Spring forward, fall back
As we move rapidly towards the end of October, an important seasonal calendar event approaches us with comforting certainty. No, I don’t mean Halloween, that perfect blend of processed sugar and devil worship that has emerged as one of the American Empire’s most beloved holidays. I’m referring to the other autumnal rite: the turning back of the clocks. The constant low-level grumbling about how unnecessary it is, has become almost as much a ritual as the time change itself.
Yet I confess I have never much cared about it either way. Do farmers need more light in the mornings for late planting? Does bumping peak traffic out of twilight more quickly reduce the amount of traffic accidents at dusk? My guess is that when all the variables are plugged into the cost-benefit equation, any effect either way will be more than drowned out by the hefty error term – meaning no one knows and it doesn’t much matter.
What’s in a base? A day by any other base would last as long
But allow me to hijack the discussion to propose something that, I believe, does matter: a simple and elegant means by which we can improve the quality of life of every human on earth. Society pays a small initial cost, and life gets better for everyone, until the end of time. Allow me to explain.
We all know that there is a reason why we have 365 days in a year (with an extra day added once every 4 years). The maths comes to us straight from God, who in His infinite wisdom decided the Earth should complete 365 axial rotations in the time it takes that celestial body to complete one orbit of the Sun.
But the Almighty set no such rules when it came to the division of a day into lesser units of time, and so man decided to create sub-units of the day as he saw fit. Different systems were tried, but the Egyptian solution survived, owing to its practicality: 24 is a good number to use because it has many factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24). Especially useful are the factors 2, 3 and 4 because they allow us to divide into halves, thirds and quarters respectively. This is something we often like to do. Ditto for 60. So on the face of it, 24 hours/day; 60 minutes/hour; 60 seconds/minute looks like a good, if entirely arbitrary, system. You might ask: If nature doesn’t demand otherwise, why on Earth would anyone want to change it?
Tick tick, boom boom boom
The problem is that this system does, in fact, clash with nature. Unfortunately, our current (mathematically convenient) temporal divisions are slightly out of sync with the most important clock nature has given us: our hearts. The average human heart rate at rest is about 80 beats per minute, just a little faster than the 60 seconds per minute set out by Greeks and medieval clockmakers.
The effect of this is subtle, yet I believe it can have far-reaching consequences. Our internal clocks are always struggling to calibrate to the artificial rhythm of the clock. It’s like we are trying to sing along to a song that is being played in slightly the wrong time. Counting seconds out loud is difficult as a result – and the point is it shouldn’t be. If clocks were synced to our bodies, counting seconds would come naturally to all of us. Indeed, the very act of doing so would have something meditative and relaxing to it. Time itself would become a form of mindfulness.
For most of human history, this asynchronicity was nothing to worry about. After all, most of us had no access to timepieces of any description: the only chronology that mattered was sunrise and sunset. But as more and more of us are now ‘on the clock’, I believe this problem of ‘horological asynchronicity’ has become a hidden and persistent form of stress. The only reason we are not more aware of it, is because it has been with us thousands of years.
It’s time to take time to heart
The solution has always been simple: simply change the division of time. A quick fix would be to rejig the divisions of time within a standard minute, so that there were 80 seconds a minute, rather than the current 60. I don’t think this is a good durable solution, because it simply kicks the can down the road: The asynchronicity still exists, but now it occurs through the misalignment of heart beats with minutes.
The solution is to rejig the entire arbitrary system, by creating a 32-hour clock.
This is done easily by speeding up each second by 33.3%. If we keep base 60, faster seconds yield faster minutes. Whereas Ptolemy’s system gives us a 1,440 minute day, Heartbeat Time has a 1,920 minute day – with each of those minutes feeling like a natural duration of time in terms of heartbeats. The next step is to divide the minutes by 60, (so keeping our base). This yields 32 hours in the Heartbeat day.
If this be the hour when we draw swords together, let’s at least shorten the hour by 33%!
I feel like heartbeat time would have subtle advantages over current timekeeping – beyond the natural rhythm it respects. For example, for me, a standard time hour feels too long. And that’s because for most practical purposes, it is too long. Hour-long meetings drag and drag. Hour long lectures in college always contained about 40 useful minutes of information and sitting through the rest usually meant fighting the urge to take a nap.
And what about waiting for a bus that comes ‘every hour on the hour’? How is that at all useful to commuters? Never mind the joy of being able to tell children they will now get to stay up until to 12 O’Clock at night!
I’ll admit, the 32-hour heartbeat clock does lose us the ‘3’ as a factor – which is useful, for example, for factory shifts. But I think it would work out even better: my guess is having 3 11-hour shifts eliminates a lot of problems, because it allows for two 30 (heartbeat) minute overlap at the two crunch changeovers (morning and afternoon). And for anyone who’s done shift work, we all know that these handovers can cause a lot of friction.
The only problem is getting the entire world to reprogramme their software systems, replace their clocks, change their watches and so forth. No big deal.
