Читать книгу On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast - Catherine Blyth, Catherine Blyth - Страница 15

Why we invented it, how it reinvents us

Sometimes I wish that nobody had invented clocks. Then my days would not be chopped into miserly minutes. I would have all the time in the world.

It is a sweet fantasy. But I need not hunt far to find it. This is the land of time that our toddler inhabits, and what a merry place it looks. How he howls if we urge him to hurry while he is studying a marathon of ants on a pavement, or try to scoop him up before he has patted the last jag of jigsaw into place. Often we ignore him; we have to bowl him off to nursery on time, into his bath on time. But how he blossoms on weekends when the day ebbs and flows with the hunger, curiosity and vitality that set the beat of his clock.

‘Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being,’ advised psychologist James Hillman. ‘It’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit it’s right here.’ If this is bliss, my son has it. Ask when something happened and he answers, ‘Yesterday.’ Ask when something is going to happen and he smiles, ‘Today?’ then gets back to what he was doing. The only clocks he respects are dandelions, because his present consists of whatever present thing grips him.

Children remind us that obeying time does not come naturally. When my son rears in protest as we try to saddle him with our schedule, I worry that he is learning to see time as his enemy. Because clocks are not going anywhere, and thank goodness for that. This chapter explores why we invented time and how it reinvents us. To a surprising degree our life is shaped by something often hidden from us: the version of time that we carry around inside our head. There are persuasive arguments for seeing time as your friend.

1. How time changed the world

Time is confusing. It is invisible, unbiddable; we cannot touch, taste, see or smell it, although you would have to travel a long way – as far as the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest – to find anyone above the age of ten with their wits intact who might deny that it exists.

The Pirahã are not just foxed by time. They also have no concept of numbers. Show them five soya beans and two soya beans and they cannot count the difference. Time blindness is an extension of their number blindness. This is because what we are talking about, when we talk about time, is something by which to count life. Its many puzzles have bewitched astrophysicists and befuddled philosophers, but set aside the black holes and the sophistry and you could do worse than this explanation given in 1762 by Henry Home, an industrious farmer-judge, who served as mentor to Adam Smith and David Hume and as the midwife to Scotland’s Enlightenment: ‘A child perceives an interval, and that interval it learns to call time.’

The complication is that from a user’s point of view, time is actually two separate things: it is the dimension in which we exist, and an organizational device like a compass. The compass’s job is to help us to navigate the dimension: to orientate ourselves in space, to measure the duration of events, to co-ordinate actions, and to plot our next steps. Day to day, however, we tend to think of time as something else entirely: a resource, divided into days, hours, minutes, seconds – the stuff that we never have enough of.

If you can bring yourself to forget its dismaying habit of marching on, then time grows easier to admire. This utterly ingenious intellectual technology lets us impose order on the rolling hurry of succession that is existence, by subdividing experience into three categories – past, present and future. It is also elastic, spanning infinitesimally tiny intervals such as attoseconds (a quintillionth or billionth of a billionth of a second) and epic photonic journeys across space called light years (5,878,625,373,184 miles). Its applications are numberless.

Try to imagine life without atomic clocks.

take a ten-second pause: really picture that thought

Did you envisage a world without smartphones, satellites or the internet? Almost certainly there were no nuclear submarines. It would be a slower place by far.

This little thought experiment illustrates an odd thing that happens when we find new ways to measure time: we transform what we can do with it. It is what cosmologist Gerald Whitrow was getting at when he spoke of ‘the invention of time’. Clocks were not simple witnesses to humanity’s story but accelerants. Each technological leap in timekeeping sprang a change.

The earliest evidence that humanity looked to the sky in search of answers about time is a painting on the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 BC. Twenty-nine black dots undulate like hoofprints beneath a stippled brown horse; they are thought to represent the cycle of the moon, making this the oldest surviving calendar. Venerable obelisks still serve as shadow clocks in Egypt, a function some have performed since 3500 BC, but the circle of megaliths at Stonehenge is Britain’s oldest clock. Built around 3100 BC, its design ensured that their arches would frame sunset on 21 December, the northern winter solstice, and sunrise on 21 June, the high point of the northern summer. And those ancient worshippers had reason to celebrate it. Once our hunter-gatherer ancestors understood the meanderings of the moon, the sun and the seasons, they were armed with the co-ordinates that would enable them to stop living from hand to mouth and begin farming the land. As agriculture developed, communities grew until eventually there was not only enough surplus food but also enough time to spare people to foster new skills and interests. Society developed.

