The Timelessness Trilogy 1
The Culture Code
I have a note on my phone called The Problem Collector. Perhaps it’s a bit of a misnomer. A touch dramatic. Like all entrepreneurs do, I spend my days engaging with the world - with customers, teams, investors, and co-conspirators - noticing quirks about how the world really works. About our modern times. Things that modern ‘Westerners’, like me, obsess and stress over.
Over time you notice themes and it becomes unavoidable that an inkfinger like me would eventually write about them. One of those things - a thing that keeps coming back regardless of how much I try to avoid it - is time.
I first wrote about the curious case of time after my maternal grandmothers funeral. I was asked - and honoured - to 1/3 of the eulogy and I spoke about family and time. Something Beryl Kirkpatrick always seemed to have a surplus of, and something nobody else seems to have any of. In fact, now that I think about it, all grandmothers seem to have a surplus of it. Maybe they stored it all up because they knew that the rest of us would crash and burn, and they’d be waiting, at the kitchen table, with a hot cup, and a plate of food - there when we needed them most.
In the last 4 years I’ve thought so much about time that I can hardly imagine what timelessness would even mean. I’ve only experienced it once in my entire life - on a small, crowded bus, surrounded by people I loved, heading for a weekend of water and sun in the Great Lakes region of Africa. I don’t know what it was but I damn well know I felt it. It would be impossible to explain in words - like St. Francis of Assisi - words just won’t do.
“Wherever you go, spread the gospel. When absolutely necessary, use words.” - St. Francis of Assisi
It’s a feeling. A sensation. A knowing that is far older than our silly notions of time. It’s what Richard Rohr calls deep time, and what the Chinese call the long history. I’m a writer though - if you haven’t noticed - and so I tried my best to put it into words. All of my best words come long-hand (vibes) and on paper (more vibes). I scribbled in my journal…
“It’s quite a thing you know…to be timeless.”
I wasn’t thinking of Africa at the time. I was thinking of - ahem - my lovely wife.
I feel lucky to have felt timelessness even once, because most of us - at this point - can’t even imagine such a state. Our entire lives are entirely bound up by time. We track it, store it, trade it, stress about it, don’t have it, have too much of it, protect it, and fight tooth-and-nail to find a way to make more it (spoiler alert - you can’t and if you think you can, I can’t help you).
This is a series about timelessness. Like all things truly timeless, I have no idea how many issues it will span, but it will span at least 3! The first, how different cultures code for time. A particular fascination of mine. The second, the secrets of seasonality. How the world seems to know what’s it’s doing without any input from us at all, thank you very much! The third, one for you productivity buffs. How the beta is unbearable at the moment, how the productivity gurus miss the point entirely, and what you can do about it. I’m going to offer a tool to overcome this grotesque genre that I believe will help you carve out your path and do your work.
Stick around until the very end.
Best wishes, warmest regards.
“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares most about.” - Burkeman
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time. I hope that in this post you learn how culture codes for time, and how you can unlock your curiosity to build relationships.
Here are 5 Tools used in this post.
Dirt from Bill Buford - one of the best to ever do it
The Documentary 3100: Run and Become from Sanjay Rawal
The photography of the wonderful Jeff Austin (@tokyoforgeries)
The ridiculously (infuriatingly) good writing of Craig Mod - Slow Time and the Bali Walk and Talk
The great and powerful Boyd Varty, on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Are you interested in getting access to all of the tools used in every post on People & Place? Let me know in the comments.
The Culture Code x Agreements
We think time is a constant and the only possible way to live in time is the way we’re currently living in it! If you’ve seen some things - if you’ve been on the road - you know that the definition of time changes depending on the context you’re in.
Time, across culture, often means something totally different. I hate to be the pebble in your rather expensive shoe, but perhaps modern Westerners get it more wrong than almost anyone else. I had come to learn this in the only way I know how - full immersion.
First, a note on what culture is. Most people think it’s superficial, surface-level things. Things that we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears - song, dance, dress. It is those things but that ain’t the half of it. Culture is bone deep. It’s the water in which we swim - but don’t realize we’re swimming in. It’s the sum-total of all of the agreements we make to each other - countless in even a single day, if you stop and think about it.
That’s why true multiculturalism is actually really hard and takes sincere intentionality. It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, because other groups of people - people you disagree with - ‘…are not failed attempts at being you.” They are the by-product of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years, depending on the long history and context of the culture. You could be a settler Canadian - a rather young culture time-wise - or a San tracker of the Kalahari - ancient by any standard.
The San, and their struggle to maintain the ancient culture they’ve built, are featured in the wonderful documentary 3100: Run and Become.
