should I move to an off-the-grid commune?
Should I move to an off-the-grid commune that doesn’t use clocks? The answer to that question involves train schedules, queer breakups, and an interview with our future selves.
Advice for and from the Future is hosted by Ozzy Llinas Goodman and Julia Furlan, and produced by Siona Peterous. Our executive producer is Rose Eveleth. Our production manager is Michael Kamel. The theme music is by Also, Also, Also. The logo is by Frank Okay. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
You can find us on Instagram at @advice4futureu. If you have a question for or from the future, email it to us at ask@futureadvice.club.
TRANSCRIPT
[Theme song plays]
Julia: Welcome to Advice for and from the Future. I’m Julia Furlan, and this is a safe space for those of us who maybe kind of forgot how to read an analog clock. I’m just saying. If that’s you, it’s fine.
Ozzy: And I’m Ozzy Llinas Goodman, and I just wanted to give you permission to schedule your text messages. Yes, this is possible on most apps besides iMessage, which is the one that, like, doesn’t do this. Unfortunately, yes. But I just learned this recently, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life. Time is officially fake. And today we’re going to talk more about that.
Julia: Each week on the show, you’ll hear a question hand-selected from our time machine, which sends us advice questions from the future.
Ozzy: And we, of course, hand selectsthe ones that we think will be most useful to you, our dear listeners, here in the present.
Julia: And our producer Siona is also in the present with us to read a question for us. Hi, Siona.
Siona: Hi y’all.
Ozzy: So you won’t always hear Siona’s voice on this show, but her thoughts and editorial perspective will all be sort of reflected from behind the scenes in everything you hear. And she’ll be here with us to read the questions that we have each week. And you will also be hearing from her in voice again a little later on today’s episode. So, Siona, what is our question for this week?
Siona: Should I move to a commune that’s off the grid and doesn’t use clocks?
Julia: Honestly, off the bat, this sounds like a dream. Go for it. I love it, like I’ll see you when the flowers bloom. Okay.
Ozzy: I feel like my immediate reaction is like, no, like don’t leave society. Because I’m like, I feel like there’s just a piece of it that’s like, I worry about the isolation. And like, any time a friend is like, I want to do this thing that’s going to remove me from community that I’m in or isolate me further in some way, that scares me.
Julia: Totally.
Ozzy: That said, I love the idea of not using clocks and, like, forgetting about time. So I think there is something that I’m drawn to in this lifestyle they’re describing.
Julia: I mean, I think that sounds like freedom. I think that sounds like you’ve transcended. You’re like in a different kind of planet. But like, I don’t know if any of you have anyone in your life who doesn’t have a cell phone. It really is like they don’t exist in the same way. I mean, I want them to exist, obviously, but it’s very, very hard to connect. You know, I don’t think we realize that we are in orbit until we have to reach back to someone who, you know, is like tethered in a different way.
Ozzy: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because when I was thinking about what it would be like to not have clocks or to not follow like a time schedule or know what time it is, I was thinking about this camping trip I was on where we didn’t have cell service. And so we were like wandering around in the woods a lot without our phones at all. And the lack of just like having that little device in your pocket that says the exact time just really changed how I was relating to time for like those few days is, you know, it’s like you still sort of know the general time based on the sun if you’re outside. So like that was one surprise. But it also felt completely different to not like, even if I had my phone and knew it was exactly 3:05, it’s like nobody else knows that. So that’s not really important. Like in a vacuum, if I’m the only one that knows the exact time it is, it actually doesn’t matter and isn’t even that time. If like, I’m the only one who thinks that out of this group that I’m in.
Julia: Here’s my pitch. Okay. Are you ready?
Ozzy: I’m so ready.
Julia: If you really want to, like, disengage from time, you have a baby.
Ozzy: Make a human.
Julia [00:04:18] Because there’s this whole process where you have to, like, make the baby. And that takes, like, a really long time and also feels very fast. And it’s like, I’m not ready at all. And yet here I am and it’s happening and blah, blah, blah. So there’s that aspect. But then once the baby is on the earth, all of a sudden you’re up in the middle of the night and you are on a pace of like the human being. And like, your job is to sort of like keep this tiny being alive and fed and clean and like, there is no speeding that up. There’s no way to speed it up. There’s no way to slow it down.
