Millennium time: January 04, 1999 issue of New Thinking

January 04, 1999 New Thinking:
Millennium time

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January 04, 1999

Millennium time

By Gerry McGovern

So, this is 1999, and it’s one year before the millennium. Well, I suppose that depends on what culture you’re living in, for by no means all the world follows the Christian calendar.

And, even if you accept the Christian calendar, is 2000 the beginning of the millennium, or is it more correct to say that it starts in 2001? For, when this calendar started, wasn’t it at Year 1, rather than Year 0, which would mean that January 1, 2001 is in fact the start of the third millennium AD, and not January 1, 2000.

But then who wants to be correct? Really, what it all boils down to is the sense of occasion. 2000 sounds like a good number. It sounds a bit more like the beginning of something than 2001. And it’s all about the occasion. It’s all about the event.

The charting of time can start at a very arbitrary place. And yet the reality of time is the fundamental rule by which we live our lives.

There has been a definite shift in the perception of time in this century. It used to be a general perception that old things were valued things. Old people were supposed to be wise. History reflected the oldness of time. An old culture was a culture that had something to look back on and be proud of.

With the ‘change is good’ mantra of modern technology, everything new is celebrated and everything old is pushed aside. History is seen by many as something that is no longer relevant. Time is squeezed dry of every moment and then thrown aside like an empty Coke can.

Time; the one thing we don’t have today. We look back from our modern world on all that they didn’t have, on all that we have, as we secretly wish that we had more time to enjoy things. In the past, they had time. They lived their life at a more leisurely pace – some of them anyhow.

Not for a moment am I championing a return to the past, where an awful lot of deprivation, cruelty, hunger and disease occurred. However, it does strike me very forcefully as we enter the ‘final’ year of this millennium that we are experiencing a Time Crisis.

Technology may in fact be allowing us to do things faster. However, the result often is that new things that need to be done faster are always waiting once we have done all those other things faster. The price of time is rising and rising. We buy some time by buying convenience foods, by trying to make our whole lives more convenient and user-friendly. But the price of time keeps rising.

You want to find the gold mine of the digital age? It’s not about making things cheaper. It’s not about making things faster. It is about saving people time. If you can save people time, you can make money. And a good way to start doing that is to make things as simple and as easy to understand as possible – something much technology seems to be hell-bent on doing the opposite of.

Gerry McGovern

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