Love them or hate them, New year’s resolutions are yet another topic for small talk after Christmas and a rather convenient way for people to attempt to motivate themselves. As you can probably tell, I think they’re useless. Why does a new year mean that we should start doing things differently? If your new year’s resolution is to ‘be nicer to people’ (good luck with that), then you can try, but if someone hates you, then it seems unlikely that your ‘fresh start’ is going to be effective simply because we now write a 6 instead of a 5. The new year makes completely no difference to anything except us. Even different cultures have different dates for the new year. Why do we as humans feel the need to set units of time? To what extent can we know what time it is? Does it actually matter what time it is?
As an obsessively punctual person, I know the horror of having a clock that is even slightly out of time, even though my friends constantly tell me to relax, or more recently, they quote Oscar Wilde, (you can always tell which ones are the English students…)
“Punctuality is the thief of time”
I usually acknowledge this with an exasperated glance, or on a good day, a witty response. There is something quite disorientating about being unsure of what time it is, even by a few minutes. CH runs on its own little time system which is two minutes ahead from everywhere else, but does that affect anything? Is it a problem that we say that 11.22 is 11.24? In this fast-paced, time-orientated culture, perhaps it does. As our technology advances, our accuracy increases and we can divide time into increasingly smaller subsections. Time used to be measured vaguely by the position of the sun, which depended on your guessing skills and experience to have even the slightest idea of the time. If I turned up an hour late to a lesson, not only would I have almost missed all of it, but it wouldn’t be acceptable, whereas, without a way to quantify the time, my rough interpretation of the sun would be close enough. I would simply be arriving slightly after the sun was in the position when I should’ve been there.
Our basic units of time are invented by humans of course. The 365 days that make up a year, although roughly based on the orbit of the earth, are not accurate. And what’s worse is that we can’t see seconds or minutes, unlike mm or grams. All we can do is observe the effects of time and just desperately cling to our system because it is the only way that we can comprehend time itself. Maybe our lives would be better without our time system (mine certainly would- I’m writing this at 1 in the morning and the precious hours of sleep will soon slip away into the abyss), or maybe we would just spend ages waiting for people to turn up (if we don’t do that already.) We are trapped by our own invention of time, and time is bound in our minds to something much more simple than it actually is.
thephoebeofknowledge 
Another wonderfully written post, Phoebe! You are right, of course, to draw the distinction between the way we measure time, which we have invented, and time itself, which exists independently of us. ‘We are trapped by our own invention of time, and time is bound in our minds to something much more simple than it actually is.’ I think that this relates very closely to one of the prescribed titles on this year’s TOK Essay list: “In knowledge there is always a trade-off between accuracy and simplicity.” Evaluate this statement in relation to two areas of knowledge- and you might want to think about this as it relates to areas of knowledge which we look at, including, at the moment, Mathematics.
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