However we measure time, it is outside our control, and was before we learned how to measure it the linear way we do now. Time has real personal and collective qualities as our phone bill analysis demonstrated above, where distance is large enough that one person born at the exact same 'moment' as someone else, is actually older because of their position on the earth. And differences become apparent for the same individual at different periods. Sometimes time seems to pass slowly when you are waiting for something but moves faster when you have to solve an elusive problem. Likewise a period of time can seem longer beforehand than after, and in the distant past or future. So, two people, or all of them, could experience time at different rates, and place different values on those rates, all at the 'same time.'
Free time is time when an individual can choose leisure instead of work, or work if they want, but they don't have to give up other things they want to do, because they have to do something. People get paid to do what they don't like, and this has to be more than they could earn doing something else, sometimes called "opportunity cost." This gives a value to our leisure, which costs money in a real sense even if we don't pay an apparent price for it. But if we got paid to do the things we liked, everyone would line up to do them and who...
But if you're paying for how you spend your leisure time, does that qualify as 'free'?
The effect on industrial society by the shift in measuring time with Newtonian physics and mechanics could hardly be understated. From a social system based on farming where peasants were often paid in food and necessities, which was closer to the modern salary arrangement where people are on the clock all the time, we began paying workers wages in money for time spent running machinery that itself depended on a number of revolutions per minute, second or hour, which only work efficiently enough if they run at a particular speed, all the way to our modern computer era, where information exchange occurs in sequence, so true "shared time" has not been achieved in many senses. Ironically these transformations allowed machines to replace humans in industrial society, which allowed or forced them to invest time in human capital, bringing about the knowledge economy we see now. But again we find differences existing side by side in how societies experience time even today, if everyone would prefer to make a lot more money under better conditions rather than perform unpleasant labor under harsh conditions, if this automation caused or…