Seasonal rhythms were central to life, as is reflected in the ceremonies of organized religion. Look past the burnt offerings and the vestments and you will find that the pulse behind the stories and traditions is agriculture’s calendar and the urge to control time, with festivals contrived to coax heaven into supplying timely sun and rain. Émile Durkheim, the forefather of sociology, identified this coercive property: ‘A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularities.’ If festivals paced time’s passage, with every culture offering sacrifices to encourage the New Year to be a kind one, the day’s staging posts were events: meal times, work times, sleep times, sun up, sun down, lengthening shadows and bells, just as the muezzin’s call to prayer sets the beat of a traditional Islamic day. Briefer intervals could be measured – a trained stargazer in ancient Babylon could tell time to within a quarter of an hour – but clocks were unnecessary. At such a gentle pace, who needs minutes?

Horology, the art and science of measuring time, soon fascinated rulers, because whoever controlled time could control people. Dates and hours supplied tools for synchronizing actions, whether to wage wars or to co-ordinate workers. It is no accident that the greater the number of clocks in an environment, the swifter people will go, as sociologist Robert Levine discovered when investigating the pace of life around the world. No wonder every major civilization invested heavily in the study of time, often hoping to prise open a window onto the future. Chinese and Babylonian astronomers (who were also priests) used their observations to predict not only astral phenomena but events on earth – a covert means of telling kings what to do.

A stroll through the history of clocks is like turning the pages of a flicker book of civilization’s greatest hits. Each occasion the timekeeper is reborn it is in a form that both mirrors and distorts its age. Shadow, sand, water, incense and candle clocks came early, but to trade event time for bossy, precise, hour-and-minute time, mechanical means were necessary.

The first automated timepieces appeared in European monasteries in the thirteenth century; named after the Latin clocca, ‘bell’, these faceless, armless clocks struck the hour as religious houses always had. Otherwise they were the preserve of the wealthy. To encounter a clock was to learn that here lived somebody to be reckoned with, as did Elizabeth I’s visitors at Whitehall Palace, where they were greeted by a needlework map of Britain, a sundial shaped like a monkey and a wind-up clock of an ‘Ethiop riding upon a rhinocerous’.

Clocks also supplied passports to power. In 1601, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented the Wanli emperor with a chiming clock, hoping to gain admission to China’s capital city. This device, so pettable compared to the huge water-clock towers that then thumbed the kingdom, inspired what would become an imperial passion for collecting clocks.

As navigation dissolved the oceans’ frontiers, a series of shipwrecks led Britain’s government to offer a prize to whoever found a means of tracking longitude. John Harrison, a carpenter from Yorkshire, devoted forty-three years to create a timepiece with sea legs steady enough to keep time, week after week, in heat, cold and tropical humidity on an ever-bobbing ship – saving lives, accelerating commerce, defeating the limits of space. Next, industrialization brought factory clocks and managers brandishing pocket watches, leading to the birth of a science called efficiency.

After engineers parcelled up the land in railways, the need to co-ordinate timetables led London Time to be decreed the whole country’s in 1880 – the first national standard time in the world. Towns no longer had their own time, and the loss of these gentler rhythms was mourned by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles: ‘Tess … started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.’

Once wristwatches became wardrobe staples, people were cuffed to time’s rule – an intrusion that was not always welcomed. In the 1950s Anirini, a Greek island, was so dull that clocks proved unnecessary, reported one traveller, describing how the suspected homicide of a husband, sent plunging down a well, was forgivingly ascribed to tedium. Locals bridled at neither the murderess nor the investigating police; however, the fat Yugoslav timepiece on an itinerant fisherman’s wrist horrified them.

