An island that shuns clocks? It won’t stand the test of time

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/island-clocks-norway-time-free-sommaroy

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Philosophers and physicists have long debated the reality of time. But it has taken the people of the Norwegian island of Sommarøy (population: 350) to reach a final verdict. They have sided with Douglas Adams, who declared “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” They want to declare their island a time-free zone.

By coincidence, the story broke when I was in Skjolden, Norway, where the solstice sun set at 11.15pm and it never got fully dark. I’m now en route to Kiruna, within the Arctic Circle, where, like Sommarøy, the midnight sun can be seen from May to July.

The absence of a proper dawn and dusk shifts your perception of time. I’m used to the move from light to dark to light punctuating the day and setting its reference points. The level of light tells you whether it’s too early to have dinner, go to bed or get up. Without these signals I am more inclined to eat and sleep when I feel like it.

Hermits have no need for clocks. But living in a community requires a common timeframe

Days and seasons have their natural rhythms, which may be slower and gentler near the poles but are never completely absent. The desire to erase them seems like a wishful overreaction to the strict timekeeping of modern life and the discipline that follows from it.

For all its drawbacks, precise timing has been tremendously enabling. Almost all social coordination in the modern world requires formalised time. For example, the logistics required to assemble and audience and performers for any kind of concert or stage play involves any number of time points.

You can’t even flee to Sommarøy to escape the so-called tyranny of time without careful travel plans that rely on schedules and timetables. Hermits have no need of clocks. But living in a large modern community requires following a common timeframe.

The romanticism of the time-free zone misses formal time’s social aspect. Throwing away your watch might look like an opt-out from the capitalist machine, but it actually speaks to the central value fuelling consumerism: the desire for ever more personal choice and freedom. This is the main selling point of the Sommarøy plan. “If you want to paint your house at 2am, it’s OK,” says the leader of the campaign, Kjell Ove Hveding, on the campaign’s Facebook page. “If we want to take a swim at 4am, we will.” Far from being a rejection of the values of modern life, it’s an extension of the culture in which we expect to be able to do whatever we want when we want, at the click of an app. The promise of “liberation” from the clock panders to the illusion that total freedom is possible.

Time-free Sommarøy is a consumerist phenomenon in another way. As the eye-watering prices around me testify, the market for tourists here is constituted by the so-called “cash rich and time poor”. Like luxury yoga retreats and spa weekends, the escape from time taps into the market for costly “wellbeing” breaks, where people spend huge amounts on what they convince themselves is spiritual care of the self.

Hveding may be right to say: “All over the world, people are characterised by stress and depression.” But many of the most time-poor are among the most cash-poor, working in multiple jobs while trying to raise families. If we’re really worried about the tyranny of time, we should try to give more of it to them rather than swan off for indulgent holidays.

The Sommarøy time-free zone is great publicity but completely impractical. However, it could be taken as a valuable provocation in an age when the dictatorship of the chronograph is acutely felt. For all the advantages of a common clock, the desire to escape it reflects a widespread perception that it has become less and less of an enabler and more and more of a slave master. The same complaint was made when clocking in at work became the norm.

What has changed is how much we now bring the strict discipline of the clock upon ourselves. In the age of the “quantified self” we willingly time how long we sleep, exercise, look at screens. We are no longer hapless subjects of time and motion studies by managers but have internalised their logic into the self-management of our lives.

It is not the ticking of the clock that we need to resist but the temptation to use it to measure all our activities. Time should be kept in its social place. Your watch (or more likely your phone) is for coordinating your life with others. You only become a slave to time if you choose to use time’s whip to beat yourself.