It is fairly obvious that time is not a tangible object, yet we treat it as if it were one. This delusion is rooted in the significant role time plays in our lives and the many, sometimes very precious, devices for measuring time that surround us.
For example, the most expensive clock in the world is the Graff Diamonds Hallucination, a wristwatch valued at $55 million. It features more than 110 carats of extremely rare and colorful diamonds set in a platinum bracelet, making it a unique blend of exquisite jewelry and watchmaking. Big Ben (the clock and bell inside the Elizabeth Tower, London) does not have a formal market value since it is a historic landmark, state property, and an irreplaceable symbol of British heritage. However, the most recent restoration costs for the entire tower — including the clock mechanism and bell — have reached nearly £80 million (about $97–111 million USD) as of 2022. The global watches and clocks market size in 2025 is estimated at approximately $58.94 billion USD. The market is projected to grow further, reaching about $71.75 billion USD by 2029.
It's hard to believe that such a gigantic sum of money is invested in something that lacks any material representation, yet that's the reality. Let's open the Oxford English Dictionary: "Time. (uncountable) what is measured in minutes, hours, days, etc." If time is uncountable, that means nobody can count time by saying, "I had five times, but I lent two times to my friend until next Monday."
"Time is a measured or measurable period and a continuum without spatial dimensions," Britannica says. And it sounds very foggy, because we can easily imagine a continuum of a space, but what is a continuum without spatial dimensions? The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers something more productive: "A number, as of years, days, or minutes, representing such an interval: ran the course in a time just under four minutes."
Hours, minutes, and seconds originated from ancient civilizations' need to divide the day for practical reasons. Nobody knows for sure, but it is believed that one of the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians counted the joints of his long fingers using his thumb and discovered there were twelve. Thus, we have twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. Perhaps later, the same Babylonians invented the base-60 system that gave us minutes and seconds. Remarkably, modern empirical science is still built on this ancient finger-counting system.
Just imagine if those ancient Egyptians had used a finger from their other hand to count the joints — they would have counted fourteen. In that case, our day would consist of twenty-eight hours, which would lead to many unexpected consequences. For example, each new hour would be shorter:
H₍₂₈₎ = 24/28 = 0.857
Accordingly, minutes and seconds would also be shorter in the same proportion. If the speed of light in a vacuum is now c = 299,792,458 meters per second, the new value of this constant would be:
C₍₂₈₎ = 299,792,458 × 0.857 = 256,964,964 meters per second
Thus, the "speed of light" would depend on one extra thumb of the ancient Babylonians. Of course, the actual speed of light remains constant: "Calendar reform will not shorten pregnancy" (Lec 1972) — but for us humans, any constant exists only as a measurable phenomenon. This simple example shows that the very essence of time depends on people's mutual agreements. Time is not a real physical object but a construct — the result of our collective conventions.
Ancient Concept of Time
In the past, the concept of time arose from social interactions to measure the duration of work and ensure a fair distribution of labor or determine a competition winner, but the precision of time-measuring devices often varied greatly.
Before accurate chronometers appeared in the 18th century, sailors used hourglasses to measure time intervals for dead reckoning — estimating a ship's speed and distance traveled. Starting in the 14th century, and until the appearance of marine chronometers, at sea the time was regulated each day at noon, when the sun was at its highest point. A sundial was used for this purpose, and the hourglasses were then used to measure the passage of time during the day. The 30-minute hourglass was used to measure the length of watches. Each time the hourglass was turned, the helmsman would sound the ship's bell — one ring after the first half-hour, two after the second, and so on, until "eight bells" marked the end of a four-hour watch.
This precision was necessary due to the complex nature of around-the-globe expeditions. However, it is useful to view time management from a perspective distant from the main centers of civilization, to see that sundials, hourglasses, and chronometers are not essential devices — and that the very measurement of time can take different forms under different social conditions.
Douglas Raybeck in his article "The Coconut-Shell Clock" (1992) found that notions of time among Kelantan Malays help to maintain "village solidarity and… their distinctive cultural identity." In traditional Kelantanese villages, time is social and experiential, tied to natural and social rhythms rather than mechanical hours. People describe time in relation to activities — like "before Zohor" for midday prayer — instead of precise clock hours. Punctuality is judged socially: lateness matters only if it disrupts harmony or causes embarrassment. Mechanical watches arrived with modernization, but villagers often wore them as symbols of status or modernity rather than accurate instruments.
"Westerners have watches. Africans have time."