As time technology grew nimbler, so did temporal thinking. It could be on a galactic scale; Albert Einstein theorized that billion-year-old collisions between black holes would be detected in waves of energy that continue to ripple across the universe, a prediction finally confirmed in 2016. Einstein also claimed correctly that time slows if you move fast enough (accelerating clocks grow heavier). Put an atomic clock, which keeps time by means of caesium electrons, losing one second in thirty million years, on a GPS satellite, which orbits earth at 18,000 mph, and sure enough, it loses 38 microseconds a day, requiring special electronics to recalculate its positioning. Thanks to such awesome precision, we can build targeted missiles and little gadgets capable of traversing chasms of space, landing on speeding comets and burying their noses in faraway planets’ secrets.

Computers and digital faces replaced the soothing flow of revolving arms with numbers, giving time a staccato beat – an apt prelude to the disruptions ahead, when smartphones would become our favourite means of telling time. Yet to some amazement, the watch is not dead. Luxury sales soar. The Rolex, Hublot or diving watch, equally true on the seabed or atop Everest, sits like a jewel on its owner’s wrist – perhaps, if he is a man, his only jewel. It is there less to indicate that its wearer is manacled to a schedule (even if this is how he is able to afford it) than to imply enduring success – the same message issued by Elizabeth I’s rhinoceros clock in Whitehall. Canny manufacturers market these beauties as heirlooms-in-waiting: a signal of your grip on time. This is in marked contrast to today’s other horological success story, Apple’s smartwatch, which does not passively purvey temporal information. No, it is a nagging device, buzzing like a wasp to alert its owner to an appointment or to that dire emergency, the arrival of another email – rupturing the user’s attention while ostensibly micromanaging her time.

We have travelled far from event time, which patterned our forefathers’ days according to the occasions that mattered, to a strange new, non-event time, which continually interrupts our flow. The smartwatch reminds me of that disquieting truth: whoever controls time also controls people.

Does this version of time work for you? Or does it make you its slave?

2. Our fictional units of time

In 1914, as the world geared up for the Great War, an inquisitive seven-year-old began dissecting her new favourite toy, an alarm clock. She wanted to see this peculiar thing, time. Seven alarm clocks died grisly deaths before her mother cottoned on to what was happening and gave her one device on which to experiment.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper never found what she was looking for. Instead she became a mathematician, joining the US Navy in the next world war to help devise a computer. When hostilities ended in 1945, the Navy said that at thirty-eight she was too old to join the regular force, so off she went to devise the first programming language using solely English words, flooring sceptics who imagined computers could only do arithmetic. The Navy soon took her back.

Rear Admiral Hopper was reluctantly demobbed at seventy-nine, two decades after the regular date. By then she was known as Amazing Grace, having popularized the term ‘debugging’ after fishing a dead moth from a computer’s innards. But she is best remembered for her post-retirement lectures. One day, fed up with being asked why satellite signals were so slow, she chopped a telephone cable into 11.8-inch lengths. This, she explained, doling them out to her audience, is the distance light travels in a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Yes, even lightning speed takes time.

Hopper stretched the limits of her era, ignoring rules and feminine expectations in order to prolong her career, as well as to turn computers into fatally word-friendly devices. Yet even one as resourceful as she could not locate time either within or outside an alarm clock, for the reason that time does not exist. Our units for measuring it – millennia, centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes – are also fictional. A nanosecond seems solid enough when you flop it about in a length of copper cable, but is no less arbitrary a way to measure our progress through the fourth dimension of existence than the gold stars on the badge of a McDonald’s trainee, marking his rise from novice to expert burger flipper. The crucial feature of seconds and years is their regular arrival (unlike McDonald’s stars).

All units of measurement are belief systems created to organize facts. Universality bestows a veneer of objectivity, yet these units are no less subjective than the yard, which was introduced by Henry I, ruthless fourth son of William the Conqueror, who outmanoeuvred his brothers, standardized measures and restored England’s coinage. His yardstick? The distance from his thumb to his nose. Similarly, calendars are the legacies of quarrels between astronomers, theologians and monarchs. Although most of us follow the solar year (identified by sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus as approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds), the Christian, Islamic and Chinese religious festivals stick with lunar months, just like our oldest calendar in the Lascaux cave.

