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Title: Melt That Clock
Author: Norris Eppes
Date: June 2021
Language: en
Topics: surfing, David Graeber, bullshit jobs, environment, Sports, games, play, anti-work, work, not-anarchist
Source: from Issue 30.3 of The Surfer’s Journal https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.muckrack.com/portfolio/items/668109/Eppes_-_Melt_That_Clock_-_The_Surfers_Journal_Jun.pdf

Norris Eppes

Melt That Clock

The flat spell has been broken—thankfully, mercifully. And over a

weekend, nonetheless. How rare is it that good surf lines up with the

time to actually enjoy it?

But today is Saturday, and my time’s my own. It’s small, but it’s clean,

and I’ll take anything in the Florida summertime doldrums. Anything to

snap my flat-spell-induced case of the grays. Anything to balance the

paradox of work: I feel lucky that I still have a job, and angry at how

the ocean, uncaringly, seems to coordinate its schedule inversely with

my own work calendar.

The small neighborhood crew is in the water at the end of the street,

along with a few unknown faces. A set stands up in the Atlantic—green

base tones that move in gradient along the face up to a silver shimmer,

thanks to the low cloud cover—and everyone gets one. A little jolt of

joy: clean shoulder, slicing in, finding trim, the lip flickering along,

and, eventually, a clean kickout.

As I’m paddling back out to the lineup, one of the unknown faces shouts

at another.

“Hey, man, you got the time?”

The other unknown face glances at his wrist and shouts back, “Almost

eleven.”

The first face nods, thanks the watch-wearer, and makes an unsolicited

announcement to the entire lineup that it’s about time for him to head

in. I immediately feel bothered. I absolutely did not want to know the

time. I’ve avoided wearing a watch in the water lately. It’s sort of an

experiment. A surfer knows that human time blocks are incompatible with

the ocean and when it gets good.

But why is this? What is time, anyway? Where did my twenty-first-century

American definition of time come from? Why is it so clearly at odds with

the ocean’s rhythms? And, more specifically, can surfing without a watch

help me understand the way previous generations of humans conceived of

time itself?

The consensus among anthropologists, historians, and economists is that

there are two types of time: time as money, and episodic time. The

former dates its conception to the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The

latter is much, much older—and is probably the way all humans viewed

time until the invention of time as money.

In his book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explains that the idea of time

as a commodity—something that can be “spent,” “used,” “blocked off,” and

thus “wasted” or qualified as “bad”—is one “that would have seemed

perverse and outrageous to…most people who have ever lived.” He also

writes that “in places without clocks, time is measured by actions

rather than action being measured by time.” From his own anthropological

field work in Madagascar, he found that people described the length of a

walk in terms of how many meals it took to cook in the same amount of

time.

In his essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” EP

Thompson finds passages from literature and legislation that reference

how people once conceived of time itself, and he uses these clues to

track the way the concept of time evolved from episodic (in medieval

Europe) to time as money (in the Industrial Revolution and up to the

present day). He quotes an account from nineteenth-century England that

explains that the Court of Admiralty was always left open because

“‘seafaring men must take the opportunity of tides and winds, and

cannot, without ruin and great prejudice, attend the solemnity of courts

and dilatory pleadings.’” An exception was even made in legislation “for

fishermen who sighted a shoal off-shore on the Sabbath day.” Farther

inland, medieval field workers lived on episodic time with a work

pattern that alternated between “bouts of intense labor and of

idleness.” Similarly, according to Graeber, “the typical medieval serf,

male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty

days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast

days not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.”

So why don’t we follow this work schedule anymore?

The seeds of change were planted in the fourteenth century, when towns

in medieval Europe began building clock towers—usually funded by the

local guild of merchants. These merchants also put human skulls on their

desks as memento mori, or reminders that one day they would die. This is

when the idea of time as money was conceived, though it really kicked

off in the Industrial Revolution. In the 1700s, the dissemination of

domestic clocks and pocket watches began. It took a century to become

widespread, but, once they did, their presence allowed for the

merchants’ attitude to diffuse among the populace.

