Serving Time

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When someone goes to prison we refer to it as "serving time"

We view a person's life in prison as a life not lived at all. Set apart from society. Outcasts.

What we don't see is we're all serving time.

Yesterday can never be returned and tomorrow remains unknown.

No one, in the history of humanity, can predict how long they will live or when they get to die.

Unless you believe in the conspiracies flying around, about lizard people from the future—and let's say for argument’s sake, the stories are true.

At the end of the day, they have chosen to not publicly share this knowledge with us, leaving us back to square one. The unknown.

I believe it's for the best, who wants to know the end of a movie while it's still playing right?

In one way or another, we are all prisoners serving time. Trapped in the physical forms we were born into, our families, surroundings, financial capabilities.

This then raises the question, what does it truly mean to serve time?

In modern life today, time has been divided into units that can be measured down to the millisecond.

It's hard to dispute the usefulness of “clock time” in everyday life. Until you start to question the underlying assumption, that time should be centered around productivity.

"Did you get to work on time?"

"How long is your shift?"

"What time will the show start?"

"We should meet at 8pm, sharp"

All this is well and good and accepted as the norm, but it commodifies the life we live into how much value we bring into the infrastructure of the units of time. Imparting our bodies as labour, or goods of value to be exchanged for monetary or social gain.

The clock has always been capitalism's biggest weapon. More than money.

Let's say today, someone comes up to you and says "I have spent the entire week in the house."

The most likely question that comes next would be,

"What did you do all that time?"

It's the same way we ask "what do you do for a living?" Which if we're honest, is an extrapolation of the first question.

In essence it asks “is what you have chosen to do with your time, worthy of my space and time with you.”

In the past before the "brilliant" invention of clocks, time was measured mostly using the steady rhythm of nature—the sun's path and correlating shadows, moon phases, the change of...