When the sun rises on May 18 in the small Norwegian fishing village of Sommarøy, located above the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t set again until July 26. Later in the year, it vanishes from November until January.
In the winter, the island is covered in snow. But during the midnight sun, the weather is temperate, even hot. Purple wildflowers stick out of mossy grass, and the electric-blue water and white sand look more Caribbean than Arctic. Walking along the coast around 11 p.m., you might see kayakers paddling on the smooth sea in the distance, or children in pajamas fishing and running along the beach with their catches.
Inspired by the extreme periods of light and dark, in late spring 2019, a group of locals signed a petition to make the village the first “time-free zone,” a place where anyone could buy groceries, cut grass, or eat dinner no matter the time. Their reasoning made sense enough: In a town where the sun shines at 1 a.m. in July and you can see the stars at 1 p.m. in December, the time on the clock is meaningless. International media seized on the time-free zone as a curiosity, and the town leaned into the branding, flaunting its freedom from the clock and inviting others to experience it. The realities of how to run a business, coordinate work, and have a social life without time went unmentioned; what mattered was the fantasy of a time- and stress-free life.
Some semblance of time does exist on Sommarøy. The grocery store, which is the only true store in town, has opening and closing hours, as does the café on the beach. The hotel has regular check-in and check-out times. People have cellphones that tell time.
Yet when I visited in July, the island was deep into its nightless rhythm, and I saw signs that the clock held little sway. When I tried to schedule a meeting with Olivier Pitras—the 65-year-old owner of a bed-and-breakfast and a kayak-rental company that gives midnight tours—he told me to simply drop by his shop and see if he was available. To achieve even further immersion in the time-free life, I obscured the clocks on my phone and my laptop and blocked the time of incoming email. The night I arrived, I walked around the entire island at an easy pace. The colors in the sky resembled sunlight I was familiar with seeing at 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning. But was it actually 8 p.m.? Midnight?
For nine days, I attempted to live outside of time in a white wooden house with a wraparound porch. On any other trip, I would probably sit outside in the evenings and watch the sun set. Instead, the sun moved in a circle over my head, like it was caught in the loop of a spinning lasso.
The desire to get rid of the clock entirely cuts against a very human impulse to control, predict, and measure time. The Babylonians used the moon to mark out a 19-year cycle in which seven years contained 13 months and the others, 12. Ancient Egyptians once kept track of time by the rise and fall of the Nile River. Indigenous groups in Siberia have a loose lunar calendar organized by months with names such as “ducks-and-geese-go-away month.” In the Trobriand Islands, the new year traditionally begins when marine worms swarm on the surface of the water to breed. Near Sommarøy, the Indigenous people who live in northern Norway, the Sámi, have eight seasons that follow reindeer migration.
But the more a society trades and travels, the more it must adapt its time system to be consistent and coordinated. Hours of uniform length were widely adopted only in the 14th century, when clocks could maintain equal durations. (Previously, dividing periods of sunlight into 12 hours, as the Romans did, meant the length of those hours would vary seasonally.) “There are few greater revolutions in human experience than this movement from the seasonal or ‘temporary’ hour to the equal hour,” the historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book The Discoverers. “Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings.” In 1967, the clock’s divorce from the natural world was finalized: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures adopted a definition of a second measured by the oscillations of a cesium atom, rather than a fraction of the solar day.
Sommarøy’s time-free zone was, in a sense, an attempt by residents to reclaim their connection to a more natural measure of time. After all, every year, the island experiences roughly 1,656 hours of consecutive daylight. It’s almost as if humans moved to Mercury, where the day—noon to noon—lasts 176 Earth days, but never adjusted their watches.
The idea of tossing clock time out the window clearly had wide appeal: Nearly 1,500 news outlets around the world covered the 2019 petition that proposed the time-free zone. Kjell Ove Hveding, a Sommarøy native, went to Oslo to hand-deliver it to the Norwegian politician Kent Gudmundsen. “There’s no need to know what time it is,” Hveding said in a press release that included a picture of him destroying the face of a clock. Local press published a photo of watches—reportedly abandoned by clock-weary residents—hung on a bridge leading to the island.
