IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

34 Chapter 2
standard of living of 1948 could be reproduced in four hours of today’s
earning capacity. 18 Life in Stone Age times was even easier. Then, we survived
on three or four hours of work a day. According to ‘‘P.M.,’’ the anonymous
author of BoloBolo, hunter-gatherers usually had to work only a few
hours a day to meet their subsistence needs. Most of their time was used for
socializing, ritual, artwork, or just relaxing. ‘‘We stuck it out that way for
several hundred thousand years,’’ writes P.M.; ‘‘this was a long and happy
period compared to the two hundred years of our present industrial nightmare
of accelerated industrial ‘progress.’ Utopia is behind us!’’ 19
In BoloBolo we are all viewed as cogs in a continuously accelerating Planetary
Work Machine. The Machine’s activities are governed by the needs of
an economy, which P.M. defines as ‘‘a system for the impersonal, indirect
exchange of crystallized life-time. You spend your time to produce some
part; this is used by somebody you don’t know, to assemble some device,
that is in turn bought by somebody else you don’t know, for goals unknown
to you. The circuit of these scraps of life is regulated according to
the working time that has been invested in raw materials, its production,
and in you.’’ 20 In Europe through the Middle Ages the average number of
holidays per year was 115. 21 Robert Levine recalls that farm wives in the
1920s, who were without electricity, spent less time at housework than do
suburban women today. 22
An accelerating pace of life scrambles our sense of time. Many of our
daily activities are now governed by the so-called objective time of clocks
in factories, schools, offices, and transport systems. As we pass through and
interact with these systems, we are exposed to a huge amount of sensory
stimulation, but we lose contact with the lived time, the natural time, of
our ancestors, whose genetic makeup persists in our bodies. Most of us
have experienced some of the ways time affects how we feel. Jet lag, for example,
is what we feel as our regular sleep cycle struggles to keep pace with
adjusted bedtimes. Levine says two hundred physiological changes take
place on a daily basis and have an impact on our health. Researchers and
pharmaceutical companies discovered in the 1980s that by dosing medications
in synchrony with rhythms in these processes, they could optimize
the therapeutic benefit of medications. This time-based approach to disease
treatment is known as chronotherapy, in which medications are prescribed
to be taken at specific times in synchrony with the body’s circadian
rhythms. 23