How We Miscount Time

“What a week, huh?” “ Captain, it’s only Wednesday.”

If you’re as terminally online as I am, you’ll recognise the Tintin and Captain Haddock meme, deployed whenever the world seems particularly unsettled. Which means it gets deployed a lot these days.

In the Anglophone world, we tend to think of comic strips as childish literature, those who continue reading them into adulthood as slightly odd (think of the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons). But there is more, I think, to Herge than this account allows. The Blue Lotus is a perfectly good take on the Manchurian Crisis, King Ottakar’s Sceptre a narrowly disguised re-telling of the Anschluss. Over Tintin in the Congo we shall draw a discreet veil…

Thus, although Herge never drew the panel (it appears in none of the albums), it is not impossible that one of the few certs for a list of famous Belgians might have realised that while we use clocks and calendars to tell the time, we use events to experience time. We have a rough understanding of how many significant events occur every hour, day, week and when that reservoir fills, our minds declare the time period over and reset, like an ancient waterclock. Captain Haddock might have been chronologically wrong, but he was psychologically right.

As a rule of thumb, this, allied with certain natural “tells” – nightfall, the position of the sun etc. – functioned reasonably well, but it didn’t work sufficiently well. That is why so many manhours were spent trying to invent the clock – co-ordinating peoples’ internal clocks precisely was difficult. One man’s 3:30 could easily be another’s 3:15.

Having two systems of time-keeping means that the two can clash. Captain Haddock had experienced too many mental events for the actual time that had passed. We all know that feeling of being lost in a doom-loop of self-referential boredom and being appalled to see how far behind our estimate the hands of our clock are.

Outside of Tibetan monasteries (or, at least, Hollywood’s depiction of them), we tend to think we cannot do much about the number of mental events we experience. The mind is addicted to thinking and there is no methadone. If you’re not doom-scrolling the latest updates on the Iran War or any subsequent geopolitical crisis du jour, you’ll be thinking about your football team, what will happen next in your favourite soap opera or whether you should re-paint your sitting room. The mind, just as much as Nature, abhors a vacuum.

This being the case, it is not so much the volume of thoughts that measure time, but the volume of thoughts we deem important.

It is a bit of a truism that time has speeded up. Communications technology constantly brings us news from afar, news which might have some impact on us and thus require our attention. News of the Fukushima tsunami spread worldwide in minutes and was important due to the disruption of the global economy; Westerners learned of the similarly destructive Cascadia earthquake of 1700 in the 1990’s. No-one could have known at the time due to the lack of transport links, so no-one needed to know.

However, we cannot be certain that our experience of time has changed much. A mediaeval peasant may have considered important a whole range of things we would now regard as trivial. The wrong bird in the wrong place at the wrong time might have set him to wonder about the harvest, now we would just take a photo on our phones as a curio. If that.

Different circumstances, same mechanism – the ascription of significance. And when we consider something important, we need to react to it, analyse it, tease out its likely consequences, plan our response. One event can start a proliferation of thoughts as we rehearse what we are going to do in a sort of forward-looking esprit de l’escalier. This, of course, just reinforces the significance of the event – look how much time we’ve spent thinking about it. It must be important.

Imagine what would happen, though, if we just stepped back. If we refused to get invested in every passing whim of the algorithm. If we adopted the philosopher Epictetus’ pose “An impression is all you are and not at all the thing you claim to represent.” We have substantial, if not total, control over what we consider important. Your mind may wander as your offspring goes through the minutiae of their friendship group, if you get stabbed you will be hyper-focused on the hole you’ve suddenly developed. Little of what passes before us is a clear and present danger to ourselves.

Or we could go further. Stop seeing ourselves as solid, persisting entities, ever vulnerable, but as a series of processes, ever in flux, able to flow with fate. Events might be significant, but would they be significant to us? Probably not. They would be temporary happenings with, in the main, temporary impacts on entities which are, themselves, temporary. They would pass through like the trillions of neutrinos currently bombarding you, few of which actually stick.

What would come then? A greater sense of time, probably. A greater sense of space, too. Space to concentrate on what does matter to us, time to do what we can, replacing time spent worrying about what we can’t. More peace and more freedom.

For there is an almost diagnostic quality to a mind misperceiving time. It is often a mind under threat, anxious, scanning for potential danger. A mind at rest does not need to develop plans for all manner of contingencies. Like a cricketer in form, it lets the ball come on to the bat, it doesn’t advance down the track only to see its stumps cartwheeling into the distance. Maybe Hollywood knows more than it lets on – its martial arts scenes generally take place in slow motion. It allows the viewer to see the action more clearly, but it also implies the characters are seeing more clearly.

Captain Haddock, of course, never learned this. It was whiskey which gave him time and space. Maybe Tintin did – he did go to Tibet after all…

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.

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