Why do I get this scary feeling of familiarity reading this article?

read at: the Onion

First of all: Happy new year to everyone whose New Year celebration took place on the 31st. We packed our stuff and went to a husky farm in a remote forest in Austria to celebrate this year. All of us seventeen slept in Lakota-style Tipis. They are great constructions - We had -20 centigrades at night, the logfire kept us warm. Unfortunately the weather was not as nice as on the photo taken from the farm´s website - Imagine the same scene with thick fog and the double amount of snow. We had plenty of time sitting together drinking tea and sharing the warmth. And dodging the ice avalanches that fell down occasionally from the wooden poles through the smoke hole. Into our shoes that we set up to dry. ;-)

We came back tonight after two days, but it seems like we´ve been up there for ages. Time completely lost its referential function, the intensity of sunlight took its place. This I´m missing already.

Rarely I felt this phenomenon so directly as now. I find the the consequences of a social rule as the rule of time fascinating. From this "timeless" point of view I had this weekend the angst of coming 5 minutes to late somewhere is completely neurotical. The institutionalisation of time as a norm is probably the invention that brought along the biggest consequences for mankind. This is an interesting point for further investigation - Some years ago I heard a radio interview with a historian that lectures at the TU in Dresden I think. He´s interested in the changes western societies went through after the invention of the clock as a universal norm. I forgot his name, unfortunately.