Let Us Return to Natural Time
We organize our lives by a historical anachronism. If we choose, we can use modern technology to return to the old ways, for our sake and the sake of the planet.
Once again, we are at that time of year when the clocks need to be adjusted. Articles pop up reminding everyone to adjust their clocks, and other articles debate the merits of permanent daylight savings time. It’s been this way for so long that living any other way seems impossible. We have been living this way for over a century at this point, and as such we struggle to imagine life any other way.
Historical Timekeeping
But this is not how most human beings have lived. First, the very concept of breaking a day into hours, let alone minutes, is something the vast majority of humans that have ever lived would have considered alien. In the pre-agrarian past, there was no timekeeping at all beyond the vaguest descriptions of morning, noon, evening, and night. But modern civilization is not the first society that attempted to divide the day into hours. One example that is particularly telling is the Roman.
This image is from the Wikipedia article on Roman timekeeping. The Romans had sundials, and they used these to track the hours in the day. In Roman cities, the people lived lives in many ways quite recognizable to people today. People worked jobs, they went to restaurants, they shopped in stores, they attended public gatherings. They needed to keep time for the same reasons we needed to. They had to do this via sundial, but the needs were the same.
Perhaps most interestingly to a modern observer, the Romans used what we might call “natural time.” Their days were always 12 hours long, as were their nights. The Sun always rose at 6 AM, and it always set at 6 PM. How did they accomplish this feat? Did their prayers to Sol Invictus produce some truly tangible results? No.
Rather, the Romans simply did not use hours in the way we use them. We define an “hour” as a fixed unit of time. An hour is 60 minutes. A minute is 60 seconds. And a second is defined precisely according to the ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium atom.
But the Romans did not treat time this way. Rather, an “hour” was a flexible thing. A daytime hour was longer in the Summer than it was in the Winter. Ultimately, the Roman system was simply a formalization of natural time, natural human Circadian rhythms. Outside of urban areas in premodern times, people lived also according to the Sun and seasons. When the only artificial light available was by fires and candles, people could not afford to live any other way. All through the year, people started their days at dawn and ended them at dusk, and their work output varied through the year accordingly.
The Industrial Revolution
This system broke down with the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Factory owners needed to coordinate their workforces. Train companies needed to coordinate intercity train schedules. The very concept of time zones came about due to the needs and actions of railways. You cannot coordinate intercity train networks using sundials. Instead, the precise regular ticking of clocks was needed. In turn, regions were divided into time zones, grouping cities into fixed bands of coordinated uniform time.
Factory owners also needed regular time. In the preindustrial era, most manufacturing was small and artisenal. A blacksmith did not need to punch a time clock; he simply woke at dawn, went to his forge, and worked until sundown or some other appointed hour. But in the 19th century and onward, work has shifted from farming and small-scale manufacturing to hourly work. And while 19th century timekeeping was far beyond that of the Romans, in many ways it was still primitive. Timekeeping was done by mechnical timepieces, clocks and watches running on springs and pendulums. And such mechanical timepieces required that seconds, minutes, and hours be uniform. Imagine trying to design a mechanical pocketwatch that acted according to the Roman variable hours system. Such a thing, if not completely impossible, was certainly hopelessly impractical.
So we largely abandoned natural time. The day was divided into 24 rigid hours, and we human beings had to learn to adjust ourselves to the needs of the machines. You have to work 8 to 5, and if that means going to work before dawn in the winter or going to bed before sunset in a high-latitude summer, so be it. And while doing this made scheduling large urban centers and industrial societies possible, it also has had major health impacts such as insomnia and the general poor health that comes with fighting a Circadian rhythm.
Daylight savings time itself is a crude hack we adopted in an attempt to ameliorate some of the negative effects of fixed hours. The length of an hour does not change, but twice a year we roll the fixed hours back or forwards in a vain lipservice to the changing seasons. Many have advocated for abolishing daylight savings time, or even for making daylight savings time permanent. But what if there were a better way? What if we could use modern technology to reimplement a more natural timekeeping system, a modern version of Roman time?
Roman Time Reborn
We no longer live in the 19th century. Today, time is kept primarily digitally, not through the actions of gears and springs. And even more crucially, time is kept usually not just on digital watches and clocks, but as a minor function of the calendar and GPS-enabled supercomputers we carry around in our pockets, the modern smartphone.
In principal, we have the means to implement the Roman time system on a mass and organized scale. Smartphones could be designed to display time according to the season and the latitude they happen to be at. Take your phone anywhere outside of the Arctic and Antarctic circles, and it could automatically adjust to the latitude and date. Take your phone anywhere where 99% of the human population lives, and it will always read 6 AM and Sunset and 6 PM at Sundown.