The coconut-shell clock is a local timer used in competitions: a half coconut-shell with a small hole bored through the centre, floated in a pail of water. The measured interval is simply the amount of time it takes for the shell to fill with water and sink, usually three to five minutes. Though technically imprecise, the coconut clock is preferred for its visibility and fairness, allowing everyone to see the timing. This timer emphasizes social exactness over physical precision, preventing envy and conflict within the community. Using a hidden mechanical watch would undermine trust, whereas the coconut clock protects harmony and transparency. In Kelantan, time serves human relationships first, showing that cultural meaning and social participation outweigh strict temporal accuracy.
It is clear that the coconut-shell clock was sufficient in societies where time held little economic importance. However, the Industrial Revolution in Western societies greatly increased the value of time. In 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote: "Remember that time is money." When one must literally pay for another person's time, even a difference of "three or five minutes" becomes crucial, demanding an entirely new level of precision.
From Newton's Absolute Time to Einstein's Relativity
Newton was one of the first scientists to notice that, while sand, solar, and even mechanical clocks measure time with varying degrees of accuracy, there must exist a certain ideal, absolute "super-clock" to which real clocks only approximate in precision. This idealism was a common tendency among many scientists of that era, when the authority of religion was shaken during the Enlightenment but still strong enough to punish those who disagreed with the official view of the universe.
Newton lived in a time when physics did not yet have a unified system for describing motion. Observing the movement of planets, the falling of bodies, and phenomena of inertia, he realized that an accurate description of motion required a constant "stage," independent of events, on which motion occurs. This led him to the concept of absolute time — time that flows uniformly and independently of any external phenomena or observations. He distinguished between absolute time (mathematically constant, "in itself") and relative time (which we measure with clocks by observing events). For example, a clock might run fast or slow due to mechanical limitations, but absolute time flows steadily regardless.
To support his hypothesis, Newton conducted the famous bucket experiment. By rotating a bucket of water, he observed the water's surface curving from the center toward the sides due to centrifugal force. When the bucket was stopped, the water continued to rotate and maintained the curved shape for some time. According to Newton, this effect demonstrates that the motion of an object relative to absolute space and time has physical consequences that cannot be explained merely by the relative motion between two objects. Newton could not have imagined then that the water in the bucket was under the influence of inertial force not so much relative to the walls of the bucket, but rather relative to the Earth's gravity. At a certain distance from the Earth, a similar experiment would not be possible at all.
This idea persisted for almost 300 years, until Einstein's Theory of Relativity emerged. The most interesting point in this context is Ernst Mach's remark: "No one is competent to predict things about absolute space and absolute motion; they are pure things of thought, pure mental constructs, that cannot be produced in experience." Mach saw in Newton's idealism "medieval" notions of absolute space and absolute time.
Between 1900 and 1905, Albert Einstein worked at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern and was working on the problem of synchronizing clocks at the railway station. It was there that the idea of the impossibility of events being simultaneous for all observers occurred to him. Imagine a platform 300,000 kilometres long, at both ends of which two lights are simultaneously switched on at a moment we designate as "0." Light travels from one end of the platform to the other in 1 second. A passenger stands in the middle of this platform. For them, the clocks will turn on simultaneously, but half a second after they turn on for the two passengers standing next to those two lights — thus, this will happen at moment "0.5." A train approaches the platform, and its driver will see the first light, the closest to him, at moment "0," and the second light — the distant one — at moment "1." If the engineer switches on a light on the train exactly at the moment he sees the distant light, the distant passenger will notice this at moment "2."
Thus, the idea of visually synchronizing clocks turns into an almost impossible problem to solve, as there are no means to transmit information faster than light. Einstein argued that a better and nonarbitrary solution was to set clocks not to the time that the signal was launched, but to the time of the initial clock plus the time it took for the signal to travel from the initial clock to the clock being synchronized — specifically, sending a round-trip signal and setting the distant clock to the initial clock's time plus half the round-trip time. In this way, the location of the "central" clock made no difference.
Presentism, Eternalism, and McTaggart's Dead-End
Despite the latest staggering scientific discoveries, Idealism continued to defend its positions. J. M. E. McTaggart was one of the most prominent representatives of British Idealism, a school of philosophy that opposed the growing scientific materialism and empiricism of the time. His systematic philosophy, presented in The Nature of Existence (1921), was an attempt to construct a worldview that would provide a spiritual anchor and solace — asserting that true reality is Absolute, non-temporal, and composed of eternal essences (minds) bound by love.
In his famous paper "The Unreality of Time" (1908), McTaggart argued that the appearance of a temporal order to the world is a mere illusion. His argument begins by distinguishing two ways time positions can be ordered:
- The A-series — defined by changing properties like future, present, and past.
