Don't Ask Me What Time It Is

Another news item

Don't Ask Me What Time It Is
- Go Ahead, Punch The Clock
By Melanchia Faust, New Delhi Times
February 15, 2008

Four hundred and fifty years ago, after suffering a series of imprisonments for remarks against the King of France, Justin Henri, the radical polemist declared, "Time punishes all fools who don't watch it and defeats all fools who do." Shortly thereafter, on September 12, 1553, at the stroke of noon, he was beheaded, and silence filled his void.
Four hundred and fifty years later, his words come alive. Researchers in England, after an exhaustive study on happiness, have concluded that time is the source of human misery. "It’s not your parents," says anthropologist Andrew Ahismelting of the University of Warlock, Coven, England, and co-author of the study. "And it’s not your classmates, nor your pets, your status, your boss, your childhood, your neighborhood, your bank account, your teachers, your education, your race, your nationality, your war experience, your disability, your brain chemistry, your genetics, your religion, your water, your diet, your weather, your housing, your social programs, your politicians, your...well, I can't think of anything else."
The study, appearing in the February edition of Apanthropica showed that when considering data on depression, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, happiness, and enthusiasm, people who were aware of their age were more likely to be less happy than those whose age was impossible to determine. The wide ranging survey was conducted over the course of 7 years, and amassed volumes of testimony from nearly 7 million people in 50 nations. Co-author David Blurryflower of Claymouth College in Hangoer, N.H. observed, "We found that measurable time is such an inhibitor of well-being that life functions begin a near death-spiral once time enters the consciousness, indicating a hemorrhagic loss of happiness among those who tell time."
"In essence, it is existence," says Ahismelting. "This notion of measurable time eats into the self and the identity, outreaching the modalities of science and the probing of our research staff, devouring confidence, self-awareness, and cognition. It is a dank, airless dwelling in the lower reaches of the consciousness, it is purposelessness, it is all pervasive, it is shameful, it is an anti-revelation. It is terrifying. Its weight, throughout all time, is on the minds of those who keep it. It happens every moment, for those who discern the moment, and it will not go away until we escape it. And at that point, my friend, you yourself are immeasurable."
This deterioration begins as soon as we gain the notion of time, "when mommy and daddy tell us what the big hand and the little hand mean," says Ahismelting. "From that point onward those two black metal armatures sweep around again and again, slicing off pieces of our life, spinning and whirling, dismembering it until they have shredded it beyond recognition, until nobody knows us, until we lay alone, until there is nothing left of us." He runs his hand through his thinning hair. "It really accelerates when we put children in the classroom environment with the bells and buzzers and the clock on the wall and nap time and play time and time-out time and bathroom time and disaster time and a-man-has-a-gun time. Then it get really bad when the kids start making the connection between these clocks, calendars, and ticking noises with test scores, bullying, weight gain, acne, visitation rights, birthdays. There is no end to it." He shakes his head. "If you are finding life tough when you are an infant, then watch out! Wait until you are late for the bus."
He continues, "It really peaks in adulthood, where we are submerged in a network of temporal activities that fail to transcend our existence. There it completes its grim task as it shatters, frays, and abrades our mind. I mean, how many millions of adults are unable to stop their facial muscles from twitching?"
He looks down at the desk calendar. "This slow steady decline into malaise is accomplished through simple, daily time-based routines such as breakfast, lunch, and supper, and punching the clock at work. Also running late for work, sitting at the dentist's office, breathing on life support, boarding a plane, shopping, when mowing the lawn, when planning for dinner guests, when drying one's clothes, at a stoplight, watching a passing train, playing video games, balancing the checkbook, at the barbershop, at the beauty salon, at the pub, waiting for the bus, riding in a cab, cooking a turkey, taking an exam, playing bridge, adjusting a picture frame, thinking about retirement, shaving, using the phone, on vacation, and so forth." He takes off his glasses. "But we found that it doesn't happen when you are rubbing your eyes," says Ashismelting. "Not then. Unless you are taking an exam or explaining something you just said, then it counts."
"The effect is devastating," he contends. "It doesn't take long for a person to realize that this patterned fabric, this web of measured events that composes our life has infiltrated our being and gives it a definition. We cannot exist beyond it." He looks at his reflection in his Rolex. "We say to ourselves, 'These are my limits and I cannot escape.' At that point, the spiral is out of control."
He taps his finger on the desk. "No matter where you live, someday, at some age, you will probably run into time. It will lay you out flat like a right-cross. It will make you dizzy, you will see stars, your life will flash before your eyes. It is like destiny."
Ahismelting doesn't have any concrete answers on how some combat this malady. "My suggestion is that people need to learn to diminish their super-inflated anxiety over unfulfilled and preposterously unrealistic ambitions in the face of the manifestly depleted options in an antisocial, competitive environment that is clearly on the brink of collapse from failed communities and resource exhaustion. They can do so by exercising extraordinary denial and suppression. Only then might they expunge their fairy-tale aspirations and their nursery-rhyme notions of connected identity and existence and fabricate what may resemble genuine happiness," he says, glancing at the clock. "In other words, they need to get their confounded expectations beneath what they cannot actually achieve - the sum of which is astonishingly immeasurable."
Some anomalies plagued the researchers. Blurryflower cites the trend for developing countries to experience greater happiness. But dismissing the data, he says, "They don't know how to tell time down there. Where in the Sam Hill are all the clocks? Try to make an appointment. It's always, "no problem, mon' or 'take it easy, mon.' I get tired of hearing it. But then..." He looked off into the distance. "Many of the researchers just couldn't stay away. We had to fire them."
And then there are the detractors. Research by Anthrus Bison, a sociologist at Sharecropper University in Oklahoma, has found similar connections between the notion of time and unhappiness in some countries, but he says he doesn't care what it means. "Some people are happier and they know what day it is, some people are not happy if they forget to set the alarm. And then, in some countries the only people who are happy are in some late stage of dementia. And then sometimes the opposite is true. Or nothing is true at all, or we have no idea what is going on, or forgot to ask the right questions or didn’t bother to write anything down because we had to quit for the day. I don’t know. I just don't care anymore. I have been studying this all my life and I can't make heads or tails about it and I am just about ready for retirement. Another six weeks and I am on social security. I don't care what country I am in, and I sure don’t care if I can’t remember my own name." He closes a book in his hands. "In my life I have found that if I don't know something, it isn’t going to stop me from living."
Larry Deuxfine, a psychologist at the University of Flegmeux, France, who has struggled to understand happiness for 34 years, also disputes the claims. "In order to prove that, you must have rigorous parameters, and then you must follow discreet methods, and then you can't just prove this or that or other things or say that this is wrong or right. This study has design flaws. You have to identify limits to your inquiry then contain your conclusions within these limits. How can you make sweeping statements about undetermined age? And if you cannot measure someone, or their existence cannot be framed within the parameters, how do you know if they are happy or not? Show me the data. This study is biased toward the happy." He slumps in his chair. "Why didn’t they ask me anything?” He drops his pencil. “This thing, whatever it is, has eluded me like a rainbow on summer day. But I'm not saying it's impossible to find. Just give me seven more years to study it, just seven more years, and I will find the answer." His head sinks into his chest. "I must go now. I have another appointment."
Ahismelting responds to his critics this way: "We're correlating unhappiness with perception of time, and our science is rigorous, our methods are sound, even our researchers are unhappy. Why the dour remarks? We are confident that we can be satisfied with the unhappiness that we found." He rubs his eyes. "And we are pleased to say that, at this time, we can't be any happier.”