Ozzy: Yeah, absolutely. I think I’m really just fascinated by like, how did we get to this point where we all are sort of like looking at our little clock on the bottom of our laptop screen, and that’s how we know what time it is. A big piece of why we have time and clocks is thanks to capitalism. And it’s actually because of trains.
Julia: Trains, yeah.
Ozzy: So the very first time that like a standard timezone was adopted in the UK was 1847, which was when trains were sort of widespread enough that schedule confusion started being an issue. So if you like, left one place and then it’s a totally different time in your destination, it’s like, what’s going on? Like you can’t say when the train is going to come if there’s not a standard time that applies to all of those locations.
Julia: Well, and also, you could the train could crash like that, like you needed to make it so that trains are not like both there, to do things, so.
Ozzy: Right, so that multiple trains aren’t running into each other, exactly. As soon as clocks and standard time was a thing, it sort of immediately became a tool of like colonialism and capitalism, as things often tend to do.
Julia: Why am I not surprised.
Ozzy: Like when the British Empire started spreading to India and colonizing there, they started trying to enforce British standard time. And there was actually at least one major anti-imperialist protest in which Indian community leaders were demanding an official Indian standard time instead of having to follow Greenwich Mean Time, which is like what the British were sort of trying to make everyone be on like one time. And it’s like, this was a totally different part of the world.
Julia: Well, yeah, like, time wise, that must have been fucking hell, right?
Ozzy: I’m sure it was wild, because it probably meant it was like, you know, dark when you were supposed to be doing some form of work. And it’s like, why would we be doing this? I think it’s a very colonial mindset to be like, we could just change an entire population’s biological clocks. Like, that’s fine because we want this to be the time of like the work schedule, right?
Julia: And because we want to have industry and we want to colonize these people in this land. If we fast forward to the hellscape we live in now with our low power Amazon, etc., there’s this really great paper from Data and Society that’s called “The Constant Boss,” which I highly recommend reading. It’s by Aiha Nguyen. And it’s basically like talking about the ways that capitalism in this moment and surveillance technology has made it possible for large corporations to basically take advantage of workers in new and horrible ways. You know, there was a time where you worked for a company and the company saw you as an asset and would sort of like value you in a certain way. And now, you know, like now the idea is that you have, quote unquote freedom, but that freedom is kind of a smokescreen for being surveilled. If you’re like an Uber driver or something, you’re like, wow, I am so free. I can I can work anytime I want. But if you are being surveilled constantly and told where you need to go and how what time you need to be there…
Ozzy: Well, also, if you’re getting paid so little that you just have to be working constantly, then it’s like you technically get to set your own schedule, but the schedule is also just always working.
Julia: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I just feel like it feels very clear and palpable to me, the the ways that this surveillance technology and this belief in capitalism has sort of like degraded our our humanity. It really what it does is it says like, you are nothing but the sum of your beep-beep-boops. You’re not a human being.
Ozzy: Yeah. And I think there is like this disconnect between capitalist time and sort of like actual human emotion and experience. I was thinking about this concept of queer time.
Juli: The best time.
Ozzy: Yes. You know, superior time. We’re fans on this podcast. I think that queer time is essentially just a way of like naming this idea that the ways that we measure age and maturity are often very based on these sort of like standard life events and life timelines that can look really different for queer people.
Julia: Absolutely.
Ozzy: For example, if you don’t come out by the typical age that most people have had their first relationship, you might not be having your first relationship — that may not happen until much later in life than it might for the average straight person. I like that I’ve noticed a lot of my queer friends have maybe like slightly different visions of what adulthood could look like than most of my straight friends. Like it feels like there’s just a little bit more options of how things might look. Like it might include kids, but it might not. It might include marriage or one monogamous long term relationship, but it might not. Like those kinds of things can be, I think like on average, a little more flexible for queer people.
Julia: Well, I think more than on average, I mean a little bit more, I think like really significantly different. Like I think that there’s like in some ways this question and the idea of queer time is an explosion and reframing of time. And it means that, you know, there are like age checkpoints that people grow up carrying and they carry this belief that you have to do X by X age and Y by Y age. And it’s like queer time means that you could be coming out in any number of ways or not, but like, you could be coming out in any number of ways, and having milestones and you could have them out of order. You could do one thing, then another. You could go back, you can go, you can like triple doubles, you know, double axel back into the previous thing.
