This week I came across a book and a couple of related articles that explore how (in mostly western societies) an excessive adherence to technology-accelerated linear clock time (over circular circadian natural time) is generating negative health-wellbeing impacts in lived experience.
If we think of how certain people and groups have varying capacities to affect, accommodate or balance the demands of sliced clock time in their increasingly controlled, burdened and routinised lives, such "temporal dyssynchronicity" can be seen as an important and pervasive force in the late modern production of health-wellbeing inequities. Such a force is rarely - if ever - included in any social determinants framework to explain causality of disease or health inequalities.
Technology clock versus circadian time
The first article from Sapiens takes a long-term anthropological evolutionary view of human real experience in, of and with time. It suggests that switching to a more natural cyclical time can be a cure to modern technology’s clock time-based control and demands "via a return to a way of life for which our brains, hearts, and souls evolved over hundreds of thousands of years".
It identifies three reasons to justify this return, which I mostly quote:
First, we should acknowledge that our current experience of time is unusual— it’s getting more and more precise and granular (or clock time-like). Important events and overbooked schedules occur faster and faster with less and less chance for true relaxation.
Second, we should recognize that the vast majority of people on Earth today believe time is linear, with one direction leading from past to present to future. But that’s a recent cultural construct. It’s important to note that for most of our species’ existence, humans understood time to be cyclical, with naturally recurring days, seasons, and years, all of which guided our behavior and activities.
Finally, it would seem that we are addicted to “new and improved” technology, perhaps for its own sake. There are many reasons for this, including capitalist product development schedules, marketing campaigns, and modern consumer psychology. The archaeological record, however, very clearly shows us that “old and just fine” worked sustainably well for the vast majority of our species’ existence.
The article argues that cyclical time, in contrast to clock time, is more fluid and more natural in that it flows or has ongoing duration just like dimension three in my summary of the features distinguishing real experience. It is not susceptible to "time-crunching compaction" and therefore is more amenable to a more relaxing or real way of life - one not dominated by technological change for its own sake.
Life Time
The book, Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock and How it Can Revolutionise your Sleep and Health, examines the ill-health affects and consequences arising from being out of sync with our natural body rhythms; disaffections that not only disrupt our sleep, but can expose some of us to greater risk of infection, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and mental illness.
Prof. Russell Foster of Oxford University explores the relationship between time of day and the patterning of human activities. He shows how by changing the nature and timing of activities, we can produce positive impacts in health-wellbeing, including:
- how a walk outside at dawn can ensure a better night's sleep
- how eating after sundown can affect our weight
- how the time that we take medication impacts the risks of life-threatening conditions, such as stroke
More-than-human real experience
Connected to the themes of natural time and body clock is a conception of real experience as more-than-human. Today it is too easy to forget how our biology, bodies and experiences are all entangled with nature or are 'of-the-flows-of-the-world'. Building on this theme, the second article, by Ramsey Affifi, describes how we must take a more-than-human not just human view of the Anthropocene. He argues that ...
The most promising dimension of the term “more-than-human” is not that it is a more generous or respectful way of considering other beings, contrasted against the belittling negation performed by the word ‘non-human.’ The term acknowledges and positions humans as within, as of, something bigger than is generally apparent, as it invites us to further the incomplete (perhaps incompletable), though ever-necessary phenomenological project of disclosing more-than-humanness in experience. No matter how we try to circumscribe and bulwark the boundary between us and the rest of nature, the closer we look, we find opportunities to see something challenging our sense of agency and independence ...
The Real Experience Gap
Using similar themes as Ramsey's desire to more-than-humanise the Anthropocene, in my ISPOR talk, I described the limitations and consequences of the dominant mode of thought we use to see, know, quantify, design, organise and act on our individual and collective lived experiences, as well as the forces shaping them. I described a Real Experience Gap that arises from this mode, as follows ...
The problem is that the five essential dimensions of real experience – interiority, flow, qualitative progression, interactional creation and a reality of collective flows - escape our dominant empirical intellectual analysis mode of thought, learning and design.
Dynamics, movement and flow are evacuated by analytical knowledge. We hold experiences stable and therefore miss the unstable flowing nature of their actual reality. Our tendencies of abstract thought and method suppress access to the real and lead to a superficial knowing of experience. Our gaze does not see the continuous flows of multiplicities of sensations, feelings and thoughts forming concrete and similar real experiences in our world.
I then linked this gap to some real experience pathologies including those arising from living in excessive hock to clock-time and/or experiencing temporal dyssychronicity ...
Today’s hyper-attention achievement society is characterised by scattered perception amidst an excess of stimuli, of a rapid switching of focus to different tasks, of constant neural connection to our devices, of a sense of never standing still and time running away from us, and also for many, of a real sense of inequality.
I then described how we might address this Real Experience Gap and its consequences:
In this world shaped by the abstract, intellectual and analytical, I argue we need a revolution in thought, method and design.
One that starts and ends with real experience and that is practiced via the wider frame of experience ecosystems and assemblages of their creation.
One that sees our current predicaments such as chronic disease, depression, anxiety, ADHD and burnout as the result of the systemic-level breakdown of flows of real experience.
One that cultivates a special mode of extended perception of affects, feelings, flows, difference and transitions alongside science and rational knowing, and that values this “Flow Intuition” as a valued means to see, understand and respond to our largely unobservable real experiences in the world.
A shift of attention that takes place within a more substantive framing and account of health as a power or capacity to be, do and become. Not a view of health that is largely functional, utilitarian and essential, of one supporting a life of minimum effort, of convenience, of least action.
A more transcendental empiricism that enriches us with much deeper insights into the intensive conditions and sedimentations of real experience. One that seeks to make contact with the vitality, creativity and duration of life itself through novelty and invention in design and interaction.
Implications
What does this all signify? By more deeply understanding our dislocated relationships with clock time and its pathological affects in lived experience, as Prof Foster does in Life Time, and by adopting a more expansive model of real experience as more-than-human in an evolutionary sense as well as in the current Anthropocene era, we can reveal more of the usually hidden formative forces of disease, dis-ease and inequities of health.
Importantly too, we can see how our current dominant tendencies of intellectual, abstract and analytical thought and design not only obscure these forces from our gaze but can even create them too.
See and know real experience using the Umio Flow Intuition® method
Using our Flow Intuition® method (deployed within the Health Ecosystem Value Design® framework), it is possible to gather much deeper insight into concrete actual lived experience together with knowledge of the conditions of their formation, change and persistence. In any program of work for a defined context (such as the influence of clock time in our lives), we can reveal hidden insights and wider experienced differences beyond common socio-economic and other categories of identity and representation. By stating problems of real experience more truthfully (especially in their differences in kind, conditions, tendencies and movements), we reveal novel possibilities for realising greater health and wellbeing impacts for any enterprise purpose.
What do you think?
Do you agree that how we think, see, know and design in relation to lived experience are all part of the problem?
How can technology better align and promote a positive experience of natural flows of time?
How can we see how different people and groups experience time differently and how assemblages of these experiences can produce intensities of pathologies in some groups more than others?
How can we embrace a more-than-human perspective in seeing and knowing the origin and formation of different real experiences with time in relation to a condition or disease context?
How can a more-than-human view help to better understand the relation of human and non-human stakeholders and help to design and generate expansive all-win-more wellbeing impacts for all?
Do please feel free to share your comments or ideas below. Thanks !