We need to challenge the institutions that dictate how we use our time, argues Guy Standing in this edited extract from his new book, The Politics of Time

To linger over a drink, to lie in bed next to one’s love, to strum a guitar or tinkle on the keyboard, to read or even scribble lines of poetry, to kick a ball a thousand times with one’s son or daughter – each of us has a long list of activities with which we would like to fill the unforgiving minutes.

Time is precious. As we go through life, we surely come to appreciate that, whatever we do, we should aim to create good memories of how we use our time. Using time wisely is a skill sometimes learned, too often not. Sadly, in our modern hedonistic and materialistic market-driven society, too few people have enough control over their time to be able to develop or exercise that skill. But how can we change that? Through a new politics of time.

Three time regimes have defined human history over the past two millennia: agrarian time, when the seasons and weather shaped how people used their time; industrial time, when the clock was in the ascendant and life was defined in blocs of time; and tertiary time, characteristic of today’s economies based on services rather than manufacturing or agriculture, when time-use boundaries have become blurred.

Someone who lives to the age of 80 has a mere 4,000 weeks of life, according to the snappy title of a “time management” book that came out in 2021. That figure reminds us how precious every week is. And if a high proportion of those weeks is taken up by activities over which we have no control, we should be concerned, if not angry. And we should also be angry if government policies subject some groups in society to controls that we would not accept for ourselves.

I have long struggled with the subject of time, largely arising from discontent with the ideological capture of the concept of “work”. I recall being invited many years ago to New York to participate in a conference of specialists on time-use surveys. As a young economist, I was no doubt expected to listen and learn. But after seeing table after table of detailed statistics on the time spent on numerous activities by people across the world, I asked the impertinent question, “Have any of these surveys found anybody having an affair?” Of course, none of them had done so. No doubt the specialists were not amused.

But the point is serious. When answering questions on time use, most of us will tend to report what we believe is the norm or what would be regarded as decent, responsible uses of our time. The plethora of statistics on how people allocate their time should be regarded as merely opening gambits. Indeed, even if we keep a diary, we probably rarely use time in the way we later recollect.

A famous debate was held in 1922 between the great physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and the philosopher Henry Bergson (1859–1941), in which Einstein differentiated between “psychological time” and “physicist’s time”. Thirty years later, he returned to this theme in an essay:

But what about the psychological origin of the concept of time? This concept is undoubtedly associated with the fact of “calling to mind”, as well as with the differentiation between sense experiences and the recollection of these . . . An experience is associated with a “recollection”, and it is considered as being “earlier” in comparison with “present experiences”. This . . . gives rise to the subjective concept of time, i.e., that concept of time which refers to the arrangement of the experiences of the individual.

This brilliantly reminds us that our perception of time is always jumbled by experience itself and by cultural and social reinforcement. Nothing in time is linear psychologically, except possibly what we are doing in the present. Even then, emotionally and physically, we rarely use time solely on one activity.

This book considers these issues in terms of demands on time and the need for emancipatory policies to obtain more control over our own time or, more correctly, to reduce the control of time by unwanted outside forces. Put more fancifully, it is about the ontological pursuit of what the German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) called “the negation of the negation”. Thus, in the three regimes that have shaped time over the last two thousand years, the political struggle has been – or should have been – against the institutions and policies used to control the time of the mass of people in that period.

Today, we need to understand what mechanisms are controlling our time, and we need a political strategy to overcome them.

Guy Standing‘s new book The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (Penguin) is out on 26 October. Order a copy here.

Guy will be our guest on A Drink with the Idler on Thursday 5 October 6-7pm.

Our September/October issue is available is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and in around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.