“The idea is to chill out. I have seen people suffering from stress because they were pressed for time.”
They say the best things take time — but does that mean they’re right?
In a time when the planet is starved for light-hearted news, word that an island off the far northern coast of Norway is fed up with time — from the very concept of time to its day-to-day use in daily life, word that the islanders are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore is like a breath of fresh air.
The 350 residents of Sommarøy island in Norway want to escape the tyranny of the clock. Instead of just kvetching about it, though — or klagging about it, to be more geographically and linguistically precise — they’ve decided to do something about it.
Residents on the island of Sommarøy have voted to do away with “conventional time-keeping” — i.e. traditional business hours — during the midnight sun. The idea is to go “time-free” during the 69 days of the year when the sun doesn’t set, so islanders can keep more flexible school and work hours, if only to make the most of those long summer days.
The Land of the Midnight Sun experiences a midnight sun — literally — from May 18 to July 26 every year.
Norway is still a liberal democracy, even democracy has fallen out of favour across the democratized world. So when dozens of irate islanders signed a petition demanding a “time-free zone,” hapless politicians — specifically local MP Kent Gudmundsen — had little choice but to follow along.
Sommarøy lies north of the Arctic Circle. The flip side of those long, lazy summer days is that every year the island is immersed in darkness — total, round-the-clock darkness — from November to January. Islanders don’t want to be cheated out of a single waking moment in midsummer if they can avoid it.
Sommarøy is west of Tromsø, pop. 75,500, Norway’s ninth largest city. Fishery and tourism are the main industries, and long daylight hours are good for both.
Time is becoming a pressing issue throughout much of Scandinavia, and small wonder, given just how intolerable the winters really are. Last year, Finland lobbied for the abolition of Daylight Saving Time on the heels of a citizen’s initiative that collected some 75,000 signatures — or one signature for each resident of Tromsø.
When winter means three months of not seeing daylight, island residents say that, during the summer anyway, they want to do “what we want, when we want.”
Hveding, the campaign’s unofficial organizer, went on Norwegian TV to sound off about the sheer unfairness of it all.
“All over the world,” he told Norway’s NRK, “people’s lives are characterized by stress and depression. In many cases this is linked to feeling trapped by the clock. We will be time-free zone now where everyone can live their lives to the fullest. The goal is to be fully flexible, 24/7.
“If you want to cut the lawn at 4am, then do it.”
Before you say, oh, those wacky Norwegians are at it again, wait. Philosophy professor Truls Egil Wyller, of Trondheim’s Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NUST), noted that we have been slaves to the clock for only the past 200 years or so.
“Before that you worked mostly as long as was necessary,” he told Norwegian public TV. “You ate when you were hungry and you lied down when you were tired. In modern society, everything we do is dictated by the clock, from the moment we get up.”
Not no more. Not during the summer, anyway.
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