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The Reification of Time

How We Turned Living Into Objects

Robert Kenfield | 8 mins read | November 12, 2025

The Radical Insight: Time Isn't an Object We Possess, It's the Flow of Experience Itself

Reification is the philosophical term for treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete thing,mistaking a concept for an object, a process for a possession, a way of thinking for a feature of reality itself.

And that's exactly what we've done with time.

Time, in its essence, is a measure of reality's dynamism, the flow, the change, the becoming that characterizes existence itself. But we've objectified it. We've reified it. We've turned the measure of change into a thing we believe we can possess.

We speak of time as if it were a commodity:

"I don't have enough time." "I need to save time." "Stop wasting my time." "Time is money."

We treat time as something we possess, allocate, spend, invest, or lose. This way of thinking feels so natural that we rarely question it. Time is obviously a resource we manage, right?

But what if this entire framework, treating time as an object we possess, is a cognitive illusion that fundamentally distorts our relationship with living itself?

French philosopher Henri Bergson dedicated his life's work to exposing this illusion. His insight, radical when he proposed it in 1889 and still unsettling today, was simple but profound: We confuse the way we measure time with what time actually is.

We've reified clock time, turned the measurement of reality's dynamism into a static thing we imagine we can own.

And in that confusion, we've created productivity tools that make us worse at living.

And that's exactly what we've done with time.

We speak of time as if it were a commodity:

"I don't have enough time." "I need to save time." "Stop wasting my time." "Time is money."

We treat time as something we possess, allocate, spend, invest, or lose. This way of thinking feels so natural that we rarely question it. Time is obviously a resource we manage, right?

But what if this entire framework, treating time as an object we possess, is a cognitive illusion that fundamentally distorts our relationship with living itself?

We've reified clock time, turned the measurement of reality's dynamism into a static thing we imagine we can own.

And in that confusion, we've created productivity tools that make us worse at living.

The Two Times

Bergson distinguished between two fundamentally different temporal experiences that we conflate in both philosophy and daily life.

Clock Time (temps) is the time of measurement, the time of schedules and calendars. It consists of discrete, equivalent units that can be counted, divided, and arranged. Clock time treats temporal moments as if they were spatial points on a line, homogeneous, interchangeable, and external to consciousness.

This is the time that enables coordination, scientific measurement, and industrial organization. It's extraordinarily useful for certain purposes. But it's not time as we actually experience it.

Duration (durée) is lived time, the time of experience itself. Duration is qualitative rather than quantitative, heterogeneous rather than homogeneous, and indivisible rather than discrete.

Bergson's favorite illustration: listening to a melody. Each note gains meaning only in relationship to what came before and what is anticipated to come after. You can't experience a melody as a series of discrete moments, you experience it as a flowing whole where past, present, and anticipated future interpenetrate each other continuously.

Duration cannot be measured because the very act of measurement transforms flowing experience into static spatial units. When you try to capture lived time in clock divisions, you're not measuring time, you're replacing temporal experience with spatial representation.

The Thought Experiment That Changes Everything

Bergson proposed a thought experiment that reveals the difference between clock time and lived duration:

Imagine that all physical processes on Earth suddenly doubled in speed. Days became twelve hours. Heartbeats doubled. All movements accelerated proportionally.

Scientific instruments would detect no difference because all relationships remain proportional. The ratio between Earth's rotation and your heartbeat stays constant. From a physics perspective, nothing has changed.

Yet for conscious beings, the experience would be profoundly different. The thickness of a day, the rhythm of conversation, the unfolding of thought, all fundamentally altered.

This reveals that lived time has qualities that mechanical measurement cannot capture. Clock time is a useful abstraction, but it's not the reality of temporal experience.

How Time Became an Object

The treatment of time as an object isn't natural or inevitable, it emerged historically through specific cultural and technological developments.

Medieval life organized itself around what historian Jacques Le Goff calls "Church time," the rhythm of prayers, seasons, and religious observances that honored natural and spiritual cycles rather than mechanical precision.

The shift toward objectified time accelerated with mechanical clocks in the late medieval period and reached a culmination in industrial capitalism. E.P.

Thompson's research shows how factory discipline required workers to internalize "clock time" rather than "task time," to work according to measured hours rather than natural rhythms or the completion of meaningful work.

This wasn't just a practical adjustment. It was a philosophical transformation that changed how humans conceptualize existence itself.