Ozzy: Or share them with different people. Like I feel like I know more queer people who maybe like live with one partner but have a child with a different partner, like kind of things where it’s not necessarily everything is contained within the same group of people.
Julia: Totally.
Ozzy: You know, I pretty much always think of queer time as like a positive concept. But when we were planning this episode, our production manager, Michael, was talking about how they were having this conversation with a friend who was just sort of talking about this concept of like queer time and not sort of adding on this idea that like, you know, for many queer and especially trans people, like our life expectancies can actually be a little shorter. So this friend was sort of saying like, well, queer time feels like you need to do things sort of faster or like more because like one regular year is like five gay years. And Michael was like, I kind of get that. But also like, we’re not dogs. We don’t like the idea of like, like we’re aging like five times faster than straight people. I just feel like, you know, so there’s that little bit of like tension there for me of like this also could could be limiting ourselves in a way we don’t need to if we like get too attached to this concept.
Julia: Well, and also like that that sort of thought process feels like it comes from the sort of scarcity mindset where your time is not infinite, it is counted. And you have to do everything because you have this sort of desperation. And my genuine hope is that the more that the queers sort of like take up space, the less that scarcity will play a role. But it definitely, you know, historically, of course, that was there’s like an entire generation of people for whom like that was true, you know, like, you know, probably even more than one year versus five years. It was probably even faster than that. So it’s good to remember that it’s not necessarily like just a beautiful reframing, even though that’s what we think it is.
Ozzy: Well, it’s like a beautiful reframing that comes out of oppression and like not being able to fit into the world as it exists to some degree.
Julia: Well, and also, like if you are, let’s say, a child or a teenager who is queer and is not being seen or valued or cherished for who you know you are, that existence takes a toll. Like it’s very hard to live that kind of queer time. You know what I mean? If everyone around you is not sort of allowing you to be your full self, I would say that a year probably feels like five years or a month. Feels like a year, you know, for sure. One thing I wanted to say before we move on is like queer people are not the only people who end up participating in queer time.
Ozzy: Absolutely.
Julia: Like there are so many cis, purportedly straight people who are like finding ways to queer their own time, for example, like co-parenting after divorce and like blended families.
Ozzy: Well, so I feel like basically what we’re talking about here is this idea that there’s, you know, sort of capitalist time, the time of the trains, the time that shows up on our phone screens. When we look at it like this external sort of sense of time that comes from outside of us. And then there are these senses of time that come more from like our own personal needs and our relationships with other people. I think like queer time is one example of that. But there are also so many other examples of ways that this can show up. And Siona had some really interesting thoughts about this. So Siona, what’s coming up for you in thinking about alternatives to capitalist time?
Siona: Yeah, so I’m really excited by this question because years and years ago I was researching the relationship between people’s mental health and how we view time in certain mental health crises or how time can be something that is really like directly impacted by our mental health. And in that research, I came across this thing called dream time, which is a reference to Indigenous Australian beliefs and practices that the world was created in a nonlinear format. And because of this belief, because of this practice, a lot of Indigenous Australians, also known as Aboriginals, don’t view time as linear to this day. So even through the process of colonization and Australia is broadly considered part of the Western world, a lot of Indigenous folks there just don’t view time as something that’s like past, present and future. And the reason I found this fascinating is because one of the tools some researchers were using was trying to find a way to apply dream time to indigenous communities to create better mental health outcomes for these communities specifically. And just in terms of even me as someone who was born and raised in the US, but does come from like an African family and just I’m Black in America and time does not work the same between like white spaces and nonwhite spaces.
Julia: When I moved back to the US after being in Brazil for a couple of years, I was like 45 minutes late to every single social engagement I might experience.
Ozzy: But you’re like, I’m on time. This is on time for me.
Julia: Exactly. Exactly. And also, like, I wouldn’t okay, I don’t want to be in the first 15 minutes of a party. It’s always awkward. Yeah.
Ozzy: Yeah, definitely.
Julia: And also, you know, like going back to this idea of the question, this is delicious. Go ahead, leave town. Go to your commune where you’re off the grid and out of time, because time is fake, is what we’re just I think I’ve discovered here.
