Task #2: Ditch your watch
We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to our clocks. Just glancing around my room right now, I have no less than 9 devices displaying the time. There is a reason for our indentured servitude to clocks. It has to do with switching from ‘religious’ time to ‘merchant time’ and adopting the notion “that time is money,” an insidious phrase unleashed on us by Benjamin Franklin.
If you want to learn more about how we have sacrificed our freedom to the ubiquitous clock, read Tom Hodgkinson’s book: How to be Free.
But for now, I encourage you to rethink your relationship with your watch. Consider this:
“For some unfathomable reason, everyone seems to want an expensive watch. But isn’t it mighty peculiar that what is in actual fact a symbol of slavery should also have become a status symbol? Wearing a watch indicates to others that you have bound yourself to the modern industrial tempo. Wearing an expensive watch means you are proud of being bound this way. It is, literally, a very expensive manacle. The watch is a golden handcuff. The bars of the cage are gilded.” From, How to Be Free, by Tom Hodgkinson.
P.S.
Next time you catch yourself saying: “I don’t have time,” or “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” remind yourself that yes you DO have time, in fact you have the same amount of time as everybody else, you just haven’t set your priorities right.