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But soon after the time-free zone went viral, the story began to crack. An employee at Sommarøy’s only hotel expressed skepticism to the Norwegian public-broadcasting company, NRK, that a functioning business could operate without its clocks. Hveding turned out to be part-owner of said hotel, with something to gain from increasing tourism to the island. An NRK investigation revealed that the petition was funded by a state-owned company, Innovation Norway, that promotes Norwegian businesses. The company paid for additional help from PR agencies in Oslo and London. NRK also reported that the watches on the bridge weren’t a result of swelling support from locals, but belonged to Hveding and a few others. They were removed after the photos were taken. Gudmundsen told NRK that after his photo op, the bundle of papers with signatures was also taken away and never submitted to the government. Innovation Norway issued a public apology.
To this day, Hveding denies that the campaign was a ruse. “This is us, this is how we live,” he insisted to The New York Times in 2019. Later that year, Sommarøy residents took over a Facebook page dedicated to the time-free zone (and no longer affiliated with Innovation Norway), inviting people from “down south on the planet where nights are dark” to see for themselves what living time-free could be like.
Pitras and I never set a precise moment to meet but easily found time on one of the instances I walked past his kayak-rental business. On a cloudless day, we sat at a wooden table behind the shop, facing the water. Pitras put on his sunglasses, while I shielded my eyes and described a theory about time I’d been mulling over.
Since 2011, the researchers Tamar Avnet, at Yeshiva University, and Anne-Laure Sellier, at HEC Paris, have studied people’s preferences for living with time. Clock-timers, as Avnet and Sellier have dubbed them, do things based on what their watches say. But for event-timers, the exact minute or hour doesn’t matter. A clock-timer might wake up each day at 7 a.m., start working at 9 a.m., eat lunch at noon when it’s delivered, and get into bed at 10 p.m. An event-timer rejects the alarm clock, maybe waking up at 6 o’clock, maybe at 9. They’ll stop working when they feel a task is done, or eat when they get hungry, but at no predetermined time.
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Sommarøy did seem to have daily rhythms, I told Pitras. I could identify the evenings by the way the town went quiet, most houses’ blackout curtains drawn and their inhabitants sleeping inside. But I wondered aloud whether people in Sommarøy were especially adept at moving in and out of clock time. Pitras certainly was. He has been a sailor for 46 years, he told me. When sailing on a boat alone, he performed tasks when they needed to be done, day or night; when sailing on a crew, he followed strict schedules. Now, when he organizes Arctic expeditions during the midnight sun, the groups enter a shared event time. They go hiking as they collectively please, even if at midnight; come back for dinner at 5 a.m.; go to sleep; then wake up for breakfast at 2 p.m. Pitras said shifting between clock and event time is easier for him without the sun’s clear demarcation between day and night.
Others I spoke with in Sommarøy also described a sense of freedom and agency. Halvar Ludvigsen, a fourth-generation resident of Sommarøy, invited me onto his porch when I approached him. “I work at night, and I don’t care about the time,” Ludvigsen said, in a gruff voice. Neither did his retired neighbor, who told me that when he was growing up in Sommarøy, he worked all day on his family’s farm, then went fishing at midnight and invited the neighbors over for a meal. Yet another event-timer, I thought.
Ludvigsen told me that he and Hveding, not the PR agencies, came up with the idea of the time-free zone. Marianne Solbakken, a 67-year-old who grew up in the region, told me one afternoon that all of the drama over the publicity effort obscured the truth: Time is more flexible in Sommarøy. “The life we live is real,” she told me. “How can you be inside when the sun is shining at 11 o’clock in the evening?” Solbakken went to the original meeting about establishing the time-free zone in June 2019, and even wrote a song about putting her watch away during the summer: “And if we want to paint the house in the middle of the night / Yes, then, we just take out the paintbrush / Then we will call the neighbor and ask him to help us / And you should believe he will come soon.” (The lyrics, which sound better in Norwegian, are set to the melody of a well-known song by Halvdan Sivertsen.)
As my week went on, I participated in a kind of event-time Olympics. I worked when I wanted to, ate when I was hungry, and went hiking at night—until 11 p.m., the record showed later. (My fiancé, who traveled with me, recorded when I ate, slept, wrote, read, and exercised.) I felt a great expansiveness of choice to be in total control of my day, without running out of light.