Ozzy: I mean, I feel like it’s interesting to think about how this could come up in a time free space. Like if you’re like, meet me at noon when the sun is directly overhead, but then like one person is 15 minutes late or like, you know, as late as feels correct to them, it’s sort of like you need like a different factor to triangulate, if you don’t have the clock that we’re all agreeing on. It might be like a physical space or perhaps some sort of positioning of the sun or other like natural factors. If you’re familiar with how to do that, which I’m not really.
Julia: Well, I bet you’ll get really good at that.
Ozzy: I’m sure you will.
Julia: Whoever has this question, I bet you’re going to get really much better at like checking in with the sky and your body and you’ll have a sense of time that’s different.
Siona: This also reminds me of the people who I think are really good about letting go of time, like older folks who sit on porches. They just sit there. They talk. People know where they are. They just it’s because lack of having a time constraint gives people more free time. So they really do just roam. So if you’re in a communal action of doing it because people do it all the time, typically when they’re older. But that’s what this reminds me of. People on the porches. That’s what I aspire to be.
Julia: I love that.
Ozzy: Well, I feel like what we’re really saying here to this question asker is like, move to the commune. And if you don’t like it, you can move away. You know, like, if it’s something you’re considering that feels like a good move for you, why not just do it and see what it’s like? And if you hate it, you can leave.
Julia: 100%. I fully endorse that idea and also send me a postcard, you know?
Ozzy: Please.
[Advice outro music plays]
Ozzy: That’s it for this week’s advice. But coming up, we gave ourselves a call in the best version of the future that we could find so that we could ask them what it’s like there. So stick around for that after the break.
[Video call ringing sound]
Various voices: Hello? Hello? Hello? One second. You’re cutting out. The Internet in the past is not so good. Hello? You might be frozen. Hey, everyone. Oh my god, there we go.
Julia: Wow.
Ozzy: This is crazy.
Siona: Very crazy.
Julia: Hi. Hello to the future!
Siona: To the future. So wild.
Ozzy: Hello Future Julia.
Future Julia: Hello.
Ozzy: We have so many questions for you all, but I wanted to start with just, like, big picture. What is the future like? And especially, like, if you could tell me what it sounds like, what it smells like. Like what would I experience if I could go there?
Future Julia: The future sounds like people coming together. Like, you know, when you walk up to a park on a snowy day and people are sledding and you can hear like laughter and roughhousing and like, snowball fights and screaming in a good way. The future sounds like that, because most urban centers decided to deprioritize cars. And, you know, cars can go where they need to go on highways. But most surface level streets are left for pedestrians, bikes, wheelchairs, strollers, skateboards.
Future Siona: Honestly, the future is really green. Like, I can find greenery everywhere in any city these days. And it’s not the way it used to be, where only certain places have greenery because they could afford it. Greenery is in every part of every city. Like it’s understood the access to plants and gardens and the good green things make your brain and soul happy. And that’s a right. And also, I love skyscrapers. I love looking up at them. I love looking down from them. But a few years ago, most cities started to ban those crazy tall buildings. So they aren’t just blocking neighborhoods of sun.
Ozzy: I love that.
Siona: Well, I have a question. Are there still Tesla trucks?
Future Ozzy: Okay, so I can take this one. There are still a few Tesla cars on the road. Unfortunately, we haven’t like, totally made them illegal, but to be honest, most of them don’t work anymore. I mean, they never worked that well in the first place. But in my neighborhood, there’s this park where a Tesla truck died nearby. So a bunch of people just, like, dragged it next to the park and filled it with seeds and watered it. And now it’s become sort of like this community herb garden. You can just sort of like take what you need and people plant things there. It’s like a little community greenhouse, which is really great.
Julia: What do you think would most surprise us about the future?
Future Siona: So the whole massive US prison industrial complex, it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s really rare for people to serve time because these days we have a genuine, fair, equitable judicial system, not a system where most people serve time just because they find a plea deal because they couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Future Ozzy: Yeah, I definitely think that the ways like policing and prisons and borders have changed is one of the biggest things that I wasn’t ever sure if we would see. And I was really excited and relieved that we finally saw a UN ban on assisted weapons technology and facial recognition and fingerprinting. So all of these systems that were used to mostly surveil and control people don’t really exist in the same way anymore. And there are so many climate migrants now that borders just need to be more flexible and porous. It’s sort of led to a shift in how a lot of people think about immigration, which while I don’t think we’re perfectly there yet, we’re on the right track. And that is definitely a surprise, a nice surprise to me.
