Alarming

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
— Henry David Thoreau

It can be alarming to think about an alarm clock. Normally college students notice it just twice a day. They see it at night and hear it in the morning. Glancing at it as they drop into bed, they check the time, set the alarm, and turn to sleep. Too few hours later, the alarm clock emits an abrasive noise which-at least theoretically-wakes us up. The alarm signals the beginning of the day, but it signifies much more. This clock, and others like it, are signs of a highly complex and coordinated social construction of reality, including a social construction of nature.

Time itself is just such a social construction. A day is, naturally, the time it takes the earth to complete one rotation on its axis. It's planetary and it's solar, including a period of light and a period of darkness. But there's no reference to this natural phenomenon on the face of our alarm clocks. For all practical purposes, an American day is more cultural than natural. The digits on most alarm clocks run in two twelve-hour sequences, with a tiny red dot denoting the difference between forenoon and afternoon. The two twelves make twenty-four, giving Americans the idea that twenty-four hours constitute a day. We are a culture of clock time; we live, as we say, by the clock.

Nature doesn't. In nature's time, the minutes and seconds of an alarm clock don't mean much. Nature's time includes the long cycles of prairies and forests and oceans. And in nature's time, efficiency isn't measured by speed, but by sustainability and regeneration-the ability to maintain the extravagant generosity of life over a long time. As a measure of biological time, therefore, we might take the amount of time it takes to make an inch of topsoil, roughly five hundred years. And we might consider that when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that, we are not "on time," no matter how fast or productive we might be.

The alarm clock replaces other methods of waking up. In the past, for example, people slept until their own bodies woke them up. In the modern world, however, the human body is too imprecise, too unpredictable, too natural . Our own biorhythms need to be broken to the discipline of mechanical time, a process that started in the 19 th century with the time-discipline of an emerging industrial order, and with the spread of clocks and watches and, yes, alarm clocks. In 1876, just a century after the Declaration of Independence, the Seth Thomas Clock Company patented a small bedside alarm clock, and the rest is history.

Alarm clocks generally don't make us happy, and many college students hit the snooze button repeatedly to delay the beginning of their day. Why? Because they will spend their time doing things they don't want to do, and doing more things than they have time for. At college, students learn lots of academic subjects, but they also learn that we live in a culture that often consumes our time with busywork and bullshit, assuring us that a few minutes of “quality time” is an adequate compensation for long hours of “quantity time.” They learn that we live in a culture that systematically creates a “time bind” for people by trapping them in “long-hour jobs” that often leave just minutes for the real work of creation-for love and family and friends and community, for responsible consumption and genuine re-creation. In this social construction of time, the clock often works against our fully human being. In the richest nation on earth, many of us experience "time poverty." We attend workshops on "time management." But we don't try to change the social construction of time itself.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, will it ever help us to live in time with nature? Will we ever really learn to tell time? Can we reform our social constructions of time? Can we sound an alarm for nature's time? The answer, of course, is that only time will tell.

For more on the politics of time, check out the website of Take Back Your Time, one group that is sounding the alarm on America's social construction of time.