- The B-series — defined by fixed relations like earlier and later.
McTaggart argued the B-series alone is insufficient for a proper time series because, without the A-series, it cannot account for genuine change. He then asserted that the A-series is inherently contradictory because every time must possess the incompatible properties of being future, present, and past. His attempts to resolve this contradiction by referring to further times fail, merely generating an infinite regress of the same contradiction — proving, he claimed, that time is unreal.
McTaggart's ideas initiated a whole series of conceptions regarding the nature of time and the existence of objective reality within it. Presentism asserts that, necessarily, only objects that are currently present exist; therefore, a complete list of existing things would exclude all merely past objects (like Socrates) and merely future objects. In contrast, Eternalism holds that objects from the past and the future exist now in a general ontological sense, even if they lack present temporal location. A third stance, the Growing Block Theory, posits that only past and present objects exist, constantly expanding the realm of reality as time progresses.
The dispute between Eternalists and Presentists can be resolved if we reject the idea of time having an objective existence independent of human consciousness. When McTaggart says that there cannot be a time that is simultaneously past, present, and future because this is incompatible, his error begins with the words "a time that is," because time does not exist in reality; it exists only in the human imagination. This implies that the past, present, and future do not exist objectively and independently of humanity as elements of physical reality, but are instead mental constructs that help a person comprehend the surrounding reality and organize their life. Just as Mach stated that absolute space and absolute motion are "pure things of thought, pure mental constructs, that cannot be produced in experience," the same applies to time.
So, if time is a socio-cultural phenomenon, it logically follows that it exists within the dominant cultural mindsets — and has evolved alongside our media for communicating it.
How Time Became Metamodern
The phenomenon of time, apart from our consciousness, does not exist outside the medium that transmits it, even if that medium is a leaky coconut shell. That is why, to understand how time has changed from ancient times to the present, it is important to trace the evolution of these media.
In the premodern era, private clocks did not exist or were very rare, so people learned the time from the large clock on the city tower or from the cathedral's bell, both of which embodied the power of government and faith in God. Accurate knowledge of time was a privilege of wealthy city dwellers, who used it to maintain their prosperity.
Modernity not only made wristwatches popular, but also introduced many alternative means of tracking and recording time. Now time could be learned from radio signals and newspapers. However, you still could not know the time instantly: you had to wait for the time signals, broadcast once an hour. After the exact time signal, listeners were offered the latest news, which was meant to teach them how to think correctly. The radio was always a voice governing citizens on behalf of the government.
Postmodern time arrived with television, which soon became multi-channel. Time appeared more frequently on screen, sometimes constantly during certain broadcasts. Along with time, viewers received a great deal of knowledge they didn't really need, as they watched television indiscriminately for hours. Under these conditions, even if television was strictly controlled by the government, the sheer abundance of moving images and stories already undermined this control.
Metamodern time began with cheap smartphones, which guaranteed 24/7 inexpensive access to the Internet. An estimated 5.5 billion people are online in 2024, an increase of 227 million individuals based on revised estimates for 2023, according to new figures from the International Telecommunication Union. This phenomenon is simply unprecedented in the history of all mankind, as a significant number of people constantly look at the clock throughout the day and coordinate their daily activities with it.
In this context, it is very interesting how the images of old media have evolved. Cathedral bells have either become tourist attractions or apocalyptic symbols, as in László Krasznahorkai's novel Sátántangó:
"Futaki woke to hear bells. The closest possible source was a lonely chapel about four kilometers southwest on the old Hochmeiss estate but not only did that have no bell but the tower had collapsed during the war and at that distance it was too far to hear anything."
The bell in the final scene of Sátántangó suggests that the world turns on a contradiction between the materiality — the almost painfully exact rendering of the physical, the concrete, the particular — and something mysterious and unaccounted for, an essence, perhaps spiritual, conspicuous by its absence. The reminder of the immaterial nature of time, its existence only in the human consciousness (because only Futaki hears the bell), seems the most relevant interpretation.
Metamodern time has many characteristic features that have already been noted and described in numerous studies. In Douglas Rushkoff's book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), five characteristic features are presented, with a separate chapter dedicated to each.
1. Narrative Collapse
This concept describes the breakdown of traditional, linear storytelling in media, culture, and politics. Old narratives that gave meaning, direction, and structure are replaced by fragmented, present-focused experiences. In a world saturated with instantaneous information and reality TV, the comfort of stories with beginnings, middles, and ends fades, leaving people trying to make sense of everything as isolated, immediate events rather than coherent narratives.
This collapse has only intensified with the spread of private news channels on social networks and messaging apps. News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of the global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.