Julia: I’m curious, are there any kinds of technology that we needed to, like expand on to get to this future?
Future Siona: Well, if anything, technology creation has slowed down a lot in order to thoughtfully incorporate people into the technology we already have and to make sure millions of people aren’t left behind in the pursuit of dollars. But we spent on things like public transportation in the past few decades, so it’s not stigmatized, it’s more accessible. And some technology has been incorporated in our lives and there are better ways to treat things like sickle cell. And there’s more affirming gender care. And the world has started to make sure tech is more accessible for folks who have disabilities. So treating the disability or the people who have them as a problem. Also, we somehow managed to make the hair braiding experience a smooth two hours instead of a solid seven to eight hours without replacing any human job. So, I mean, really, I’m having a great time on this side.
Julia: Wow, that sounds amazing.
Future Ozzy: That’s one of my favorite parts of this time we live in is that a lot of human jobs have gotten easier, because we’re able to use tools in ways that reduce the amount of work and labor that humans have to do. Instead of having more tools, and then you get assigned more work and there’s always like more work, more profit. Like people are able to stop working and that’s great.
Julia: Okay, everybody. What is your favorite part of the future?
Future Ozzy: Okay. So my favorite part of the future is definitely that health care is free at the point of service now. In almost every country in the world, there is universal health care. And surgeries are a lot easier. And that includes things like laser eye repair, sinus repair surgery, different forms of top surgery, artificial womb implantation, things like this that used to take a really long time to do have gotten a lot easier. There are obviously, you know, still a lot of medical procedures that are difficult. Brain surgery, nerve related spine surgeries are still really complicated, but we are making progress there, too, and making these things easier and also affordable for people to be able to get.
Future Julia: My favorite part of the future is that I got to see my kid grow up in a world that feels a lot closer to one that I believe in. I feel like there were so many things that I was anxious about and things were honestly not going great in the 2020s. You know, I was worried that my family would be legislated out of existence and that unchecked greed would destroy the earth. But the world didn’t get quite as dark as my anxiety said it would. And, you know, my kid is thriving in a world that’s still here and it’s still green. So I feel really happy, and I feel like I have a lot more time to enjoy that.
Future Siona: So I’m actually, I’m pretty happy. Life is generally slower, and that’s my favorite part of the future. Life is slower. We aren’t in a constant stream of technology that people were back in the day and that fear of being replaced by robots. It’s like a bad horror story or like a myth, kind of like the tooth fairy. There’s like a fundamental understanding among enough people — not everyone, but enough — that our fates are deeply interlinked. And having most of the world working to enrich a few isn’t just morally shitty, it’s just fundamentally a waste of our time. Also, countries that colonized much of the so-called Global South, were forced to pay back a significant amount of money for centuries of harm. And it turns out we don’t need to drain other regions of the world to have a good quality of life in the States and other parts of the so-called North.
Ozzy: Well, thanks y’all for journeying through time and space to join us here today. It’s really exciting to hear what things could be like in the future, and that you made it, and it’s okay there.
Future Siona: Yeah, we made it.
Julia: You know, clearly there is a lot to look forward to in this version of the future.
Ozzy: But also I feel like there’s so much work that it’s going to take to get there, right? Like we’re here in the present and it’s going to be a while before we actually get there. But that’s kind of what this show is going to be about. We really hope that the rest of this season will help you imagine what your favorite part of the future could be.
Julia: And how complicated it might be on the way.
Ozzy: Absolutely, yeah. And what it will take for us to get there.
[Theme song plays]
Julia: Advice for and from the future is hosted by me, Julia Furlan and Ozzy Llinas Goodman. We’re produced by Siona Peterous. Our executive producer is Rose Eveleth. Our logo is by Frank Okay. Our theme song is by Also Also Also. You can find us on Instagram @advice4futureu. If you have a question for or from the future, you can email it to us at ask@futureadvice.club. See you in the future!