Time, and the Ecological Futures of Everyday Living

Does immersion within a linear, technologically mediated, anthropocentric, and quantified perception of time, such as minutes, hours, days, and weeks, blind us from seeing the ecological and social impacts of our living?

How might different understandings and experiences of time allow us to perceive and act differently in our world?

Could a different attunement to time, as experienced by other creatures and cultures, help us conceive more ethical futures not only for ourselves, but for all beings, and our shared habitat?

Abstract

Between entering grad school in a new country and starting a new job, I found it difficult to continue the low-impact lifestyle I had been used to back home. Amplified pressure to use my time economically made it more challenging to practice held values and beliefs to minimize waste, seek out ethical products, and learn ways to live locally within seasonal rhythms. In the seemingly unstoppable stream of globalisation, industrialisation, modernisation, and urbanisation, it feels inconceivable to imagine how to live slowly with less; less artifacts, less conveniently, less productively, and less efficiently, in the pursuit of care and empathy with other-than-humans and our shared habitat. Quantified and synced by atomic clocks, phone screens, scheduling calendars, and unified time zones around the prime meridian, immerse us in a quantified, universalized, global, linear, progressive flow of time, whose pervasiveness can blind us to the ways our lives are structured around it, the values it is built upon, and the priorities it sets for economies, governments, societies, and individuals alike.

Acknowledging time as a given frame of the world, this thesis project seeks to explore the complex ways time shapes everyday living conditions in the hopes that other conceptions and awareness of time might open us up to other possibilities for more ecological ways of relating to and living in our world. Through exploring, tracing, and defamiliarizing time, this research attempts to better understand the simplified, automatic, and economically measured interactions with time that might be keeping us from living more ecologically value-driven and relational interpretations of time. Exploring a mix of immersion in different practices, making to reflect, visualizing to communicate, questioning, and navigating the gaps of understanding, this project of time seeks to reveal and defamiliarize our taken-for-granted notions of time.