This week’s episode of the podcast of This Human Business considers the alternative forms of time that elude the unrelenting mechanistic progress of Chronos, the lord of clocks. We’re used to hearing time treated as a purely physical phenomenon, a dimension of the world around us, but time is first and foremost an internal experience, a construction of the human mind. The experience of time is therefore subjective, and thickly connected to emotional experience.
Efforts to manipulate human emotion often involve distortions in the sense of time. An example of this temporal manipulation of our feelings is found in the application of torschlusspanik, the emotion that causes people to act rashly because of an imminent deadline.
Torschlusspanik is one of those wonderful German words that consists of a number of smaller words smushed together. It translates roughly as the panic of the closing gate. The physical experience of a closing gate approaches the idea of what torschlusspanik feels like. It’s the emotion we have when we believe that there’s an opportunity for us, but a very limited amount of time left to take advantage of it. There’s a gate closing, we feel, and we’ll never have the opportunity to get through it unless we act now.
Torschlusspanik is one of the staple tools of boardwalk hucksters and pushy marketers. You’ve heard it in pitches that repeat the phrase “for a limited time only” in an attempt to create a false sense of urgency. Political campaigns use the tactic too, sending emails to supporters claiming that there’s some kind of upcoming “deadline” for financial donations to be made to create an impact on a vital issue.
What con men understand is that people tend to be more susceptible to deception when their thinking is hurried. Activating torschlusspanik increases sales, as people err on the side of purchasing something if they believe they have access to a special deal that could soon expire.
The truth is that time is not as limited as we’re often led to believe. The clock may be ticking, but it’s possible to enter frames of time that transcend the limits of chronological pressure. The human mind can open up pockets of time that are so slow that they can feel practically eternal.
When we occupy this sort of position outside of quantitatively measured time, we are liberated from the emotional pressure inherent in ordinary time, and are free to contemplate what we really would like to do.
