The tyranny of time is a fact of life in the modern world. The fear of the future and of emptiness, ingrained in everyone, is exploited to turn time into a scarce commodity to be maximised. Today, time is relentlessly pressing down on us. It drives us to work, produce and consume, in pursuit of the accumulation of wealth that offers us the illusion of immortality.
What has our relationship with time been throughout history? This is a question we should all be asking ourselves. In ancient times, time was seen as cyclical and unpredictable, directly linked to the rhythms of nature. Ancient civilisations accepted it as an external, sometimes mystical force that could be neither controlled nor quantified.
But this vision changed over the centuries. Technological development and the influence of secular Greco-Roman values brought about a change. It was in the second half of the Middle Ages that a new relationship with time took hold, transforming the Western, and then the global, economy forever.
The loss of influence of the Church in the West left more room for doubt and allowed the mercantile society to triumph. The relationship between merchants and time clashed with that of believers: the former feared that time was finite, while the latter saw it as infinite because of the promise of the afterlife. The merchants, haunted by the finiteness of their own lives, introduced a vision of time guided by the idea of maximising it for as long as possible. The result was a paradigm shift in which wasting time became a sin. The Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai illustrated this mentality well when he declared that ‘the necessity is to practise the economy of time, for it is the most precious thing we have’.
This concept laid the foundations for modern capitalism, in which control of time is reserved for the rich and powerful (which is why former French transport minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari declared that ‘the time of decision-makers is precious’).
From a medieval time, punctuated by the religious calendar and the hours of prayer (the canonical hours), time has become a precious resource where every minute must be used efficiently. Whether in craft production, trade or leisure activities themselves, time was structured to increase profits and optimise production.
It was also at this time that the modern financial system developed: in 1151, the first bank was founded in Italy, and debt became its main lever. The future became a commodity, as time had to be made profitable in order to honour the debts contracted. By relying on credit, this economy created the impression that time was linear, or even exponential, in line with the interest to be repaid. This transition marks the passage from the market economy to capitalism, which can simply be defined as a dynamic economic system that is constantly looking to the future at all costs.
Profit and growth also become imperatives for debt repayment. This need fuels the famous ‘money-market-money’ cycle described by Marx, the completion of which is a sign of economic crises linked to over-indebtedness and over-production, in cycles that are bound to repeat themselves. Since the birth of the financial system, crises have been multiplying as credit has become more widespread, particularly through bills of exchange.
Money, at first a simple means of exchange, became a symbol of security. For a society anxious about the passage of time, saving and accumulating money meant accumulating time, in a form of symbolic immortality. As Keynes suggests, ‘a rich man, after all, would go to heaven, provided he had saved’.
Societies reorganised themselves around this new relationship with time imposed by the commercial world. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the first mechanical clocks appeared in the church towers of Europe, introducing a precise measurement of time that made it possible to quantify working hours. The working day became more fragmented, particularly in the merchant cities of Italy, the cradle of capitalism. The Renaissance then marked a turning point, as man aspired to become ‘master and possessor of nature’, according to Descartes. Time became a strategic factor in trade, with the great rival powers controlling the sea routes as quickly as possible. The Industrial Revolution in Britain amplified this trend, with factories organising assembly-line work and imposing ‘working time’ as a measure of productivity linked to pay and output.
The concept of accelerated time permeated all areas of society: the development of railways, then high-speed trains, reduced distances and journey times; while time zones, introduced at the beginning of the XXᵉ century, overturned working practices throughout the world. Technology transformed distances and erased borders.
More recently, these innovations have been joined by the Internet and digital tools, which fragment time into a multitude of short items (continuous news, short videos, etc.) in consumerist societies where the law of ‘always more, right away’ reigns, with products designed in vast quantities for a short lifespan.
This compression of time, which is now omnipresent, influences every aspect of our daily lives. Our days are lived at a frenetic pace, driven by the credit economy that demands constant productivity and makes everyone impatient. The system rejects moments of rest. It hates it when people spend time at the table, when they decide to take time off, when they want to work 4 days a week, when they want to retire at 60… Basically, when people take time off, because this act becomes a form of resistance to capitalism.
The repercussions on our thinking are profound. As Günther Anders has pointed out, it is not just the obsolescence of objects that is at stake, but that of man himself. Thinking is reduced to the dictatorship of the short term. At the same time, Paschalian entertainment is in full swing, with the inflation of artificial needs and services constantly distracting us and filling up our time, making us forget about death.
In advanced economies, the year now seems to pass like a month, the month like a week, and the week like a day. While time is a dimension that once linked us to nature and to the very essence of our being, this dimension is now being depleted under the weight of an economy that is moving towards a theological goal, in a complete artificialisation of society. Today more than ever, the search for lost time is imperative…