We began treating time as:

Divisible (into hours, minutes, seconds)
Measurable (by external instruments)
Commodifiable (wages paid by the hour)
Exchangeable (one hour equals another)
Scarce (never enough of it)
External (something we exist within rather than as)

None of these properties describe lived temporal experience. They describe clock time, a social construction that proved economically useful but philosophically misleading.

Heidegger's Temporal Existence

Martin Heidegger deepened Bergson's critique by showing that human existence itself is fundamentally temporal, not that we exist in time like objects in space, but that our very being is temporality.

Heidegger identified three interconnected dimensions that constitute human existence:

The Past as "Having-Been": Not the collection of events that happened "back then," but the thrown conditions that continue to shape present possibilities. Your past exists not as a museum of memories but as the living context that makes current choices meaningful.

The Future as "Coming-Toward": Not a series of events waiting to happen, but the horizon of possibilities that calls forth present action. The future exists as the realm of potential that gives direction and meaning to current activities.

The Present as "Making-Present": Not a knife-edge moment between past and future, but the dynamic process of actualizing possibilities within the context of having-been-thrown. The present is where past conditions meet future possibilities in the moment of choice and action.

This temporal structure reveals why calendar grids feel so alienating, they treat time as a neutral container in which events happen, rather than recognizing that temporality is the very structure through which human existence and meaning emerge.

Martin Heidegger deepened Bergson's critique by showing that human existence itself is fundamentally temporal, not that we exist in time like objects in space, but that our very being is temporality.

Heidegger identified three interconnected dimensions that constitute human existence:

Why This Matters for Productivity Tools

When productivity apps treat time as divisible, measurable blocks to be filled with activities, they embody the reification Bergson critiqued. They take lived temporal experience and reduce it to spatial representation.

The calendar grid literally spatializes time, makes it into rows and columns, blocks and boundaries, containers to be filled. This spatial representation can coordinate meetings but cannot capture or support the flowing, meaningful experience of actually living through a day.

Consider how you actually experience your morning:

You wake with certain energy, certain thoughts, certain feelings about what the day holds. These aren't discrete moments but a continuous flow. The coffee tastes a certain way. The shower has certain sensations. The mental preparation for work or family responsibilities unfolds organically.

None of this fits in calendar blocks. The experience is qualitative, continuous, and context-dependent. It can't be captured by "Morning Routine, 6:00-6:30 AM."

When you reduce morning experience to a 30-minute block, something essential is lost, the lived quality that makes it your morning, the temporal thickness that constitutes actual experience.

The Distortion of Measurement

Bergson argued that measurement requires making things equivalent that aren't actually equivalent. To say "one hour equals another hour" requires stripping away the qualitative differences that define lived experience.

The first hour of deep creative work, when your mind is fresh and ideas flow, bears little resemblance to the seventh hour, when you're exhausted and just pushing through. Yet the calendar treats them identically. Both are "one hour."

The hour spent in meaningful conversation with someone you love has nothing in common with the hour spent in a tedious status meeting. Yet both occupy the same sized block in your calendar.

This systematic flattening, reducing rich, heterogeneous experiences into uniform, interchangeable units, is what enables the commodification of time. But it comes at the cost of distorting how we actually experience temporal life.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

The World Health Organization now recognizes that mental health is not merely the absence of illness but the presence of positive characteristics like life satisfaction, optimism, and sense of purpose—qualities emerging from how people structure daily life, not from task completion efficiency.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

The Scarcity Illusion

When time becomes an object we possess, it automatically becomes something we can have too little of. "Not enough time" becomes a constant refrain.

But this scarcity is a function of objectification, not temporal reality.

Duration, lived time, isn't scarce. It's simply how experience unfolds. You don't "run out" of duration; you live through it. The sense of scarcity only emerges when you treat time as discrete units that must be allocated among competing demands.

Consider a historical contrast: Economic historians estimate that medieval English peasants worked roughly 1,500-1,620 hours per year. Modern Americans work roughly 1,800-2,000 hours per year. Yet the historical record suggests a fundamentally different relationship with temporal experience.

Economic historian E.P. Thompson documented that pre-industrial societies operated on what he called "task time," you worked until the harvest was complete, then you rested. Work wasn't divided into abstract hourly units. The distinction wasn't between "work time" and "leisure time" but between periods of intense labor and periods of rest, governed by seasonal rhythms and task completion rather than clock measurement.

