Living Between Two Clocks
Who else feels time moves faster here than back home?
I wake up, and after a short time, the day is already over. I feel like I am operating in a time machine.
Big cities everywhere have their own pace, but moving from Nairobi to Paris was on another level. Two different rhythms. Two different relationships with the clock.
People here plan more in the future. I am not used to planning that much.
Here we have an exact time for everything. Lunch is from 13h to 14h. Back home, lunch is “lunchtime,” anywhere between 12h and 14h, whenever the food is ready.
I think here is fast because of history. Industrialisation packaged time as productivity, and productivity as money. You come 8h to 17h, you get paid. If you come less, you earn less. It made it easy for people to plan and to know what to expect in the future.
You can see it on the streets. People squeezing through closing metro doors. Running up the escalators.
Different parts of the world industrialised at different times, and built different relationships with the clock because of it.
Here, people relate to time through future deadlines, dates, days, and hours. Back home, time is shaped more by events — whether the event happens or not. In the village, we can schedule a meeting and find no one at the spot because the meeting will take place when people come.
Neither way is better. They are different operating systems for the same 24 hours.
Here is the part that took me time to see. In professional life, the strict clock is the same everywhere. A 10h meeting in Paris, Nairobi, or Lagos is a 10h meeting if you want to be taken seriously. The deadline does not care where you grew up.
It is in personal life that the two clocks really live. A Sunday with family. A call home. A long lunch with a friend. Back home, these stretch. Here, they get squeezed between calendar blocks until they almost disappear.
The real challenge is not learning the strict clock for work. It is protecting the slow clock for life.
What I do now: I read the room before I set the clock. Work, doctor, admin, dinner with locals — I am on time. Family and friends back home — I drop the rush. When in doubt at work, I default to the stricter clock; worst case, I wait 10 minutes. I block the calendar for basic things like calling home, because in personal life here, what is not scheduled does not happen. And on weekends, I protect at least one block of unscheduled time and do nothing.
If you are living between two clocks like me, which one is winning?