In AD 398 St Augustine of Hippo queried the validity of such celestial yardsticks:

I heard from a learned man that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars constituted time, and I assented not. Why should not rather the motions of all bodies be time? What if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter’s wheel run round, would there be no time by which we might measure those revolutions?

And it turns out that not even the sky is reliable. As life accelerates, the planet’s solar orbit is slowing by fractions of a second each year. Blame gales in our mountains, which cause the earth to jiggle on its axis, and the friction of tides, which drag the earth’s rotation by 2.3 metres per second, per day, every hundred years (an effect partially masked by a glacial rebound, since the last Ice Age, of land once trapped beneath continental ice sheets, which speeds earth’s rotation by 0.6 metres per second per day). This slowdown maddens the engineers who nurse the atomic clocks on which our communications and defence systems depend. After all, if these fall out of synch with the planet, a missile or satellite will veer off course.

One nanosecond. One foot. If a misdirected drone were whizzing at you, you would care a lot about missing nanoseconds. But in general, such measures mean little to you and me, since our senses cannot compute such minuscule intervals. Time only gains purpose as a tool that we can use.

What is the point of femtoseconds (a quadrillionth, or millionth of a billionth, of a second)? It sounds a nonsense word, perhaps a satirical comment upon the emasculation of time, slivered into such absurdities. But although Concorde could not have travelled an atom’s breadth in such a minute interval, scientists, aided by femtoseconds, can track, instant by instant, what transpires at the atomic level during phase transition, that mystifying moment when a liquid becomes solid and free-range particles suddenly lock into a lattice, like dancers at a military dance. Our tiniest temporal unit yet is Planck time (the time it takes light to travel 4 × 10-35 metres) – mind-boggling, yet necessary, since it permits quantum physicists to comprehend the force that keeps life turning: gravity.

3. The comforts of time – or, why we love linear

You too are a clock. The beat of your life is the tempo of events – occasions whose rhythm dictates how relaxed or stressed you feel. A life borne on a steady routine can be titanically productive, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant demonstrated, his schedule so unwavering that amused citizens of Königsberg are said to have set their clocks by his afternoon stroll.

We invented time from a need for predictability. In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant observed that time is ‘at the foundation of all our intuitions’. Without it, how could we make sense of the world, distil lessons from experience, decide what to do when, or guess how long it will take? Time’s numbers and dates impose a reassuring form on vast existential uncertainties such as duration, decay and amorphous feelings like our sense of inevitability, empowering us to co-operate and compete as no other animal can.

Anything that gives time definition and direction is a blessing if you are an upright ape whose life’s work is, essentially, to survive an unpredictable environment and convince yourself that fleeting existence has a purpose. Recalling yesterday, dreaming about tomorrow: these mental co-ordinates extend a miraculous thread on which to peg our lives, allowing us to weave irretrievable sensory data into something more substantial: a tale of who we are and where we are going. Time’s script gives us history, identity, accumulating meanings, reasons to stay alive.

If time is foundational to our being, physicality defines how we conceive it. Concepts of time and space are interchangeable in indigenous languages, such as the Karen’s of Thailand. Soon is ‘d’yi ba’ – ‘not far away’. Sunset might be ‘three kilometres away’ (if that is how far you could walk in the time it would take for it to arrive). Similarly, we think of time as an independent, often impatient being – time ‘races ahead’ or we are ‘behind’ it. These metaphors are pale shadows of beliefs in time as independent divinities, like Kairos or Chronos. But the main reason that we see time as a moving spirit and life as a journey is that we are upright apes, striding on two legs, facing ahead. If a spider, jellyfish or side-shifting crab spoke of time, doubtless its vocabulary would be different.

No doubt it is also because we are upright apes, who like to move on, race, climb, get ahead, that many of us feel contented only if we are metaphorically getting on – in a career or romance, or ascending a social ladder. Our craving for a sense of destination in life’s journey (once we called it heaven) is preferable to the depressing alternative: to see life in purely physical terms, as a wizened decline unto the zero of death. How much better to mark life’s milestones with accumulating numbers, from your first birthday to your hundredth, evoking achievement, progress: a story from a lifetime.

