I Need It Yesterday

Why are we obsessed with time?

“Now we are less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, more engrossed in the drama of staying ahead of whatever it is we think is pursuing us. … The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Humanism

1. Oblivion

The fear of death haunts and hunts us, and to cope with it we hunt time and haunt each other. We track time, dissect it, box it in and bind it with frivolous tags, arbitrary demands, and imaginary urgencies. We gorge ourselves on the anxieties of other people. Our rooms and bodies are adorned with clocks that forever blink, tick, and buzz. We wear fear on our wrists. We borrow money to buy gold-chased mementos of fear. In our vanity we call them heirlooms and so the fears of the fathers are passed to the seventh generation. The fear of death ejects us from sleep every morning. We measure the movement of shadows, eyes fixed on the ground, oblivious to the heavens.