The worst place to find ourselves, is in a position where we can’t believe(!) what someone else thinks - because the things they think are the culmination of their entire lives. If you can hardly believe what someone else thinks, you can’t possibly empathize or understand their point of view. If you can’t understand their point of view then negotiating the world, and collaborating with others, becomes incredibly difficulty. You isolate yourself. You retreat into a brain-cave of your own making. You lose your ability to think. You shut yourself off from others - you contract. In an ever-expanding world, contraction is a death-like state.
That’s why I sign off on my emails like this:
Not because I wish to bathe in the glow of admiration for being so noble. Not at all - I’m hardly worthy of such praise. It’s because understanding what someone believes - how they see the world - is great power. It’s the most practical thing you could do.
Few realize that the quote above is attributed to Henry Ford - someone I expect to have been rather far from dharma or Buddha. Michael Lewis encountered the quote in a humble frame, behind the desk of a former German Finance Minister. Another unexpected place to find such a quote, no? The pragmatic Germans! Not often a group to dwell on their feelings. Another group with an…eventful…long history.
Jean Dong introduced me to the concept of long history in a podcast with Harvard/Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs.
In this case, the long history of China and how it informs how they see the world as it is today. When you watch Western mainstream media (it’s inevitable decline - or adaptation and reinvigoration - can’t come soon enough) you’re bound to hear takes on China that are close-minded and simple. This just won’t do for a complex, fascinating society of 1.4 billion people and thousands of years of written history.
For example, a society that was once an advance seafaring nation largely chose to come off the oceans because of their vulnerability to the North - invasion of China is only really possible via the Asian Steppe. Invading parties would likely wish to avoid the Himalaya to the Wast (too tall), the rainforests to the South (too dense), and the East China Sea (too wet). This history deeply informs how they see the world today. They were not an empire set out to conquer the world like the British and the Spaniards. They’re observant, patient, and orderly. There is a process to Chinese life and steps are not to be skipped! I’m not making a moral judgement here - life is very difficult in China for different groups of people. My point is simply that every people has a history, and that history defines how they see the modern world, and how they see time.
Contrast, for example, China’s long history with the speed at which they seem to be encountering (and building) the future. I wrote an essay called Leapfrogging in Rising Asia that dealt with this very phenomenon - that many Chinese went from agriculture based work in their ancestral homelands, to the mobile phone era - having skipped landlines entirely. If that’s how you’ve seen and experienced innovation, how does that impact your view of time? In the case of China, thousands of miles of high-speed rail (built at a clip North Americans can hardly fathom) flying by in the foreground of the Great Wall.
In the summer of 2023 I experienced the culture code (and full immersion) in a way that I hadn’t in some time. We tucked into a mid-size SUV and struck off by road - Matt George, Hussain, and Mohammed - bound for two of our truly great towns, Boston and New York. We were three men, crossing the American border without our families. Hussain’s family had already left for a permanent move back home, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mohammed had immigrated here alone, had been born in Somalia, and (you can’t make this up) had spent time in Cuba. I’ll let you imagine how crossing the American border went. We laughed the whole way to Bean Town. Bonds are forged in the crucible of experience (and when you laugh).
When you travel with people who are wonderfully different than you are, time becomes an obvious conundrum. In fact it’s the central conundrum. You have to work together, figure things out, compromise, and do all of the stuff that human teams have to do. All of them, somehow dictated by time. The speed at which you walk. The amount of things you’d like to cram into a day. Whether being ‘on time’ is important or not. When to eat and what to eat. I encourage you to run this experiment for yourself. It’s fascinating, and if you consider yourself a patient sort…humbling.
Compare - and experience if you can - what walking is like with your East-African brethren and your comrades of Bavarian heritage. The former, a saunter, often hand in hand, which is a lovely twist (even amongst males). The time of meeting is a mere suggestion and the walk is often slow and filled with laughter. A wonderful saunter. The latter, your friend Dominic (Hi Dominic!), positively fuming - fighting the internal battle of all battles - at the mere prospect of being late. Ve said 8:vifteen! Equally wonderful, in its own way.
We can feel ourselves change - if we allow it - in both situations, but we are nonetheless plagued by the culture and time in which we came up. You will either boil your own blood at walking so slowly, or you will sincerely question the sanity of someone so bound up by the clock.
Boyd Varty talks about the time conundrum in an amazing podcast with Tim Ferriss. For those in our community prone to pod-walks, Tim Ferriss went on what I would call a historic run in 2022. Not soon to be repeated. Maybe not ever to be repeated. It was a scenius - what the Japanese refer to as ichi-go ichi-e - loosely translated to ‘once in a lifetime, never again.’
Boyd went out into the Londolozi Game Reserve, in his natal home of South Africa, on a walk-about of sorts. He wanted to be alone for 40 days and 40 nights, and he chronicled the experience in a journal-style podcast series (a very malleable medium indeed!).
