Living Without Time (An Experiment)

9 Jan 2025

From tomorrow I am removing all indicators of time from my life. I will no longer wear a wristwatch or show the time on the phone's lock screen. All other gadgets like the laptop, ebook, tablet etc. will also hide the clock whenever possible. When their settings do not allow hiding the time, a random incorrect time will be set.

Lock screen changed to Thai script so that I am unable to read the time.

Ok... Why?

The reason for this is the growing realization that time is not real. It is a construct. An axis put through a dimension that does not exist in the first place.

I cannot say with certainty that time as a concept in physics does not exist, I simply know too little about that field to comment. However in daily human life it is certainly an illusion. We imagine time as an arrow going through the past, present and future. However, I argue that only one of those points is real: the present.

What we call "the past" and "the future" are constructs that can only exist in the present moment.

Our memories which to a large extent hold the past are like this. They consist of neural connections formed by experiences that were at some point also in the present moment.

The concept of the past can also manifest itself as clues that can be used to extrapolate previous states of the world. If you stumble upon a smoldering camp fire when hiking in the woods, you can guess that not long ago there was a fire burning there. But again, the past here does not exist independently of your mind, you have to extrapolate it into existance. And insofar as it exists, it exists exclusively in the present moment.

The future's existance is even less substantial. Unlike the past which can be seen through its lasting effects in the present, the future only exists as extrapolation.

Hence a time machine is impossible. Not because we lack the knowledge necessary to build one, but because there is no destination to go with it in the first place.

Practical application to life

Pondering how insubstantial the concept of time is, I realized that I am missallocating my energy. Most of my thinking goes towards planning the future and analyzing the past, leaving little for the present moment.

Too much energy is going towards things that might never come to pass, and things that have already passed. This comes at the expense of the present, where I am often lost in thought planning and analyzing. My default state is fairly disconnected, only part of my mind being focused on the present experience.

It is to remedy this missallocation I have decided to run an experiment.

The experiment

To lessen the hold the illusion and social construct of time has on me, I will remove as many indicators of time as I can from my life.

I will no longer wear a wristwatch, and all of my devices will be updated to either hide the time, or show a random incorrect time.

However I want to do this experiment responsibly without burdening other people, and without it negatively impacting work. I believe the following rules will help me do exactly this:

Relative time is still allowed. While I might not know what time it is, I will allow knowledge that I have a meeting in X minutes. This way I can simply put all events dependent on other people into my calendar, and have my phone notify me in advance. This does however force me to have the correct time set on my phone, but by changing the lock screen and the putting a sticker over the menu bar I can limit my knowledge of what time it is.
I will only commit to this experiment for 2 weeks to start with. In that time I should not be able to cause irreperabel harm to my businesses. If after two weeks I find that the negatives outweigh the benefits, I will stop the test.

My hope with this experiment is that I will be less anxious and more connected to the present moment, and not feel the need to do something, just because it is a certain time of day. Things that are dependent on others (calls, dinners, meetings etc.) I will schedule. Everything else can happen whenever it happens.

I will go to bed when I am tired, wake up when rested, and eat when hungry. Surely this must be a more natural state for humans as mechanical timekeeping was only invented in the 13th century.

Experiment diary

I will document the results of this experiment in a diary and post an update on the blog. If after 2 weeks I feel this is having a positive/neutral effect, I will keep going.