I am acutely aware of time in a way that often feels uniquely American. My days are governed by calendars, alerts, deadlines, and productivity metrics. Even leisure is scheduled, parceled into neat blocks that can be justified as “earned.” Time here is not just measured; it is managed, optimized, and frequently worried over.
That obsession feels especially stark when contrasted with Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island recently profiled by The Atlantic. According to the article, residents of Sommarøy have flirted with the idea of abandoning traditional clock time altogether. During months of continuous daylight, the community leans into a looser relationship with schedules, allowing activities to happen when they feel right rather than when the clock dictates. It is not that time disappears, but that its authority softens.
Reading that, I felt a twinge of envy. In the United States, time often feels like a moral force. Being busy is a virtue; being late is a failure. We talk about “wasting time” as if it were a finite natural resource that must be extracted efficiently. The clock becomes both referee and taskmaster, its ticking an ever-present reminder of what I should be doing next.
Yet my lived experience of time rarely matches its mathematical precision. A clock insists that an hour is always sixty minutes, but subjectively, that hour stretches or collapses depending on context. When I am immersed in a conversation, reading something absorbing, or laughing with friends, time feels fleeting, almost dishonest in how quickly it vanishes. At work, staring at an uninspiring screen, those same sixty minutes can feel stubbornly immobile.
That tension is what lingers with me. Time is exact, measurable, and utterly indifferent. And still, my perception of it is elastic, emotional, deeply human. Perhaps the lesson from Sommarøy is not to abandon clocks entirely, but to remember that while time can be counted, it does not have to be worshipped.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pocket watch, savonette-type. (by Isabelle Grosjean via Wikimedia)