Today, though, linear time has a challenger: our superfast, flexible hyperdigital telepresent. As a result, holding onto a sense of life as progressive – or simply getting through our plans from start to end – can be a trial. Operate on too many channels simultaneously and attention frays. This is dislocating. Time can resemble less a comforting anchor than a harrying tormentor. How much better to feel led by event time – placing your actions at the centre of a life that unfolds in meaningful chapters?

For Ethiopia’s Konso, the hour from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. is kakalseema (‘when the cattle return’). The word is so sumptuous, you could stretch out on it and swoon. By contrast, an appointment at 17.30 has an icy ring. It embodies the difference between a life organized by numbers and according to personal experience.

Few of us are tugged along by the rhythms of livestock, crops or the sea’s moon-bound tides. But we continue to weigh our days by events: what happens and what we make happen. If, come evening, we cannot account for ourselves – if the day passed in a forgettable rush – we can feel at best frustrated, at worst panicky. In the same way that studies find we are far better at fathoming how long it will take to reach a destination using landmarks than numbers, so time gathers meaning for us from landmark occasions. Not just from big celebrations, but all the moments when our experiences are distinct enough to fashion into stories we can tell one another; then, life makes sense.

Multiple clocks have a hand in shaping our lifetime: social clocks, physical clocks. Many are cyclical, from the fiscal year to the twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle or the twenty-four-hour rollercoaster of the testosterone cycle. Not forgetting our metronomic heartbeat, and ageing – all too visible in growing children, the shrinking old, and any mirror (failing eyesight is a kindness of age).

There are so many versions of time to choose from, yet if I try to picture it, I see a ruler, subdivided into units. Here I stand in the middle, the past behind me, the future before. This feels entirely authentic, yet it is a product of my scientific culture. The philosophical Roman statesman Seneca, writing in AD 65, a less geometric age, saw a lifetime instead in ‘large circles enclosing smaller’ – banded by childhood, youth and maturity, like tree rings.

It is only when I try to think how I feel about time that the importance of event time surfaces. Because cyclical time is what grips my heart. From mild indignation when a birthday rolls around, to the March thrill of strolling along streets lined by magnolia trees, their boughs shivering with ballerina blooms ready to dance in the spring, to my pangs walking into Holland Park to find my favourite horse chestnut already an orgy of gold, autumn’s first ravishment before setting about the oak next door. These events come sooner each year, until soon – too soon – there will be less time before than behind me. They remind me that all I love is temporary; life is not cyclical, and winter’s frost is already upon me – inconvenient truths no hair dye can refute. Yet still it moves me to know (grace of Robin Robertson’s poem ‘Primavera’) that Britain’s spring walks ‘north over flat ground at two miles an hour’.

Events may be as inevitable as the flush of autumn, or as unguessable as a black swan. But they are a benign organizing principle for life. Build days around occasions that matter to you, and time’s march will root you.

4. Your view of time, your quality of life

One gusty evening in February 1969 a student sat in her college room, writing, when she heard the seven-twenty bell, summoning her to dinner. She was mid-paragraph in an essay due the next morning, yet the bell was hard to ignore. Until a few weeks earlier Karen Armstrong had been a novice, and to a nun, time is ‘the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter’. Each hallowed moment, ‘no matter how trivial or menial the task’, was a sacrament commanding obedience.

At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately … It had become second nature to me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence.

But it had never happened. Heartbroken, faith lost, she left the convent’s rule. Nothing seemed sacred. So, this night, unwilling to cast off her train of thought, she carried on writing then strolled over to the college dining hall, into the stunning roar of four hundred young people and tutors eating supper. After years at the convent, where conversation was a vice strictly rationed, she was shocked – but more so by what followed: ‘Instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.’

This peculiar episode resonates not simply because it shows how hard it is to shed the habit of God. Those dominated by time are often disconcerted to discover that views and rules relating to it vary enormously.