Creating space and time like that is an almost insane thing to do for a modern human. Yes, Boyd grew up in Londolozi and so there is a sense of time that he comes by naturally - similar to what Laird Hamilton calls ‘…an island sensibility’ for people who grew up on islands. All the same, we never have that kind of space in modern life.
“There’s this weird component of time right? You wake up [with the sun] at 4 in the morning, you meditate, you go tracking for a few hours, you come back to the camp, you make some coffee, you run, you do some more reading and journalling, you meditate again…and it’s 10:15…”
Cue Tim’s horrified laughter at the mere thought of having so much time.
Carl Jung - our modern source for thinking on archetypes - experienced the same sense of deep time when visiting Kenya in 1925 - an experience that must have been rather jarring for a Swiss psychotherapist.
“From a low hill in this broad savanna, a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being…I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savoured the feeling of being entirely alone.” - From Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks
This is - I hate to be hyperbolic - exactly what I felt when I experienced my only moment of timelessness, a mere 1,500 kilometres, by road, from where Jung was in 1925.
Timelessness - what Jung experienced in Kenya - is somehow the antidote to the modern-day traveller, hell-bent on a rigorous, stuffed-to-the-brim schedule, attempting to see an infinite number of things in a very finite amount of time. The end result being - naturally - that you feel like you didn’t experience anything at all, and you’ve either returned without the rest you so hoped for, or you’ve returned from your vacation feeling like you need a vacation. I urge to consider whether or not we’ve gone completely mad.
"The vacation gone wrong in Paris is almost always because people try to do too many things. Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Please, make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little. Get lost a bit. Eat. Catch a breakfast buzz. Have a nap. Try and have sex if you can...Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine. Eat. Repeat. See? It's easy" - Anthony Bourdain
Better, perhaps, to consider wasting time in all the right ways. To mindlessly putter, closely examining the minutiae of life. Things that seem ordinary often take on a rather pleasant glimmer, if we only slow down and allow them to do so.
My friend and climbing partner Alex, sensing that I may have caught myself in a moment of living too much of life governed by the calendar (guilty as charged), sent me this video of Jerry Seinfeld, and his beloved Tricolour Bialetti.
I soon after encountered this clip of someone we see as a rather productive person, talking about the joy he feels during the morning putter, well before the sun rises. I can’t help but relish in the countless thousands that clicked on this clip on YouTube, hoping to hear a sacred secret of time management, only to be told one of the world’s richest people wakes up and…putters. Tremendous.
When we lose ourselves - and forget the wonder of joyful puttering - we’ve found ourselves in what Burkeman calls the efficiency trap.
“It’s true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.” - Burkeman
Bourdain above, rather astutely, knew this about the French. In them (and many others) we can see the importance of what Swedish writer Terry Hartig calls ‘the social regulation of time.’
“That means more willingness to fall in with the rhythms of community; more traditions like the sabbath of decades past, or the French phenomenon of the ‘grandes vacances,’ where almost everything grinds to a halt for several weeks each summer.” - Burkeman
And the subsequent - and inevitable - rentree…
“It was the weekend of la rentree, when all of France comes home from their vacations, and the mood is never exactly jubilant.” - Bill Buford
It’s true of communities as it is true for human groups of all kinds. That includes teams and company building - the world that I live in full-time. Terry Hartig’s mother culture - the Swedish - know this too, and they ensure its preservation with a curious corporate compunction - the fika.
“…the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake. The event resembles a well-attended coffee break, except that Swedes are liable to become mildly offended - which is the equivalent of a non-Swede becoming severely offended - if you suggest that’s all it is.” - Burkeman
Much like our German Finance Minister and his Henry Ford quote, framed on the wall behind his desk, this relationship to time is just as practical as it is personal. We form relationships and relationships form the foundation of teams. We begin to row in the same direction - the mission becomes viral and we want to support one another in the achievement of a common cause. We now work for a greater whole, not simply for ourselves.
“…people mingle without regard for age, or class, or status within the office, discussing both work-related and non-work matters: for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy.” - Burkeman
In fact, the fika often works so well that even senior leaders within the company say it’s the most effective way to put their finger on the pulse of the organization and it’s people. It works precisely ‘…because those involved are willing to surrender some of their individual sovereignty over their time."
This idea of collective ritual, it should be of no surprise, has made its way to many seemingly different cultures, in all corners of the globe. It’s what American writer William McNeill calls Keeping Together In Time - commentary on the idea of garrison, in the military, or…
‘…the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday.” - Burkeman
I spotted this particularly wonderful habit in one of my favourite documentaries - The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, from Mami Sunada.
Perhaps the takeaway here is that time is contextual and how we see the world is largely bound up in it. Life, inevitably, is lived in seasons and it’s within the seasons of life that we discover the secret. That’s next, on People & Place.
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
Onward.
Next time, Part 2 - the secrets of seasonality.
See you on the path.
