Illustrated by Kyle Fletcher and written by Michael Kiser

The passing of time frightens us like the howling pitch of a wild animal did our evolutionary grandfathers. And yet we willingly surround ourselves with its artifacts — clocks in every room, calendars on our fridge and devices, time stamps on every piece of digital communication.

 

Tick tick tick, time somehow seems to move faster or slower than time itself. It’s making you crazy, even now, as you sense the passage of time with every little notch in your mouse scroller. You’re in a hurry — but for what? The next blog entry in your Google Reader? Can you sense that your email is about to ping? Is your cellphone about to buzz?  We’re living like soldiers with PTSD, cringing every time we have a second of down time. 

Our collective anxiety about the passage of time makes us all into dickish blowhards. What’s faster than listening to what your co-worker is thinking right now? Telling you what you should be thinking, that’s what. I find myself cutting people off even as they respond to the now-rhetorical question of “hey, how’s it going?” Oh wait, did you actually want to try and answer that? Shit. I gotta go. 

Sensitivity to others requires patience. It asks us to empathize with others, marinate in their lives just long enough that we sense a connection between their experience and our own. But in recent years, the sense of urgency in our culture has been less about considering others and more about blasting the world with our own mundane thoughts. This urge is closely aligned with our desire to win against time. Consider this: you can now purchase a variety of digital gravestones that will project your image via photos and video, some for thousands of years into the future. And before you decide this is ridiculous, consider the intent of a gravestone in general. We’ve been fighting against time for a long, long while. “here lies so and so, the son of blah blah blah, OMG RT!

The only difference between a gravestone and our social networking altars is that now we can get started on memorializing ourselves sooner than ever. In his book, “American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Bernard-Henri Lévy calls into question American’s obsession with memorializing even the most recent past. American’s are adept at creating museums for barely-passed elements of our culture, such as the Rock and Roll museum. This frantic collecting and over-appreciation of our still-warm cultural corpses is the result of our anxiety over our youth. In a sense, we’re insecure that not enough time has passed for us to have a true history worth recalling, as compared to say Europe or ancient Greece. Hey, remember when that crazy preacher burned the Koran to protest the Manhattan Mosque project? Man, that was a crazy time. 

Lévy hardly could have predicted the effort we’d put in to memorializing each and every individual that’s part of a social network. We upload more pictures than we have experiences to account for them. We run out of status updates so fast that many of our feeds are full of re-tweets. We’ve become an echo chamber to validate the memorialization of every person on the planet. We’re all in cahoots. 15 minutes of fame? How about infinite mediocrity. 

So our anxiety over overwhelming inbound emails and SMSs has less to do with being overworked or oversocialized — it has everything to do with the fact that we only have so much time in a day to record an entire day. This time thing is a bitch.