Climate Change Changes Time
Our experience of time is abstracted relative to history, memory, repetition, pattern, and tradition, a linear perception of forward motion defined by that which moves into the past and repeatably changes in the same ways. It is relative to experience. The Climate Crisis disrupts. It requires the realignment of our expectation with this new reality. No harvest season, snow in the summer, summer sun in December, wasps feeding in November, wet and dry seasons migrating, fertile soil experiencing desertification, so on. The Climate Crisis makes the traditional temporal measurements of our lives unreliable. Climate change changes time.
There will be no time in the apocalypse only turning hands, ticking numbers and meaningless shadows. We will have nothing to connect the value of those abstractions too, they will no longer be codified. All we will have is work designed to give time value through the standard forms of coercion that have discoursed on for decades.
The value of time - both as change and worth - spent paying off debts held by the owning classes, banks and debtors is near zero. Its sole value is that which we imagine true. I wish to work, and I don’t know why but I do - any reason has very little to do with me, I wonder if I have any knowledge of why at all, other than the forces which centre my approach life.
The hours spent each week working to purchase does not present the value of the good, nor - classically - the labour. Not only because the labour value is decoupled but because the value of time has no relative position in a world where the sun is outside your coolest room or hidden by pollution.
Time relative only to work is time spent waiting. It is inactivity and does not exist in the same temporal space as more essential tasks with which you no longer have any relationship. How do you grow food in an environment devoid of airable land? How do you cook with no time to spare? How do you rest when totally and unavoidably uncomfortable? How do you develop relationships when everyone is indoors, dying, sick, working, hurting, miserable, isolated, hungry, angry, displaced, unhoused and/or dead – as we all will be?
All essential tasks will be undoable, and we will fall silently into the malaise of a non-temporal world. Corporations and states have stolen time. The Climate Crisis will end the relative experiences that give time meaning. Turning endlessly does not give us meaning nor any time in which to mean anything. Working, as most people do, menial tasks does not provide self-worth especially if those tasks have no definitive end, nor does the day. It is the totalisation of alienation. Life, as will be lived, will not have any relationship with the natural function of the day, seasons, ordinary marked change. We don’t yet understand the new temporal space, but we will. As time passes, we have always recognised by its movement relative to repeated and predictable change. The Climate Crisis muddles and disturbs those patterns we use to discern the movement of time.
I have a watch which tells me when to wake, work, eat and sleep. That is the purpose, and has always been the purpose, of a watch. However, it provided the unintended benefit of giving you relevant information to better understand the changing world in which you existed. You know that the hottest part of the day is after noon, it lets you know you have an hour till noon, now you can make decisions which are reasonably assertable thanks to the information on that watch.
Now every day is too hot or too cold do anything at all. It may be too wet or too dry also. Too windy, too stormy, too polluted. What does the watch tell you about noon, the hottest part of the day is all day as it is always too hot, meaning there is no relative change to how you experience the heat. Noon means lunch break, nothing else. Life relative only to work, is meaningless exploitation. Time is now a form of exploitation. Climate change has changed time so that all it is able to do is exploit your labour, skills, knowledge, education, and effort. Time has no value.
You can stop this by reversing many of the effects of the Climate Crisis. To do so you take total defederalised revolutionary action which disestablishes the hierarchies which have instituted this misery. If every disgruntled, belittled, beaten, oppressed, member of every true majority work for their own reason to a single goal, starting anew – we will find common ground in our neighbours, friends, and family.
However, we must not replace them, we abolish them. We trust knowledge, effort, and kindness not the hierarchical tradition. All human life has value equally once the arbitrary cruelty of instituted and systemised hierarchies is totally removed. Once you have reached this stage you can radically reverse the effects of the Climate Crisis. There will always be plastic rocks but there do not have to be any more. There will always be trace-micro-plastics in the water, but we can stop producing more. There will always, in our lifetimes, be less ice on the poles and glaciers but they do not have to shrink anymore. The water is now at this level, but it does not have to rise any further.
Climate change changes time but if we change the climate then time returns.
Image generated using AI
