# Procrustesing Time

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/procrustesing-time
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2024-03-28

## Summary

Using the Procrustean bed as a metaphor, Jeanyoon Choi argues in this 2024 essay that modern institutions cut and stretch people to fit external timetables. Education designs curricula for an average student and rewards all-round performance over singular interests, which he finds troubling in an age when machines excel at general competence. Collaborative projects measure ideas by deadlines, and spare time is filled with assigned tasks. As a result, he writes, people, including himself, lose the ability to inhabit their own time and instead consume it.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 프로크루스테스의 침대를 은유로 삼아, 교육과 프로젝트, 직장이 개인을 외부의 시간표에 억지로 맞추면서 우리가 스스로의 시간을 살아가는 능력을 잃는다고 비판한다.

## Concepts defined

- **Procrustesing time**: The modern habit of forcing individuals and their time into external, mass-designed timetables, at the cost of their own sense of time and individuality.

## Questions this answers

### What does 'Procrustesing time' mean?

In Jeanyoon Choi's essay, it means forcing people to fit external, system-defined timetables, as Procrustes cut and stretched guests to fit his bed, rather than adapting the system to them.

### What is Jeanyoon Choi's criticism of education systems in 'Procrustesing Time'?

He argues that schools design curricula for an average student and reward consistently high grades across subjects rather than singular interests, producing general-purpose competence just as machines become better at it.

Topics: time, education, individuality, productivity culture, procrustean bed, artificial intelligence

References: [Procrustes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes), [Nassim Nicholas Taleb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)

## Full text

The Procrustean bed offers a way to think about modern time. Rather than adapting a system to living beings, we cut and stretch living beings to fit the system.

Education makes this visible. Six years here, three years there, a prescribed curriculum across many subjects: a timetable designed for an average student who may not actually exist. A person’s strongest curiosity might lie in one or two areas, yet the system rewards consistently high performance across all of them.

We produce all-A students rather than necessarily cultivating singular interests. Those who readily follow the timetable benefit, while unusual abilities may appear as failures to keep pace. In the age of AI, I find this particularly troubling: we could be educating people into a general-purpose, machine-like competence while machines become better at precisely that competence.

A collaborative project has its own version of the problem. Its timetable arrives from outside. A good idea is useful if it happens to appear before the deadline; otherwise it may never enter the work. The schedule becomes the measure of thought rather than a condition to be negotiated with it.

Even spare time is treated this way. When an employee has a free interval, we assign another task instead of trusting that something might emerge from it. We do the same to students, friends and ourselves. We demand that unused time become productive according to an external scale.

Eventually we lose the ability to inhabit time without that instruction. I recognise this in myself. Faced with free time, I look for someone or something to organise it: a film, a queue, an attraction. I consume time because I no longer know what to do with my own.

What would it mean to resonate with a duration rather than fill it? Some people may pass through their lives without encountering that question.

The boldness of individuality is sacrificed when it fails to align with the system’s timetable. I suspect our learned habit of forcing time into prescribed forms contributes to that sacrifice. Space undergoes a similar treatment. In that sense, the whole spatiotemporal field of experience is placed on the Procrustean bed.

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.