A vivid example of narrative collapse in news consumption is the Russian messaging app Telegram, used for this purpose by 51% of Ukrainians. Telegram's advantage as a news source lies in its hybrid nature, which can confidently be called metamodern. Users can subscribe to unlimited channels, and their authors are not only (or even primarily) journalists or celebrities, but ordinary people who have found themselves in unusual circumstances and gained access to unique events. These individuals — who can be called "metanewsmakers" — record videos or photos from the scene and immediately post them to their channels, usually accompanied by very subjective comments.
Metanewsmakers do not always publish their own videos; sometimes they share footage found on the smartphones of captured or deceased soldiers. Videos can also be staged, created using artificial intelligence. No rules or standards of journalistic ethics apply in this context. This contributes to the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories. The number of metanewsmakers increases daily. They produce such a volume of posts that Telegram channel audiences are literally in a hypnotic trance, consuming news for hours each day in an endless scrolling process. Even elderly people now spend hours bed-rotting, endlessly scrolling through Telegram channels. This kind of media consumption starts to resemble an illness.
Metanewsmakers can be private, state-affiliated, or of a mixed hybrid nature. A vivid example is the Telegram channel "MAGYAR," run by Róbert Bródi (callsign — Magyar), a Ukrainian citizen of Hungarian origin, commander of Ukraine's Drone Systems Forces and head of the aerial reconnaissance unit "Magyar's Birds." The channel features drone footage showing the destruction of Russian occupation army equipment and personnel. Currently, the "Magyar's Birds" unit eliminates up to 330 Russian soldiers per day, with all confirmed kills documented on video, and particularly noteworthy ones edited into compilations.
2. Digiphrenia
Digiphrenia refers to how digital technology splits people between multiple roles, places, and timelines at once. Emails, texts, and constant online engagement force individuals to inhabit overlapping moments and identities — creating stress and confusion as personal coherence is disrupted. Time is no longer experienced sequentially but as a barrage of simultaneous demands from various sources and platforms.
People maintain multiple social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) and message feeds, each projecting a different version of themselves at the same time. This fragments their attention and identity, making it hard to be fully present in any one context. Professionals juggle work emails, texts from family, social notifications, and news feeds all at once, even in supposedly "off" hours. Rushkoff notes that drone pilots might control deadly machines on the other side of the world from behind safe screens — occupying contradictory moral and physical realities at the same time, living in two places and two ethical worlds at once. Even in social situations like meals with friends or family, people are pulled away by notifications and engage absent-mindedly with smartphones instead of those physically present.
3. Overwinding: The Short Forever
Overwinding is the compression of long-term processes or goals into shorter time frames than they are meant for. In business and finance, this translates to the expectation of instant results, rapid trading, and immediate returns. The push to fit everything into the present moment — including processes that historically took years to mature — causes instability and a loss of long-term perspective.
Artificial intelligence tools have greatly accelerated this process. Now, people who don't have time to read lengthy books of hundreds of pages can simply create a 2–3 page digest, compile a list of ten main points, or make a podcast. Then, new texts are generated based on these rapid digestions, which in turn are quickly read with ChatGPT or Perplexity. Eventually, the real authors and readers of texts become language models, while humans are left with only a general idea from brief summaries.
4. Fractalnoia: Finding Patterns in the Feedback
Fractalnoia describes the urge to find patterns and meaning in the overwhelming feedback loops of real-time information. With traditional timelines gone, people seek connections between events and data, sometimes inventing links where none exist. This can lead to paranoia or conspiracy thinking — or a networked sensibility, depending on whether the patterns are personal or shared.
5. Apocalypto
Apocalypto captures society's longing for finality or clear endings in a never-ending present. The persistent anxieties of living in "present shock" prompt fantasies of total collapse, reset, or apocalypse — responses to the stress of having no narrative resolutions or ultimate goals. This mindset manifests in prepping, fascination with doomsday scenarios, and apocalyptic media, as people look for closure amid chronic uncertainty.
The Netflix limited series Carol and the End of the World (2023) serves as an essential cultural artifact for mapping this Apocalypto metamodern temporality. The series is set seven months before the rogue planet Keppler 9C is scheduled to collide with Earth, an event that frees most of humanity to embrace hedonism and pursue lifelong dreams, rendering jobs and money obsolete.
Protagonist Carol Kohl, a quiet, middle-aged woman, is one of the few who feels lost by this newfound freedom and instead finds profound comfort in the monotony of her previous life. Her search for routine unexpectedly leads her to a secret, seemingly pointless office called "The Distraction," where she forms genuine human connections with other lost souls, finding meaning not in grand adventures, but in the small, shared rituals of a normal workday before the inevitable end. The environment itself reflects a metamodern aesthetic of memory: the surviving fragments of the preceding epoch (the corporate infrastructure) are reinvested with new, sincere purpose.
