what this is all really saying is we need more boundaries with Modern Notion of Time. Nature creates a natural separation. A hike ensures no connectivity; it forces a break with the clock. Sorry to say there’s no easy fix to the problems humans are faced with in modern life. We don’t have the luxury to simply unplug all the time. It is setting these boundaries with time that are so difficult to forge, and a quick escape  from modernity every once in a while just might be the easiest way to start. 

And of course — this notion of boundaries, escaping the noise, and reclaiming our souls is nothing new. I’ll close today with a quote from Anne Frank, where she effortlessly describes this sense of a timeless state of attention better than I ever could — 

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be…happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. … I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.” – Anne Frank

Thank you so much for spending time with me today. 

Don’t forget to get outside tomorrow morning and get a little daylight to help you sleep.