How the Invention of the Clock Broke the Human Brain
We didn’t just learn to tell time. We learned to be anxious.
“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” — Lao Tzu
What is the most stressful object in your home?
Your laptop, with its endless stream of emails?
Your phone, with its constant notifications?
Your television, with its 24-hour news cycle of doom?
It’s none of those things.
The most stressful object in your home is the clock on your wall.
We see it as a neutral, objective tool. A simple device for measuring the passage of the day.
But we are wrong.
The clock is not a tool. It is a tyrant.
It is a piece of software that we installed in the human brain 700 years ago, and it has been slowly driving us mad ever since.
Before the clock, we lived in a different world.
A world without minutes, without seconds, without deadlines.
We lived by the sun, the moon, and the seasons.
We ate when we were hungry, we slept when we were tired, and we worked until the task was done.
We were human.