Ask an Australian aboriginal when she won the lottery or lost her mother and she might say very recently – even if these events occurred years ago. This would not be untrue because, to her, time is not purely linear; it also moves in circles, radiating outwards from her at the circle’s centre. As a result, the more important an event is, the closer in time it feels. This elegant image is true of us all at a psychological level. Like magnets, significant events bend our perception of time. Our memories feel closer to the surface, or vivid, ‘like yesterday’, if they mean something to us.

We apprehend the future in the same way. A major occasion – be it an exam or a wedding – always, research finds, seems closer than its calendar date, looming delightfully or menacingly. This not only distorts our perspective but influences our actions.

What we tend not to notice is how, as a by-product of our experiences and expectations, we precipitate an attitude towards time itself – as if it were a force with a distinct personality. We see ourselves as always late, running to stand still, chasing after inexhaustible time. Or time is a lunatic whirligig; thrilling, fun, but a mite repetitious. Even if this view reflects reality, its feedback effect, like a prism, refracts the facts in another direction.

You might argue that our attitude towards time shifts from moment to moment – shit happens, we feel shit, then a shaft of pleasure shifts our barometer. True. But research finds that if you scrape away momentary differences, people tend to have a stubborn viewpoint that, like a compass, can set their life’s direction. Our minds habitually use single events to predict how we will behave in the future; psychologists call it ‘bundling expectations’. Let a mood crystallize into a belief – see time as divinity, friend or foe – and our behaviour shifts, determining whether we attack life or wait for it to happen. Expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies due to consistency bias (the term for our tendency to act in accordance with our self-image).

This is useful to know. Great swathes of your day may be hired out, subservient to others’ whims, and you may have a limited say in what you do. But you can control your attitude. Budge the mood, expect better, and outcomes can improve.

It is worth a try. Persistent, nagging time stress, however trivial, becomes a chronic condition. Simply being exposed to multitudes of things happening at once percolates a state of constant expectation that is cognate with anxiety. This is the tax we pay for all those incomplete tasks, unsent or unread emails, grating Facebook posts, pieces of paper on our desk, meetings whose action points we have yet to enact, if they hum in our minds. This is why we write them down. Cognitive dumping outsources stress; an improvement, until to-do lists become the bully. Catalyze this stress into a permanently embattled perspective towards time and the minor magnifies: everything seems urgent, overwhelming; impatience becomes our default mode, and rush unavoidable.

What would a positive attitude towards time look like? I like this view, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a model of eloquent rage written in horror at the tumbrels, guillotines and desecrated churches across the Channel: ‘Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn.’ Despite the legalistic language, for me it summons an interlocking chain of hands, reaching from the graves of the past to the cradles of tomorrow: the bond of trust required, as Burke saw it, to seal the deal that society offered – that is, to support all human interests. Current psychological research takes a similar view of what might be the healthiest attitude an individual can hold towards time. It has a catchy name: the balanced time perspective. It was invented by Philip Zimbardo.

Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison experiment, a notorious 1971 study in which adults played prisoners and guards in a fake prison. Things got dark, fast. Guards grew sadistic, prisoners depressed and passive. Zimbardo killed the experiment in consternation after three days as it teetered into abuse and the man playing the role of prison governor – Zimbardo himself – fell in with it. What this proved, if proof were necessary, is that much behaviour is a function not of innate character but of habitat: we follow the rules of our environment. Uncomfortable information after the genocidal complicity that marked Hitler’s Third Reich.

Since then, Zimbardo has sought to understand how to steer character for the better. His research, based on reams of studies, finds that a perky temporal outlook will produce a perky, productive human being.

Want to test your attitude? Consider the following questions.

1 What are your strongest memories and how would you describe your view of the past?

2 What are you doing this weekend and why?

3 What does the future hold and what matters most?

A balanced perspective is marked by a warm sense of the past (happy memories, fondness of traditions) zest for the present, and positive plans. All of which sounds like a very long description of optimism. But consistent evidence lends weight to the theory. Future-orientated countries and individuals enjoy greater success (if slightly less hedonism) than present-orientated ones. Effective people tend to feel positive about both past and future. Those with precise, full memories are also better at making plans. The message is plain: the more connected you feel to yesterday and tomorrow – the greater your sense of life as a connection between past and future, the dead and the unborn – then the clearer your focus on time and your life potential.

