The West Broke Time. Other Cultures Didn’t.
That hollow feeling after scrolling? It has a 500-year history. How will we change time in the future?
Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist
a11y-light · December 22, 2025 (Updated: December 22, 2025) · Free: No
What’s talked about most, it seems, with regard to our phones, tablets and such, is the dopamine hits from all these platforms and digital tools and their impacts on our brains. That it’s exhausting us, that it’s too much. And of all the clickbait and misinformation. But I think there’s something else here, perhaps something even more profound that’s gone awry. Something that’s been taken from us. That we’re only starting to wake up to. Time.
In the West we often frame time as the “attention economy” or “attention budget” and “paying attention.” It’s transactional language. It’s Taylorism that’s seeped into our industrial, Protestant ethic driven psyche. And it’s spreading around the world. A sort of temporal colonialism if you will. And we haven’t really gotten anything out of it.
In the West and some other parts of the world, like South Korea, a meritocracy, we’ve shifted from a disciplinary society to an achievement society. But I think we’re starting to ask, just what have we achieved? Certainly a lot. But at what cost? I think dopamine addictions through notifications, always being “on” and connected are symptoms. A deeper, root cause, is our sense of time is in a serious kerfuffle. That’s what’s underlying the exhaustion. It’s our temporal relationship with ourselves, community and cultures.
This essay takes on a more Western viewpoint of time, while exploring some of the more nuanced and rich approaches to time (temporality) in other cultures. The West has tried to “import” other cultures temporal ideas and systems many times. Usually not very well, as they are quickly commercialised.
2016 saw the trend of hygge arriving in America and Canada and other parts of Europe. Hygge is a Danish sociocultural practice deeply embedded within their culture. Driven by chilly, dark, damp winters that drive people indoors combined with a small population.
When Hygge arrived in America it was more hygge-as-a-commodity; candles, blankets, scents. The perfect social media palette. It was all aesthetic signifiers but without the social conditions of genuine hygge. You could buy objects that represented hygge, but delivered no context. The bits and bobs arrived, but the relationship with time that changes in Denmark, didn’t change in America or Canada.
The West has largely inverted Yoga as well. The underlying idea of yoga is samadhi; absorption, integration and union with the divine. In the West this become a productivity goal os fitness, which moved to wellness, then to self-care then to recovery so, you know, you’d be more productive tomorrow.
For the West I think, as I wrote earlier, we can chase much of its relationship down to the Protestant work ethic and the influence of Taylorism (scientific management theory.) Work not as necessity or craft, but as moral performance. Taylorism was all about turning humans into efficient machines. Every minute spent resting is stolen from production.
And this has filtered into our digital lives. Every notification missed is a lost opportunity for social performance and engagement. The West tells us to be more “mindful” to rest and restore. But it is not for our true mental and physical health, it is so we can be machines tomorrow. FOMO (fear of missing out) becomes chronic because the pace of events exceeds human processing capacity. This is directly opposed to almost every traditional culture’s understanding of time. Most cultures have recognized that time is “textured”; there are times for work and times for rest, sacred times and profane times, times that are propitious and times that are dangerous. The Jewish concept of kairos (the right moment) versus chronos (measurable duration) captures this.
Humans have moved through some interesting phases in how we think of, approach and understand time. For much of our while plodding about this planet, time wasn’t linear as we see it today. It was more of a wheel. Driven by seasons, lunary cycles, animal migrations, the ebb and flow of generations. This is still seen in some of today’s hunter-gatherer societies like the Maasai and the!Khun. We didn’t meet at the ridge at 11AM for coffee before going on the mastodon hunt.
Agriculture came along and changed all that. When we started planting seeds we started investing in a future outcome. Agriculture required prediction. More careful observation of the heavens and skies. This lead to astronomical cultures like Egypt, China and the Maya, among many others. Time became cosmic, tied to the movement of the stars, planets, sun and moon. Calendars arrived.
The around the 14th century, thanks to some monks (see where that Protestant work ethic thing evolved from?), along came the mechanical clock. Time suddenly became abstracted from natural rhythms. Time became measurable, divisible and tradeable. We went from time “for” something to time “as” something.
It’s not all bad. Without mechanical clocks and Isaac Newton’s ” Principa Mathematica ” in 1687, we wouldn’t have progressed with physics, medicine, manufacturing. But that of course, brought on labour as time, time as money. What one produced mattered less than how long one was present.
The internet and mobile computing (laptops, tablets, smartphones, cars, planes) flipped Newton (thanks to Einstein) on it’s noggin again. As German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has suggested, everything just sped up. He noted how IT just as us creating more, but rarely adding any true value.
Today, time for many of us is more fragmented. We can send emails and social media posts and a whole conversation through time can take place and we’re not even there until we pop back in. If we do. We may not, uhm, have time. We are always on. We interact without being temporally co-present with one another.
We quantify time now with screen time trackers, productivity apps, time-logging and keystroke logging software, workout time. We chunk our days and live off of coloured calendars. Social media is filled with productivity tips and videos. Everyone has “the system” that will get your life back. Not really, but we love it. Are seduced by it. And we fail at it like we fail with dieting.
We evolved as a species for over 99% of the time we’ve been on this plot in the universe for cyclical, task-oriented, seasonally varying time. But we now have psyches shaped by the Protestant urgency and industrial discipline. 24/7 available technologies, instant global communication across time zones. Economic systems that demand perpetual growth, acceleration, optimisation.
So it’s no wonder we have so much burnout and anxiety, this chronic sense of “there’s just not enough time”, which is a tad ironic given all these “time saving” technologies and systems. We’ve lost that sacred/qualitative time distinctions.
The current temporal system is aberrant by historical human standards. It’s not “how time is”, it’s how time has been “constructed” in one culture over roughly 500 years, then exported globally through colonialism, capitalism, and technology. While we can certainly place much blame on the West for these issues of time, in some ways it has served us well. We just need something to shift. A new sense of time.
So are we stuck with this? Perhaps for now. Something will change. We see this in people practicing digital detoxes, getting back to nature. Other cultures offer us in the West the clues to figure things out. Even the First Nations peoples of North America offer us insights and practices. If we listen to them and yeah, take the time.
Humanity is changing in the digital age. Culture, as always, is starting to push back. I think the underlying reason we’re turning off notifications, taking social media breaks and so on, is because we want to reclaim what we’re just beginning to realise we’ve lost; time. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
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