WE DIDN’T ALWAYS have clocks. For most of human history the concept of, say, ‘a quarter to five’ or ‘four forty-five’ would have been meaningless.

No one has ever found a Neolithic cave painting of someone waking up stressed because they slept through their alarm and missed their nine o’clock management meeting. Once upon a time, there were really just two times. Day and night. Light and dark. Awake and asleep. Of course, there were other times, too. There were meal times and hunting times and times to fight and times to relax and times to play and times to kiss, but these times weren’t dictated artificially by clocks and their numbers and endless partitions.

When time-keeping methods were first used they typically still kept this dual structure sacred. After all, when the Ancient Egyptians looked at the shadows from their time-telling obelisks, or when the Romans looked at their sundials, they could only do so in daylight. Even when mechanical clocks first appeared in Europe in the early 14th century, on things like churches, they were quite casual affairs. They generally didn’t have minute hands, for instance, and couldn’t be seen from most bedroom windows.

Pocket watches first came about during the 16th century and, like so many consumer desirables, were exclusive status symbols to begin with – novelties for the nobility. A fancy pocket watch in the middle of that century cost in the region of ￡15, which was more than a farm labourer earned in a year. All that for a watch that didn’t even have a minute hand. It was, however, the pocket watch that seemed to make people become a bit antsier about time. Or, at least, antsier about checking the time.

When the diarist Samuel Pepys first treated himself to a pocket watch – ‘a very fine [one] it is’ – in London in 1665 he quickly realised – like so many modern internet users – that having access to information gives you one kind of freedom at the expense of another. He wrote in his diary on 13 May:

But, Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishnesse hangs upon me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times; and am apt to think with myself, how could I be so long without one; though I remember since, I had one, and found it a trouble, and resolved to carry one no more about me while I lived.

Surely anyone who has ever had a smartphone or a Twitter account can relate to such compulsive behaviour. Check, check, check, and once more, just to see. When the ability to check something turns into the compulsion to do so, we often find ourselves craving the time before, when there was no ability to check in the first place.

The thing is, Pepys’ pocket watch wasn’t even very good. It wasn’t even quite good. It was a very crap piece of tech for a year’s salary. But no pocket watch in 1665 was good, at least not at telling the time. It wasn’t until a decade later with the invention of the hairspring, which controlled the speed of the watch’s balance wheel, that even vaguely accurate pocket watches were possible.

Since then, of course, our ways of measuring time have become ever more advanced. We are now in the age of atomic clocks. These are incredibly, intimidatingly accurate clocks. For instance, in 2016, physicists in Germany built a clock so accurate that it won’t lose or gain a second for 15 billion years. German physicists now have no excuse for being late for anything ever again.

We are too aware of numerical time and not aware enough of natural time. People for thousands of years may have woken up at seven in the morning. The difference with these last few centuries is that now we are waking up because it is seven in the morning. We go to school or college or work at a certain time of day, not because that feels the most natural time to do so, but because that is the time that has been given to us. We have handed over our instincts to the hands of a clock. Increasingly, we serve time rather than time serving us. We fret about time. We wonder where time has gone. We are obsessed with time.

A phone call

‘MATTHEW?’ IT’S MY mum. She is the only one who ever calls me Matthew.

‘Yeah.’

‘Were you listening to what I was saying?’

‘Um. Yeah. Something about going to the doctor . . .’

Shamefully, I hadn’t been listening. I was staring at an email I was halfway through writing. So, I change strategy. I tell her the truth.

‘I’m sorry. I’m just on the laptop. I’m very busy. I seem to have no time at all at the moment . . .’

Mum sighs, and I hear the sigh instantaneously, even though she is 200 miles away. ‘I know the feeling.’

We need the time we already have

THE THING IS, we should have more time than ever. I mean, think about it. Life expectancy has more than doubled for people living in the developed world during the last century. And not only that, we have more time-saving devices and technologies than ever before existed.

Emails are faster than letters. Electric heaters are faster than fires. Washing machines are speedier than handwashing over a sink or a river. Once laborious processes like waiting for your hair to dry or travelling ten miles or boiling water or searching through data now take next to no time at all. We have time-and effort-saving things like tractors and cars and washing machines and production lines and microwave ovens.

And yet, for a lot of our lives we feel rushed off our feet. We say things like ‘I’d love to read more/learn a musical instrument/go to the gym/do some charity work/cook my own meals/grow strawberries/see my old school friends/ train for a marathon . . . if only I had the time.’

We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.

Remember

Feeling you have no time doesn’t mean you have no time.

Feeling you are ugly doesn’t mean you are ugly.

Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious.

Feeling you haven’t achieved enough doesn’t mean you haven’t achieved enough.

Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.

5

LIFE OVERLOAD

An excess of everything

THERE IS, IN the current world, an excess of everything.

Think of just one single category of thing.

Think, say, of the thing you are holding – a book.

There are a lot of books. You have, for whatever reason, chosen to read this one, for which I sincerely thank you. But while you are reading this book you might also be painfully aware that you aren’t reading other books. And I don’t want to stress you out too much but there are a lot of other books. The website Mental Floss, relying heavily on data from Google, calculated there were – at a conservative estimate – 134,021,533 books in existence, but that was halfway through 2016. There are many millions more now. And anyway, 134,021,533 is still, technically, a lot.

It wasn’t always like this.

We didn’t always have so many books, and there was an obvious reason. Before printing presses books had to be made by hand, written on surfaces of clay, papyrus, wax or parchment.

Even after the printing press was invented there wasn’t that much stuff to read. A book club in England in the early 16th century would have struggled as there were only around 40 different books published a year, according to figures from the British Library. An avid reader could therefore quite easily keep up with every book that was published.

‘So, what are ye all reading?’ a hypothetical member of the hypothetical book club would ask.

‘Whatever there is, Cedric,’ would be the reply.

However, the situation changed quite quickly. By the year 1600 there were around 400 different titles being published per year in England – a tenfold increase on the previous century.

Although it is said that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person who read everything, this is a technical impossibility as he died in 1834, when there were already millions of books in existence. However, what is interesting is that people of the time could believe it was possible to read everything. No one could believe such a thing now.

We all know that, even if we break the world record for speed reading, the number of books we read will only ever be a minuscule fraction of the books in existence. We are drowning in books just as we are drowning in TV shows. And yet we can only read one book – and watch one TV show – at a time. We have multiplied everything, but we are still individual selves. There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

The world is having a panic attack