Meanwhile, the negative side-effects of over-scheduling on child and adolescent mental health have been well-documented. Nor is the pressure confined to the West: a 2020 letter to The Lancet revealed that due to intense academic pressure, the prevalence of non-suicidal self-harm in Chinese youth aged 13-18 is estimated at 27%, compared to an estimated 19% worldwide.
And the drive to maximise productivity at any cost doesn’t end when adolescent strivers reach adulthood. So-called “smart drugs” — usually prescription amphetamine-based substances — are now widely used among students and high-stress tech and finance workers to improve study performance or workplace focus.
The most popular such drug in the UK is Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat children diagnosed with ADHD. It’s available on the black market for around £2 a pill, and a report last December indicated some 19% of UK students routinely use such drugs. So like the additives that eliminate time as an ingredient in bread and agriculture, we now have additives that replace time as an ingredient in human work — even the time we might once have considered essential, in which to daydream, pray, socialise or just sleep.
Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, but 70 years of Chorleywood bread have seen rising rates of digestive disorder. Along with producing less nutritious crops, a similar era of industrial agriculture has brought us to a point where topsoil erosion in many areas of Britain is well above sustainable levels. According to the UN, the world may have only 60 years of farming left if we stick to current practices. And like in bread or agriculture, cognitive additives such as Ritalin that defer our need for time also have side effects, such as palpitations, insomnia and addiction.
But instead of inviting us to slow down, the contemporary, headlong rush into digital culture threatens to flatten time still further. Digital tools promise ever greater efficiency and opportunities for self-optimisation. And past events have a way of hanging about online, as though they’re still happening.
It’s not as though this is all the fault of the internet, of course. The “green revolution” started after World War Two, and the Chorleywood Process was invented in 1961. Our drive to master time began long before the digitisation of everything. But the pandemic-era mass digitisation of mainstream culture effectively completed our surrender to the systematised, searchable and hyper-efficient eternal now offered us by the Men in Grey.
It’s mainly via my relationship to dough that I’m able to retain any sense of what knowing things felt like, before we set about trying to beat the clock. Through considerable practice — and excepting rare cockups like last weekend — I’ve reached a point where I can combine flour and other ingredients without weighing. I can tell by touch when the dough is worked enough, and (usually) judge accurately how long it’ll take to prove for great results.
This kind of gestalt familiarity with the nature of dough is partly sensory, partly intuitive, partly a non-scientific feeling for the alchemy of time. I treasure it, as a miniature pocket of holistic knowledge in my otherwise relatively indexed, optimised and high-tech existence.
I dare say there still exist longstanding practitioners of any number of occupations, whose main body of activity involves tactile, holistic, time-bound knowledge of this kind. What such experts know, and how they know it, is nigh-on impossible to convey in recipes or formulas. Because of this, it’s generally taught via apprenticeships rather than books. And it’s a kind of knowledge that can be temporarily eclipsed by machines, or by chemicals — but only at a price.
Its analogue in human knowledge is the world of touch, practice, faith, good judgement, intuition and dreams. In the name of time-saving, that domain has now been almost completely displaced from food, from farming, and from the educational and professional experiences on offer to children and young people. Our need for it hasn’t been eliminated, though, just deferred — and the costs are increasingly evident.
In Momo, the eponymous heroine eventually succeeds in freeing the stolen seconds, which fly back out into the world in the form of lilies and restore colour and play to the world. Our time, though, isn’t locked in a vault. It’s simply lost: traded for indigestible food, degrading farmland, miserable people and hyper-mediated personal productivity.
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