First published 2017
Garfield examines humanity's transformation from solar timekeeping to digital precision obsession. Not long ago, people measured their lives by the sun's movement across the sky. Today, time signals bombard us from every direction while we remain convinced we lack what we crave most: enough hours in the day. Garfield investigates how something so arbitrary came to dominate human existence. His exploration spans our compulsion to measure, control, sell, film, and immortalize time itself. Over the past 250 years, temporal forces have become omnipresent in daily life. The author questions why humans abandoned millennia of casual sky-watching for the compulsive, millisecond-accurate signals from computers and phones. As time management becomes our greatest challenge, Garfield's layered narrative provides fresh illumination for confronting this modern predicament.
Genres: science, non-fiction, 21st-century, history-of-science
Vibes: thought-provoking
Tropes: social-commentary
Period: 250 Years
407 pages · Hardcover · Taurus