TED Talks · How to slow down

Timekeeping

If we're ever going to slow down, we must understand why we sped up in the first place.

Level: A2 · 44 sentences

Transcript

  1. If we're ever going to slow down,
  2. we must understand why we sped up in the first place.
  3. And to do that, we need to explore how humans have tracked time through the ages.
  4. The earliest known sundials date back to 1500 BC.
  5. And even these limited timekeeping tools caused Roman poet Plautus to write,
  6. who in this place set up a sundial to cut?
  7. and hack my days so wretchedly into small portions.
  8. Right up until the Middle Ages, timekeeping was an imprecise art.
  9. Our ancestors split their days into 24 hours,
  10. but the length of each hour varied with the seasons.
  11. In the early 1300s, one hour in London could be 38 minutes or 82 minutes,
  12. depending on the time of year.
  13. Timekeeping came of age with the invention of mechanical clocks in medieval Europe.
  14. Suddenly, we could cut and hack our days into smaller and smaller portions.
  15. Here's one example.
  16. Sometime around the year 1370, the German city of Cologne erected a public clock.
  17. A few years later,
  18. Cologne passed a statute fixing the start and end of the workday for laborers.
  19. It also limited their lunch break to one hour and no longer.
  20. In 1391, the city started imposing curfews.
  21. So, in the space of one generation,
  22. the people of Cologne went from never knowing for sure what time it was to letting the clock dictate when they worked,
  23. how long they took for lunch, and when they went home every night.
  24. Time was now calling the shots.
  25. By the late 1600s, we could accurately measure hours, minutes, and seconds.
  26. And then, came the Industrial Revolution.
  27. Modern capitalism is built on timekeeping, and it rewards speed like never before,
  28. because the faster you make stuff, the more profit you turn.
  29. As the saying goes, time is money.
  30. Factories hustled to make every minute more productive.
  31. Towards the end of the 19th century,
  32. Frederick Taylor, an American inventor and engineer,
  33. took this obsession with saving time in the workplace to a whole new level.
  34. Taylor used a stopwatch and a slide rule to figure out how long factory workers should take for every single task down to the nearest second.
  35. Taylorism was time is money on steroids.
  36. And later, that mindset spilled out of the factories to infect every corner of our lives.
  37. Like good disciples of Taylor, we are obsessed with time.
  38. We think and talk about it.
  39. We track it.
  40. We go to great lengths to maximize it.
  41. Of course, no matter how much we do or how quickly we do it,
  42. the number of hours in each day remains the same.
  43. And learning to savor our time makes much more sense than rushing to beat the clock,
  44. the stopwatch, or even the sundial.