Is it possible to abandon the concept of time? It might be a toothpaste and tube situation—impossible to unsee. But maybe we can still ignore it. Like the degenerate uncle nobody in your family speaks of. Just pretend time doesn't exist.
Most jobs make this hard to do, of course. It would be damn near impossible if you have kids in public school and you'd miss a lot of doctor and dentist appointments. But is it even possible to lose the concept of time altogether?
I was reading a book recently where members of a farming village would gather at dawn to walk a great distance to farm their rice fields all day. Then they'd walk the distance home again at sunset. A researcher asked one of the tribespeople how long the walk took. Bewildered, she said, "I don't know. I've never thought about that."
Time is concept we have built our lives around. But do we have to use it all the... ahem... time.
What might happen? (Besides being late or missing a bunch of scheduled stuff).
I think we'd feel a lot less stress. How much anxiety do you feel in an average week just trying to make it to something on time.
I think we'd enjoy things more. It would allow us to experience things without the distraction of a looming "time to leave" or "bed time".
A concept of time, an awareness of time, the watching of it, speeds things up most of the time. But then, if we are bored or otherwise suffering something unpleasant, watching the clock slows things down. I'm not sure if this is what Einstein was talking about when he said time is relative, but it seems to fit.
Einstein once wrote, "If, for instance, I say, ‘That train arrives here at seven o’clock,’ I mean something like this: ‘The pointing of the small hand of my watch to seven and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.’"
The connection of ticking clocks and watches to the passage of our lives is misleading.
This moment, now, exists differently for each person. Or as the New Yorker writer Jim Holt put it, "Whether two events are simultaneous is relative to the observer."
Weeks before his death, Einstein wrote, “this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one.”
I wonder then, can we force ourselves to see past the illusion? Can we ever be like the farmers walking to their fields, incapable of referencing time, even for a moment? I'm guessing not since I couldn't even write that last sentence without using the concept of time.
We can probably pretend it's not there, but like the degenerate uncle, it's going to show up uninvited and ruin our party.
Source: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/grand-illusion