The transformation came with mechanical clocks and industrial capitalism. Thompson notes that "time-discipline" had to be actively taught to workers, the notion that time itself was a measurable commodity that could be "wasted" or "saved." This wasn't a natural human experience; it was constructed through specific economic and technological changes.

We created time scarcity by objectifying time. Then we built productivity tools that reinforce this scarcity by making time appear as finite blocks competing for allocation.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

The Lost Art of Temporal Richness

When we treat time as object rather than experience, we lose access to what we might call temporal richness, the qualitative, meaningful aspects of how life actually unfolds.

Bergson describes this richness through the concept of duration: "Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states."

This isn't mystical, it's phenomenological. When you're fully engaged in meaningful activity, you're not tracking clock time. You're inhabiting duration. The boundaries between past, present, and future soften. Experience flows.

Athletes call this "the zone." Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi researches it as "flow". Artists know it as "losing yourself" in creative work.

But you can't schedule flow for 10:00-10:30 AM. You can't measure it in hourly blocks. It emerges when conditions are right and sustains as long as it sustains. It's pure duration, lived temporal experience that resists objectification.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

Productivity Tools vs. Temporal Experience

Current productivity tools not only can't support temporal richness, they actively work against it.

Calendar grids force you to:

Pre-specify duration (before you know how long something needs)
Accept equivalence (all hours treated the same)
Think in blocks (discrete units rather than flowing experience)
Optimize allocation (fitting more in rather than living fully)
Measure success (completion and efficiency over meaning)

Task lists reduce temporal goals to:

Binary states (done or not done)
Atemporal items (no connection to when or how)
Isolated units (no relationship to flow or context)

Both approaches embody what Bergson warned against: mistaking spatial measurement for temporal reality.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

The Possibility Space Alternative

What if we stopped treating time as a resource to allocate and started treating it as the medium through which possibilities become actual?

This isn't semantic wordplay, it's a fundamentally different approach to daily life design.

Instead of asking "How do I fit everything into my limited time?" you'd ask "What possibilities do I want to actualize through my living?"

Instead of dividing your day into discrete blocks, you'd recognize natural rhythms and flows, periods of focus and periods of rest, times of intense engagement and times of gentle presence.

Instead of measuring success by completion and efficiency, you'd assess the quality of lived experience, did the day feel meaningful? Did activities unfold with appropriate attention? Did you inhabit your life rather than just processing it?

This possibility-based approach aligns with what Bergson and Heidegger teach us: that we are temporal beings whose existence unfolds through the actualization of possibilities, not mechanical entities allocating scarce resources among competing demands.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

Recovering Temporal Wisdom

Traditional cultures maintained wisdom about time that industrial capitalism erased. Indigenous temporalities, seasonal rhythms, ritual cycles, these all recognized that different times have different qualities, different meanings, different purposes.

You plant in spring not because "spring" is an arbitrary calendar date but because spring has specific qualities that support germination. You rest in winter not because you've scheduled downtime but because winter is the season of restoration.

This temporal wisdom can't be recovered by returning to pre-industrial life. But it can inform how we design tools for temporal organization in a complex modern world.

We need tools that:

Honor qualitative difference (not all moments are equivalent)
Support natural rhythms (rather than imposing arbitrary blocks)
Enable flow (rather than fragmenting attention)
Preserve temporal richness (rather than reducing to measurement)
Treat time as experience (not resource)

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

The Path Forward

Bergson's critique of reified time isn't a rejection of clocks, calendars, or coordination. These tools serve legitimate purposes.

The problem is treating clock time as the only time, measurement as the only reality, spatial representation as the only way to organize temporal life.

We need tools that can accommodate both: clock time for coordination and duration for living. Precise scheduling when synchronization matters and flowing temporal experience when meaning matters.

What would such tools look like? How would they work? What principles would guide their design?

We're building toward answers. But first, we need to understand one more dimension of why current tools fail: how they reshape not just our relationship with time, but our very capacity for thinking itself.

That's where we turn next.

The productivity paradox has reached a critical point where fragmentation's cost has become unsustainable.

Burnout has reached epidemic levels. The surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health crisis. People report feeling simultaneously overscheduled and disconnected, busy and unfulfilled.

These aren't separate problems from the productivity paradox, they're symptoms of the same issue: our digital tools fragment rather than integrate the human experience of living.

This is Article 5 in a 12-part series exploring why we need a new category of technology, Life Design, to replace productivity tools that fragment rather than integrate our lives.

Next: "The Cognitive Load Crisis: How Fragmentation Rewires Your Brain"

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