Long Distance Scheduling and Industrial Applications
One obvious downside of such a system would be scheduling. How does one schedule a meeting or an international plane flight when not only time zones, but variable hour lengths are in play? Here again, our access to modern digital technology gives us options unthinkable to our forebears. When scheduling a meeting in modern scheduling systems, the systems already adjust displayed times for time zones. Such systems could be built to largely schedule things based on a fixed UTC or other system and then display time to individual users based on their local latitude, longitude, and time of year.
Some systems, like the Internet, do require fixed time measurement, but the Internet largely exists on UTC and can continue to do so. Airlines similarly can operate on UTC, while their consumer interfaces could display arrival and departure times based on local natural time.
Why Change the Clocks?
One objection to returning to natural time might be, why not instead simply adjust the operating hours of businesses, schools, etc? If the goal is to have some sunlit time before and after a work day, why not make work hours seasonal? Why not just make the normal work hours 9-4 in the winter and 7-6 in the summer? Daylight savings time illustrates the difficulty of this approach. We as a society do need a way of coordinating across multiple disparate and uncoordinated businesses, schools, individuals, etc. If a business decided to operate with such seasonal hours, there is no guarantee that the schools will do the same. This makes things extremely difficult for working parents. The same applies for people working multiple jobs, businesses that need to coordinate with each other, etc. In theory, daylight savings time should be completely unnecessary, but we find it easier to simply adjust the clock itself rather than coordinate seasonal schedules. Variable hour lengths would allow for the smooth seasonal adjustment of work schedules without requiring a vast coordinated scheduling operation betwen various organizations.
A Bifurcation of Time: Human and Industrial/Scientific
There would of course be some applications where fixed lengths of time are required. A recipe might require cooking something 20 minutes in the oven, and that is true regardless of what time of year it is. While it might be possible to store all recipes and other time-dependent procedures in digital seasonal-adjusting formats, that seems impractical. Rather, such seasonal time would be largely limited to the matters of human scheduling. Time could be bifurcated into “natural time” and “scientific time” The natural hour and the natural minute, whose lengths vary with the seasons, would be used for scheduling school and businesss hours, meetings, shifts, etc. For processess and procedures that require a fixed length of time, the scientific second, the scientific minute, and the scientific hour could be employed, whose denitions would remain as they are now.
Benefits of a Return to Natural Time
Despite the technical and logistical challenges, there would be some benefits of returning to a system of natural time. These would be individual health and environmental benefit.
Individual health would benefit by allowing people to live more in tune with their natural Circadian rhythms. Human beings have evolved to do most of our work during daylight hours, and to adjust our work output with the changing seasons. The dependence on mechanical clocks has forced us to work against our nature, and this has produced an epidemic of insomnia and other negative health effects. We live in defiance of the seasons, and then we lament how we are always sleep deprived. We take huge doses of caffeine to awake at an unnatural hour, and we struggle against insomnia and medicate ourselves to sleep. We abandoned eons of evolutionary history to the service of mechnical clocks, and we continue to do so even though modern technology has made such sacrifices unnecessary. A modern implentation of Roman time would likely greatly improve the health, happiness, and well-being of all.
Second, the environment would also benefit. Moving to a system of seasonal time would likely cause a corresponding seasonal shift in production and work output. More work would be done in the Summer, and less would be done in the Winter. Workers could be paid the same nominal hourly rate through the year, getting less for their time in the Summer and more in the Winter, but it would all balance out in the end. But this would have some very real environmental benefits. As we move to a renewable power grid, the intermittency of renewables is becoming ever more important. While production fluctuations over a 24 hour period can addressed with relative ease with battery banks, seasonal variations are much harder to solve. Shifiting as much production and economic activity from the Winter to the Summer would shift power demand to the times of year when energy is cheapest and most abundant.
Finally, returning to a seasonal relation with time might have some further psychological benefits. Winter and Summer used to actually mean something in terms of the day to day lives of people. In Winter, you spent most of your time huddled at home with your family through the long Winter nights. In Summer, you spent long days working the fields. In the Summer, you could look forward to the reduced workload that would come with the Winter months. In the Winter, you could look forward to overcoming cabin fever and getting back out in the Sun again. Harvest festivals like Halloween and Thanksgiving actually meant something to people, as they marked the very real changes in their day-to-day schedules. Easter and other Spring festivals celebrated not just the rebirth of nature but the reemergence of people into a reawakened world. We still celebrate these holidays, but the celebration is hollow. We don’t live the seasons. We don’t feel them in our bones. And our lives are poorer for it. Perhaps by returning to a system of natural time, we can rekindle some of that ancient magic, abandon our service to old spring clocks, and once again find our place as denizens of a living world.