16
votes
I traveled above the Arctic Circle to find out whether the town of Sommarøy really can live free from the clock
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- Title
- The Island Without Time
- Authors
- Shayla Love
- Published
- Dec 21 2025
- Word count
- 2861 words
Interesting article. I've often thought about similar ideas based on extended travel in places that are less... let's say punctual than typical American culture.
I'm what the author would call an event timer myself. I struggle to be on time for things, and often am stressed out because I get things planned for me back to back, and making all of those appointments is hard.
Places with more "laid back" cultures are often put on a pedestal as less stressful, more in tune with what really matters in life, and less preoccupied with the silly little ideas of punctuality and efficiency like most industrialized Western cultures are.
However, if you spend a lot of time in places where time is just sort of a suggestion instead of a rule, you quickly realize that especially as someone who has a hard time being on time, it causes you more stress, not less.
If you have a doctors appointment you need to get to, you show up to the train station, and the train is 40 minutes late, because whatever. That causes you to get to the Dr's office late, but he took off early to go to a festival, so you have to reschedule, so you get on the train back home which is late again. You just spent 3 hours doing essentially nothing. Then you have to take another day off of work and reschedule, this time you'll show up to the station two hours earlier for the earlier train and hope it arrives.
It's just an enormous waste of time, and the idea that "oh well, it's just time, you can do it another day" results in you just frivolously spending the one resource we have no way of getting back sitting around, waiting in lines, and rescheduling stuff instead of actually doing things you want to do.
I can see how a life like that is livable in a very rural area where you don't have to interact with other people much, but in a modern lifestyle where everyone depends on everyone else, it's just a constant exercise in frustration.
My sister spent some time in Zambia as part of her degree as a social worker. She told a story about how, apparently, Zambians all agree that if it's raining, you don't show up to a scheduled event until it stops raining. Whenever that is. It sounds stressful to me. Never knowing exactly when you're supposed to be where, or for how long.
Sommarøy is a tiny village in Tromsø municipality. I've lived in Tromsø, although I lived in the city (population approximately 60,000). And I currently live slightly south of the Arctic circle, although the variations in daylight are still extreme (today: less than 3 hours of "daylight", mostly twilight; in the summer, more or less 24 hours of daylight). So I have some experience with the physical conditions that seemingly lead to a "timeless" society.
Paradoxically, I feel like clock-timing helps me live like an event-timer. The reason being that I've struggled with insomnia since my early teens. I'm frequently running low on sleep, and I'm an introvert who needs to recharge a certain amount of mental energy to function well in social settings. I really like to schedule things for a specific time, because I can make sure I'm actually well rested when it happens. And if I'm not well rested, I can at least mentally prepare for the event, so I don't become an unlikeably grump. If I were able to live entirely according to my schedule, sleep when I'm sleepy and be awake and active when I feel well rested, that would be great! But my personal schedule rarely lines up with anyone else's. And so it's actually easier to schedule things for specific times, because then at least, I know when I need to be "on".
I think this really is just a marketing scheme. In the end, clocks are mostly about coordinating activities between groups of people. In a small village, it's easier to coordinate without needing a fixed time. At the exact same latitude, which experiences the exact same daylight hours, but in a bigger city with more people, it becomes a lot harder. How did people manage without clocks back in the old days? Their social reality was simply smaller. The average person needed to coordinate schedules with far fewer people. The average person's life was limited to a small community, maybe a few hundred people at most. Rarely did they need to accomodate outsiders.
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