How do you 'feel' time?

[matias93 7,535]

If you are wondering, yes, many of the stereotypes about punctuality are true (says a Chilean that's currently arriving late to his first class of the semester, along with many of the university students). But what's behind them? A field of research, sometimes called Sociology of Time attempts some explanations.

Observing the overall pace of timed activities of different societies, they have developed the categories of time-oriented and time-relaxed societies. On a known experiment, Robert Levine et al. measured the speed of people walking on city centres, the time a postal clerk took to sell them a stamp and how precisely timed were several public clocks.

What they found is that most Western European societies, along with the US and Japan are consistently time oriented societies, where people walk fast, work efficiently and care about keeping clocks working as intended; in counterpart, most Mediterranean, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries (those categories overlap) are time-relaxed, meaning that we focus less on punctuality, plan ahead for customary lateness and don't care about occupying other people's time.

A clarifying example is shown by Levine and recognise by many other scholars that share his experience: while giving classes on time-oriented countries they could count on their students arriving in time, but were also frowned upon if they extended the class after the scheduled time ends, with students abandoning the hall. On time-relaxed cultures, arriving late is generally seen as admissible, even for the one giving the class, but leaving a classroom before ending is widely regarded as impolite, while extending it is took as a 'gift' from the scholar to their students.

Further analysis has observed that time-oriented cultures tend to be richer, more individualistic, more stressed and to develop on colder climates, but there's no clarity on how this factors are related to time perception.

Also, there are cultures that aren't fully time-oriented nor time-relaxed, as Korea, where lateness is considered very impolite, but end times are much more flexible. Similar phenomena occurs on developing countries, where most people retain a time-relaxed culture but economic and political elites have synchronised themselves with foreign time-oriented cultures, as in northern Mexico, where both hora inglesa and hora mexicana are selectively used depending on the situation.

[Toby Ferrian 873]

here in norway people are expected to show up on time but nobody really cares if you're a few minutes late

[Fantozzi 4,067]

Time is movement. And totally dependend on movement. Look at a clock, it shows time by showing movement.

To organize time is only an instrument to organize process:work, traffic etc.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,157]

At first I wanted to be defensive of my attitude toward time, but I answered the questions accurately.   I'd like to see a 3rd question that asks how a person would prefer time to be managed, time-relaxed or time-oriented.

Given the breakdown of regions and the results from the Robert Levine experiment, it appears the difference is between more and lesser heavily industrial societies -at least at the time the experiment was done.

I've never thought of it like this before but given that time=life, any action of 'occupying' another person's time without their consent may be considered a hostile action.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

It kind of angers me when people are late, especially if they have chronic problems with punctuality.  I think part of my attitude stems from having lived in Japan for so long where unless you're 15 minutes early, you're late.  In Upper Michigan punctuality is certainly more relaxed than in Japan, so I answered that it's more mixed here, but perhaps that is just my own perspective.  Someone from a really time-relaxed society would probably find it too strict even here.

[matias93 7,535]

3 hours ago, RandyE said:

At first I wanted to be defensive of my attitude toward time, but I answered the questions accurately.   I'd like to see a 3rd question that asks how a person would prefer time to be managed, time-relaxed or time-oriented.

Given the breakdown of regions and the results from the Robert Levine experiment, it appears the difference is between more and lesser heavily industrial societies -at least at the time the experiment was done.

I've never thought of it like this before but given that time=life, any action of 'occupying' another person's time without their consent may be considered a hostile action.

It's an interesting question: personally, I largely prefer time relaxation, specially when is a shared agreement; you don't lose time, but use it differently, open to what gets to happen while waiting. In any case, even that aspect has an opposite face, because most of your leisure time becomes procrastination, as is heavily conditional to the waiting itself.

And as you say, one of the main theses is that the industrial revolution was the process that created time-oriented societies, and one could even say that's a requisite for successful industrial-type development.

[Fantozzi 4,067]

9 hours ago, RandyE said:

I've never thought of it like this before but given that time=life, any action of 'occupying' another person's time without their consent may be considered a hostile action.

Wow. Now this would take us deep into the philosophy of time and maybe into Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology of time-conciousness.

To judge time it's a bit similar to space. You need two points to measure the space in between. But on time you may discover it's like on space too, the space in between is empty and hence without meaning.

If you stop moving and working and doing, if you stand still and try to remember what was - you may discover you never remember a continuum but that life - on the level of perception - consists only of moments: lucky moments, bad moments, but in between them there is only dark space.

So you shouldn't mind if I stole your time making you read this. All I stole was a little bit dark space. But instead there might have been a point I made you smile. So in a moment - hard to measure it with a clock - you caught a thought you like. How we catch a thought from a sequence of words (same as we catch a melody by a sequence of notes), that's how we make meaning/sense out of time.

And this is all that counts on life. This moments we 'got it', we got consciousness wihtin the stream of time like a nugget from the river flowing. It's not that we can collect time like some empty bottles - later we can fill something in if we don't waste them.

It's a little bit paradoxal on first thought - you have to waste your time to fill the bottles of time. If your save your time the bottles will remain empty. Or in other words: the more you waste your time the more you fill it.

To understand the 'feeling of time' maybe one has to understand the essence of moments - what a moment consists of, what it is. As our conciousness consists only of moments and the empty space between them.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,157]

5 hours ago, Fantozzi said:

As our conciousness consists only of moments and the empty space between them.

I found the article very familiar in ideas of philosophy, and enjoyed a bit of a refresher course in classic philosophy.

Your concluding statement is a good summary of your down to earth and practical living point of view as I understand.  I see a positive value of time and encouraging to make the best of every moment.   We're only made of flesh and blood and exist as mortal beings.  That's a humane point of view and good medicine.  I remember when I studied social sciences the professor challenged me to look at what a philosopher was saying in terms of the doctorate, ask the question, "What is the doctor prescribing for life?  Is it a good medicine?  Is it positive or negative?

Generally, I see more academics in the mainstream encouraged to reach a bit further in their processing of reality, and that seems to be consistent with natural process of advancing the ability of our species to overcome challenges to civilization and the living planet.   So my own prescription for life, is exactly that, to continue pushing the barriers, stretching and bending the lines and reaching for discovery of greater knowledge while at the same time valuing what we have in the present and looking at the past objectively and not allowing it to negatively impact the present or future.    

I always come back to the wisdom of a lady that worked all her life as a social worker in the worst of human conditions who told me, 'As we get older our memories are what make us rich.'

Now I said all of the above when I really wanted to talk about spooky quantum entanglement observations in physics that take me on a real wild ride through dimensions of time and space, suggesting that something is travelling a lot faster than light and outside of time or in a dimension of space wherein time may have more than 2 or 3 points so that what is past or present or future is not the same as we normally experience in this space...   But I'll save that stuff for another topic, another time.

[Francis90b 748]

I really like the example of a melody's notes - time as a neutral void, within which episodes of awareness occur, irrelevant and essential at once.These episodes, as they happen, become detached from the very matrix which allowed them to exist at all, and still they're the only way we might be aware of it.And their perception is entirely subjective, based on the relevance one attributes to them.

Under this light, quantity-based time standards can be regarded as they are - a clearing house between individual perceptions, nothing more than an universally accepted fiction.

And the set of questions the OP chose further reinforces the essence of perceived time as being an interplay of fictions experienced at individual and collective levels, strictly linking it to the ethical dilemma of how to balance individual and societal expectations...quite a vast topic to deal about in it's own.