nine thousand flowers

Friday, February 03, 2006

The politics of time & the 20-hour day

Temporality -- the way people exist in time -- is one of the basic frameworks of any sociocultural reality. The way we practice/enact time, and more speificially the increase of FREE TIME should be a major issue in the democratic discussion of how we should organize our government, which is to say the way we govern ourselves, the way we organize our society and everyday life.

If we had an open, honest debate, one not dominated by self-interested elites and con-people, what percentage of USAmericans would be interested in trying some social policies aimed at increasing the amount of free time in everyday life? (What if it became clear that we had to cut back on our materialism in order to get more free time? I think a lot of people would be willing to seriously consider this…) Which is where my idea for the 20-hour day comes in…

I propose we endeavor to begin reorganizing our temporality in a more relaxed, enjoyable, humane way by adopting a whole new clock -- a clock that only goes to 10 twice a day (rather than 12), with fifty minutes in an hour and fifty seconds in a minute. Doing the math shows that one second in 'new time' would last for 1.728 seconds in 'old time.' Theoretically, this slower second/minute/hour would eventually structure a more relaxed everyday life. (I would propose no minutes marks on the clock to help us get there.) In addition, we could make the work day 5 'new hours' (1/4 of the day, so the equivalent of 6 old hours), so that people have more free time. Over time we could try to make the work day even fewer hours so people could have more time to pursue whatever they enjoy doing when not pressed for time...

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