OUR DESIRE TO MANAGE OUR TIME - WHAT IS IS ALL ABOUT?

Making sure that societal order is being maintained, and/or that all is well and citizens are safe?

Contemporary humans have almost certainly loss the plot; what with this great desire we have about managing our time and using it efficiently.

A great deal of emphasis is placed on this presumed need for us to manage our time by allocating it to the different and competing living tasks we have to perform, and, when there is not enough time to go around, as it were, for us to prioritise those tasks which we actually perform. The 'must do tasks', as opposed to those which 'can be done another time', even if that time has to be constantly pushed back into the future. And so it is that, contemporary humans, especially those of us who are in paid occupations or doing voluntary work on which others are dependent, are being controlled by the tick or pulse of the clock.

When, and why did us humans become so automated, so conditioned, that our lives, our living became controlled by time?

Is time too oppression or obsessive, or have humans made it into 'a tyrant from which it is not possible to be freed, except through death?

Let us take a look back into our ancestral past, when we were  free or freer than we are today. A time when the only time management our ancestors probably paid any attention to, was that pertaining to hunting and food gathering to feed and clothed the tribe. The need to ensure that they had shelter to protect them against wild animals and inclement weather. Ensuring that they had adequate defences against other tribes who might or would attack them. 

And, as our ancestral societies evolved, the need to ensure that they sowed and planted their crops in the appropriate season, so that they would have time for their crops to grow and be reaped before they would be damaged by adverse weather conditions. The time to celebrate and show their collective appreciation for the good things in their living.

Yes, the living of our ancestors were time managed around the practicalities and the spiritual aspects of their world. You could argue that our ancestor managed their time according to the necessities of their societies. And, yes, as the saying goes, with 'necessity being the mother of invention' or, if you wish, evolution, our ancestors, spurred on probably by wars, famine and drought, began the process of what we could call 'societal incorporation', whereby each society was characterised by certain systems or organs which gave it the appearance of being a corporate body.

Yes, the beginning of the process of getting society to work like a clock, in its predictability, and which, as time progressed, would see the focus being transferred to getting humans, the functionaries who are responsible for keeping society functioning like clock-work, to also function like an automated clock.

Take time to be amazed and enjoy the beauty of what is!

Contemporary societies, as you would expect, have become much more complex and representative of the advances we have made in our scientific, technological and electronic development. And therein lies both the problem and the benefits which our application of these advances have made to our living.

Quite simply, in adapting our living to meet the needs - some of which are artificially generated - or demands of these advances, we have, in our orientation, been made more automated, with the machine becoming our driver our god! 

We see this more and more in the 'work-place', and it is not clear to what extent we are debating the issue of how it is benefiting us, what the cost is, and where it is ultimately leading us to.

To be continued.

No time to acknowledge, appreciate and enjoy the view in the background, because there in not time?