The rogue planet Keppler 9C — this gigantic, celestial object — is not just a threat; it is a static image of the future catastrophe. It is fixed, terrifying, and omnipresent. This functions as a crystal-image where the banal, slow present (Carol pouring coffee, doing paperwork) is simultaneously juxtaposed against the fixed, certain reality of its inevitable, violent end. Because the end is mathematically assured and visually constant, linear cause-and-effect collapses. What remains is a pure duration, focusing the viewer and the characters entirely on the quality and authenticity of the present moment, thereby producing the specific affective aesthetics of metamodern temporality.
Episode 6, "Holidays," perfectly encapsulates the metamodern temporal paradox. The characters consciously organize and celebrate future holidays — such as Christmas, birthdays, and Halloween — that are guaranteed not to arrive before Keppler 9C crashes.
In a world where time is endlessly mediated and exploded, the individual no longer simply inhabits a timeline but becomes an editor — curating memories, reactions, rituals, and micro-narratives across devices and media. Identity is forged from assembling these fragments into a livable present, as time is only a fruit of our imagination.
Bibliography
Britannica 2025: "Time." In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated September 14, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/science/time. Accessed October 7, 2025.
Britannica 2025, 2: "12-Hour Clock." Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/12-hour-clock. Accessed October 12, 2025.
Clocks Market Share 2025: Global Watches and Clocks Market Share 2025, Forecast To 2034. The Business Research Company. https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com. Accessed October 7, 2025.
Dictionary 2012: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth ed.). 2011. Archived from the original on 19 July 2012.
Emery 2024: Emery, Nina, Ned Markosian, and Meghan Sullivan, "Time", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/time/. Accessed October 12, 2025.
Fisher 1748: Fisher, George (accomptant). The Instructor: or, Young Man's Best Companion. 1748.
Galison 2003: Galison, Peter. Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Graff Diamonds Hallucination 2025: $55 Million Quartz Watch. A Blog to Watch. https://www.ablogtowatch.com. Accessed October 11, 2025.
Guinness 2016: Guinness, Os. Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, 2016.
Internews-UA 2025: Ukrainian Media: News Consumption and Trust in 2025. Internews Ukraine. https://internews.ua/media-research. Accessed October 7, 2025.
ITU 2024: International Telecommunication Union. "Global Internet use continues to rise but disparities remain." ITU Press Release, 27 November 2024. https://www.itu.int.
Krasznahorkai 1985: Krasznahorkai, László. Sátántangó. Translated by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2012. Originally published in Hungarian in 1985.
Lec 1972: Lec, Stanisław Jerzy. Myśli nieuczesane. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972.
Mach 1960: Mach, Ernst. The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development, 6th ed. Translated by T. J. McCormack. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court.
McTaggart 1908: McTaggart, J. M. Ellis, 1908, "The Unreality of Time," Mind, 17(4): 457–474.
McTaggart 1921: McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis (1921). The Nature of Existence. Vol. 1. Cambridge: The University Press.
Metamodernism 2015: Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction. metamodernism.com, January 12, 2015. https://www.metamodernism.com. Accessed October 13, 2025.
Navigation and Time 2025: "Navigation and Time." The Saint-Malo Shipwrecks. https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr. Accessed October 12, 2025.
Newman 2025: Newman, Nic. Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report. Digital News Report 2025. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, 2025.
Oxford 2025: Oxford English Dictionary. "Time." In Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. Accessed October 7, 2025.
Raybeck 1992: Raybeck, Douglas. "The Coconut-Shell Clock: Time and Cultural Identity." Time & Society, vol. 1, no. 3, 1992, pp. 323–340. SAGE Publications.
RG/EUAM 2025: RG EUAM Report, August 2025. https://cdn.prod.website-files.com. Accessed October 7, 2025.
Rushkoff 2013: Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (New York), 2013.
Vickers 2019: Vickers, Jon. "Those Bells." Establishing Shot — IU Blogs. December 4, 2019. https://blogs.iu.edu.
Washington Times 2025: Big Ben Clock Tower Restoration Doubles Cost, Wins Critical Acclaim. The Washington Times. https://www.washingtontimes.com. Accessed October 12, 2025.
Zeoli 2024: Rowan Zeoli. "'Carol & The End of the World' Teaches Us How to Survive the Apocalypse." Autostraddle, February 1, 2024. https://www.autostraddle.com. Accessed October 13, 2025.