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Time-management styles do seem to influence how people experience the world. In Avnet and Sellier’s studies, at least, clock-timers were more likely to believe that events are steered by fate, not by intention. They are also worse at distinguishing between events that are causally linked and events that are unrelated. Those who follow event time are more likely to say that what happens on a daily basis is a result of their own actions. In one of their experiments, Avnet and Sellier split participants into two types of hot-yoga classes: one in which instructors advised people in a clock-free room to move through poses without attention to how long each was held, and one in which a teacher noted how much time should be spent in each pose. In the clock-time class, students skipped and gave up on more poses than in the event-time class—and were more likely to consider the instructor responsible for these failures. Students had less positive experiences in the clock-time class.
Despite such findings, Avnet and Sellier stressed to me that they don’t regard clock or event time as superior, and in truth, we all engage with both time styles. But it’s clock time that’s imposed on most of us from a young age, Kevin Birth, an anthropologist at CUNY Queens College, told me. Outside of vacation, most people don’t get the chance to embrace event time—even if it might suit them. In his 2015 book, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa wrote that modern humans crave detachment from social acceleration, which he defined as the increasing “experience per unit of time.” Perhaps that’s why so many people were charmed by the idea of a time-free zone. At the southern end of the island, I often stopped at the beach café, where Gjertrud Tvenning Gilberg sells charcuterie, along with homemade cakes, pastries, and soup. “Most people who come here live in cities, and there’s a big rush,” Tvenning Gilberg said. Perhaps Sommarøy isn’t strictly without time, but it offers a temporary respite for those who use the clock to harness their busyness.
As an event-timer doing my best to live in a clock-time world, I expected to thrive in my temporary timelessness. But after just a few days in Sommarøy, the clock began to haunt me. I began to doubt whether I was doing things at the “right” time. I missed the feeling of progressing toward a finish line, and developed strong urges to check the time when no one was watching. I hated relying on my fiancé to tell me that it was time for a work call. Ultimately, I slipped into a routine; later, I learned that it closely resembled my schedule at home.
When we talked upon my return, Avnet guessed that I had been uncomfortable with the 24-hour sun. She said that, paradoxically, pure clock-timers may flourish more in Sommarøy. “A clock like me, I wake up at 7 a.m. regardless if the sun comes up at 5 or if it comes out at 9,” she said. But committed event-timers might struggle without non-clock cues to drive our actions.
There haven’t been studies on time preferences above the Arctic Circle, or how people there view fate and manage their emotions in relation to how they view time. (Avnet and Sellier told me they hope to do research in northern Norway in the future.) But people in northern Norway don’t seem to have higher rates of mental distress during the winter than they do in other seasons, as you might expect of people who spend so many weeks in the dark. Kari Leibowitz, a psychologist who has studied Norwegians in this region, wrote for The Atlantic in 2015 that those who lived farther north had a more positive, and protective, mindset about the wintertime. Another way to look at it is that they are more in control of their activities, regardless of the light levels outside. In Cincinnati in January, you might not go for a run at 10 p.m., because it’s dark. But if it’s dark at 3 p.m. or 10 p.m. in Sommarøy, the lack of light won’t stop you.
I saw Tvenning Gilberg, the café owner, as a role model of routine within timelessness. Every day, winter or summer, she gets up early, reads, writes, and swims in the ocean right outside her door, but not based on the time on the clock. (She told me she uses her clock almost exclusively for baking.) She has hours at the café, but ones she sets herself. She had a career as a meteorologist, she told me, so she more intimately understands the sun’s movements, even when it doesn’t rise or set. In the winter, though the sun doesn’t rise, she recognizes a brightening of the sky during the day. In the summer, the sun will be to the south by midday, and at midnight, to the northwest.
That’s where I should look for the first official sunset of the summer, Tvenning Gilberg told me. It would take place on my last night, at 12:30 a.m.; the sun would rise again just 49 minutes later. I un-hid the time on my phone so I could catch the exact moment—but that night was cloudy. Somewhere underneath the gray mist, I knew the sun had fallen below the horizon. I wished I could have seen it. The day I landed in New York, I made a point of walking to the East River at dusk. I wasn’t quite sure of the time, but I felt immense relief looking at the darkening sky.
The post The Island Without Time appeared first on The Atlantic.
