In the present year, a year is a strange way to gauge time.
It’s arbitrary as the meter, who’s a bastard admixture of arbitrary fixtures tied to a speed of light constant in post-facto justification of “how can we make this thing we made up make sense?”
The meter which unfairly came to dominate the world of measurement by defining itself in terms of light and pretending its scientific basis and elitist European origins met the global need for a universal standard unit. The meter which defined other systems’ units in terms of itself and so inimically imperialized indigenous, traditional systems of measurement by incorporation and redefinition.
The meter, born of local cultural context and coming to burrow in every brain by virtue of its connection to the international scientific discourse.
It’s all about the friends you make.
Don’t get me started on the gram.
The importance of these units is their universality, a universality of need rather than their intrinsic quantity.
So why do we still need years?
It seems an arbitrary length of time.
Sure, years measure the time it takes Earth to revolve around the Sun once. Great. That has tenuous meaning in this era, and should evolve to utter meaninglessness in the future as we retreat indoors and spread to the stars. The city is the center of capital, the beating heart of the modern era. She pulses in with the day, and out with the night, breathing humans in accord with the rhythm of the sun, which still arbitrarily holds men to her tyranny. But the human world increasingly moves with the cycles of capital. When is the last time you saw a star that wasn’t our Sun? For those of you freaks who go out at night and live far enough from genuine civilization to catch a star or five in spite of the bubble of light pollution that encapsulates our great dwellings, when is the last time you navigated according to the stars?
And for the one bastard who answers in the affirmative, was that necessary? Or would you have been better served by the little computer in your pocket, communicating with the heavenly bodies we cannot see, satellites with eyes pointed right back at us, nudging us along the fantastic veins of commerce connecting everything that matters in our human, human world?
In fact, the phone has a little app on it that will describe to you the positions of stars wisely hidden by civilization, if you just hold it up to the horizon.
My point in all of this being we have clearly replaced this traditional field of monuments. Its relevance becomes increasingly strained outside of very specific applications: aerospace, archeology, ancient translations, satisfying boredom.
The meteorology/climatology establishments, too, are losing their grip over the year. Anthropogenic climate change is poised to utterly deracinate local seasonal variations from their traditional astrological associations. Even before this change takes total hold, we’ve managed to largely separate traditional harvests from seasonal time. Greenhouses, hydroponics, shipping, genetic engineering, increasingly advanced agricultural methods all lead us away from dependence on traditional time to guide our actions. The correspondence of corporate financial quarters to the seasons are now a byproduct of some charming, stale nostalgia. They lead to insane waste: neurotic behaviors based on quarterly budgets, bonus structures, and shareholder reports. There is no reason for this any longer.
Nature once held us hostage to her patterns and whipped us with her caprice. We are well into the process of her domination. Our needs and desires are easily met in spite of her strictures. We force her to submit to our will. As such, we out evolve the traditional year.
Why adhere to some 24-hour day? What’s the point of a 365-day year? We step outside less often. I let the sun in with a light switch, absorb its rays with a lamp. I close it out with curtains and an eyemask. I have a heater. I have an air conditioner. I get groceries delivered by an app. Winter squash midsummer, flip flops in winter. I seldom leave my home. Soon I’ll live and work and shop and socialize in one great structure I share with a whole community.
The eyes of the human race turn ever inward. It becomes important to consider a more practical method of chronology for today’s tomorrow. A new field of heuristics is in order!
There is no need for a 16/8 conscious/unconscious split. Imagine a better cycle, engineered by a consortium of corporate scientists to create optimal productivity in environmentally managed self-actualization communities. Free from the inhibitions of nature, we are empowered to explore the perfection of our biological forms. Let’s shape time around that.
Why keep the year based on seasons which no longer exist and astronomy which is no longer relevant? The quarterly and annual production cycles are no longer so germane as specific policy pursuits. In ancient times, years were named after kings in regnal calendars. There was no year 4635BCE-2020CE insanity. There was the era of “King John, year 7”. One measured progress in an ordinal, distinct, event-based orientation. This seems far more natural.
If we are to reorient human understanding to promote civilizational advancement, a project-oriented epochal approach seems obvious. Let’s say we were in the Petrolivorium, the era devoted to owning and exploiting every possible natural fuel reserve, and are in the Notitiavorium, where information is the primary resource to be owned and exploited. Years become irrelevant in these cycles. We ought number each by phase of progress in the epoch, and the raw number of consciousness cycles. Say Petrol.2.1962. Petrol for Petrolivorium, 2 for second phase, intense exploration and consumption, 1962 for how many consciousness cycles have occurred since the beginning of phase 2.
This is, of course, a very rough draft. Such a project can be adapted to nearly any national end, any corporate end, any group end. In conception, it’s similar to a 5-year-plan, but without the pitfalls a neurotic devotion to arbitrary numbers can arouse. This measurement is simultaneously scientific and debased. It doesn’t diminish itself by superstitious obsession with uninvolved planets. It is perfect, meeting a need, expected to change by its very definition to promote positive, directed progress.
I do not expect most of the world to catch on quickly, but as the meter subsumes the yard and every other traditional unit, converting them into versions of itself, the success of this system should suborn all others to its supremely useful vision of time. No calendar system was universal in the past: universalization is a product of imperial power, impositions to coordinate humanity for great economic gain. I am certain that institutions adopting this time scheme will be able to absorb and reorient any traditional calendar into this program of maximal utility. It allows the maximization of human efforts by putting them in proper context: guaranteeing progress.
You can start today. Chose a goal. Rename this period of your life to correspond with your goal. Better if you’re in charge of an organization. For instance, we can retitle the beginning of the Notitiavorium as Google.1.1, and move forward to Alphabet.1.1. We can even retitle the second “digit” of the planned epoch for the drift in epochal leadership: Notitiavorium.Google.1; Notitiavorium.Alphabet.1.
Just remember: if you’re not orienting every instant as efficiently as possible toward progress, you’re holding more than society back. You’re holding yourself down. Make your resolution to construct a better tomorrow by changing today.