Ingenious methods exist to measure the breadth of our temporal horizon. Individuals with good impulse control – those who override temptations and cleave to long-term goals – evince warm feelings for their future self when their brains are scanned, regarding that imaginary being as they might a friend. By contrast, self-destructively impulsive people, unable to see far beyond their present, can feel as little for their future self as they would for a stranger.

Of equal interest in our view of time is the role played by our sense of agency. There is the goal-setting approach, seen among individuals who chart their life course; then there is the fatalist, who are closer to corks bobbing on time’s current, whither fate takes them – an outlook, Zimbardo notes, found in certain religions, as well as in pessimists, suicides and terrorists. Any one of us can feel either way, our perspective fluctuating by the hour, the season, our circumstances. In times of suffering, well may you believe in cruel fate or feel that time is the enemy. ‘Of all things past, the sorrow only stays,’ wrote Sir Walter Ralegh from his cell in the Tower of London, awaiting his summons to the axeman. Past successes, like the introduction of the potato and the courtly fashion for smoking, had proven an inadequate amulet against Elizabeth I’s disappointment in him.

Autobiographical memories are scripts that we use to tell ourselves who we are, what we like and how to get it. If the memories that you carry around like pebbles in your pocket fund self-limiting behaviour, you can bevel their sharper edges. Successful interventions conducted by Zimbardo and others with sufferers of post-traumatic stress and mental illness prove that a more enabling outlook on time can be cultivated. If that sounds close to brainwashing, consider how unreliable memory is, always editing. Perhaps our brain’s greatest gift is that it lets us forget so much that is dull or hurtful, instead spotlighting the peak experiences – the novelties, highs and lows – and giving them far more memory space than quotidian routine. This can mislead us into thinking that we had a wonderful trip or saw an incredible film because it ended well or there was one eye-wateringly hilarious incident, even – perhaps especially – if most of it was utterly unmemorable.

Years of therapy are not necessary to shift your angle on the future or past. A research team at the University of Miami asked three hundred students to recall an incident when someone had hurt them. One-third were then invited to spend a few minutes describing the event in detail, dwelling on their anger and subsequent misfortunes. Another third were also asked to describe the event, but in this instance to explore the good that had flowed from it (what they had learned or gained in strength and wisdom). The rest simply described their plans for the next day. Afterwards all three hundred completed a questionnaire setting out how they regarded the person who had upset them. Not surprisingly, the second group were far more forgiving, less likely to want to avoid the person concerned.

Spend a few minutes considering the profits drawn from a bad experience and you convert its value. Would your future look different if this kind of thinking became a habit?

Directions for a time-rich outlook

Past positive

The capacity to look warmly to the past is a psychological bridging loan, funding confidence for tomorrow. Although, as a financial adviser is obliged to remind you, past performance cannot guarantee future success, think more about the past and at the very least you will find your memory enriched – a good idea, since people with detailed recall have greater facility at drawing up detailed plans. To improve your powers of recollection, make a game of remembering happy things from different phases of your life. Could you also prioritize family or local traditions? If melancholy memories surface, dig a useful lesson from them. (Being bullied was my education in compassion, for instance.)

Present balance

Some pleasures render us passive recipients or consumers, others make us powerful and purposeful. Try to privilege experiences that help you to feel the author of your life’s story, connected with the world. Zone in on what you are doing as you do it and moments are instantly livelier. Could you be more interested in people, or pick more absorbing tasks?

Future positive

It begins in the expectation: that time can deliver what you crave. But the slightest nudge in a hopeful direction lifts the mood. For this reason, always arm yourself with something to look forward to, be it a holiday or an emergency biscuit. You might seek to develop a clearer vision of who and where you want to be. To this end, work on your prospective imagination. Perhaps try a different point of view for size; reading a novel or memoir is a collaborative exercise in evocation. And start daydreaming about credible pathways towards your future: specific goals, detailed plans. Then set a date to begin.