Thompson describes the explosion of watches in popularity in terms that

are eerily similar to the smartphone boom over the last decade. Was the

watch the smartphone of the 1800s? This would explain why the idea of

pawning your watch was a bigger deal then than now: It’d be today’s

equivalent of pawning your smartphone.

Once time became money, our finite amount of it on this Earth in the

single life we know we have could be put into blocks and sold and bought

and spent. It began seeping into daily life through work, education,

religious practice, and the literature, music, and art that humans were

making to process their lives.

“Charity schools,” writes Graeber, “designed to teach the poor

discipline and punctuality gave way to the public school systems where

students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room

to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement consciously

designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.”

In short, since the Industrial Revolution, people have been encouraged

to see time just like medieval merchants did: as money. Except it’s a

weird sort of money that’s both a possession to be carefully budgeted

and also an unchanging calendar grid that can’t be altered, regardless

of the life hacks or uppers people may engage in to “increase

productivity.” Instead of trying to resist the new definition of time

while it was still evolving—which would have been a strange enterprise,

and maybe impossible to comprehend while it was happening—people checked

into this new work culture of time as money and left behind their

notions of episodic time. Factory owners fiddled with the clocks on the

walls to keep workers, who were expected to punch in and out when they

arrived and left, on the job longer. Workers—who at first weren’t

allowed to wear their own watches—began bargaining for shorter workdays,

paid time off, and other such “benefits.” While the eight-hour workday

and the eradication of child labor in factories were improvements, they

were made within the limits of a time-as-money culture. In just a few

hundred years, the watch explosion caused both moral and neurological

changes. People had a completely new way to think about their

actions—and thus about their lives.

So what happened to episodic time?

Thompson sees that it “persists among some self-employed today—artists,

writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students,” which “provokes

the question whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

I’d add surfers to his list too. What other pursuits can you think of

that demand the near total dismissal of both clocks and an internet

connection? Sure, there are things that get you into a flow

state—requiring a similar amount of improvisation, luck, skill, and

persistence—but which of those can and must mostly be done without

technological connection of some kind?

With today’s smartphone boom mirroring the watch boom of the Industrial

Revolution, surfing can also teach us about how our brains are evolving

in response to near-constant use of the internet. Our brains are

different from the brains of the humans who worked and lived with

episodic time. Since there are new neural pathways being formed in each

of our brains due to smart-phones, our minds are different from the past

generations that didn’t use the internet. To extrapolate this, the

neurological makeup of our descendants will assuredly be different from

ours.

At the end of his essay, Thompson suggests that humans “might have to

relearn some of the arts of living lost in the Industrial Revolution.”

He sees a world “in which some of the old aggressive energies and

disciplines migrate to the newly industrializing nations, while the old

industrialized nations seek to rediscover modes of experience forgotten

before written history begins.”

Which is where surfing, again, enters the picture. It’s a special way to

tap into an older neural pathway, one that most human beings have lost.

The “time spent” surfing is usually defined by the conditions of the

surf itself. When you surf without a watch, you’re living by episodic

time. Thus, surfing rewires your mind to conceptualize time close to how

your ancestors thought about their days. And you can take this episodic

time back onto land and see your day as a series of actions as opposed

to capita—deciding on the activities that are worth doing for their own

sake. Which is why I got so bothered by the unknown faces making

unsolicited announcements to the lineup about the time. Sure, they may

have had obligations that Saturday. But couldn’t they have kept it to

themselves? And, while they’re at it, couldn’t they ax the talk of time

as money? No more “spending time,” but rather “passing it,” if it must

be spoken about at all in the lineup.

Thankfully, they left. My agitation disappeared as sets kept coming.

Eventually, I forgot what time it was, losing whatever conception I had

of the blocks and chunks of a calendared day. Episodic time appeared

naturally in its place as I dissolved into the cycling and recycling of

the sets, the kick-outs, and slicing into each new one with walls

stretching out in front of me. I’ve ditched my cheapo waterproof watch

and lost track of time, finding, in the process, that there was no time

to lose in the first place.