The spread of time-saving transforms the city

The spread of time-saving transforms the city from a place of varied human rhythms into one organized around efficiency, while its inhabitants lose the time and attention that make life meaningful. The Men in Gray exploit a commonplace faith in saving minutes: people believe they are preparing for a better future, but the more they save, the less life they seem to possess.

The promise and its hidden direction

The change begins with a contradiction at the heart of the city’s new creed. Time is not merely something clocks and calendars measure; an hour can feel long or pass quickly depending on how it is lived. The Men in Gray understand this intimate value better than anyone, and the narrative likens their expertise in time to the way leeches know blood. They have designs on people’s time, secretly establish themselves in the city, and wait for the right moment to draw individuals into their plans. Their secrecy matters: those they recruit do not recognize the campaign as an outside force, but take its demands for their own decisions.

For Mr Figaro, the promise takes the form of practical instructions. The gray visitor urges him to serve customers faster, limit each appointment to fifteen minutes rather than the usual half-hour, and avoid conversations. He is advised to halve the hour he spends with his mother, place her in a cheap old folks’ home, stop keeping a budgerigar, see Miss Daria rarely, and give up singing, reading, and time with friends. A more accurate clock is recommended so that the barber can time his apprentice precisely. These proposed economies reach far beyond the workplace: family care, companionship, leisure, and reflection are all recast as time that could be saved.

Efficiency enters daily life

After the visitor has gone, the figures written on the mirror fade, and Mr Figaro’s memory of the man fades with them. The resolution remains, however, and he believes it belongs to him. His first customer receives only the service absolutely necessary, and the appointment takes twenty rather than thirty minutes. Mr Figaro then applies the same treatment to every customer, hires two assistants in addition to his apprentice, and watches them closely to ensure that not a moment is wasted. A notice in the barbershop declares that time saved is time doubled.

The personal costs become concrete. Mr Figaro sends Miss Daria a brief note saying that work pressure will prevent future meetings, sells his budgerigar to a pet shop, and places his mother in an inexpensive home, visiting her only once a month. He no longer enjoys his work, but treats that loss as secondary to the project of saving time. Even when he becomes restless and irritable, the time he saves never becomes time at his disposal. His days instead seem to contract: weeks, months, and years pass with growing speed. Because he cannot remember the gray visitor, he never asks where the saved time has gone. On the rare occasions when he is horrified by how quickly life is passing, that alarm only strengthens his determination to save more.

A city remade in the name of saving

Mr Figaro’s experience becomes a pattern. More inhabitants take up time-saving each day, and others follow not necessarily from desire but from a feeling that they must. Radio, television, and newspapers promote devices that promise to free people for the supposedly right kind of life. Posters and billboards carry bright promises of advancement and prosperity for timesavers. Yet the people who appear to prosper are tired, dissatisfied, and sour. They earn and spend more, but have no one to listen to them in a way that might make them happier or more conciliatory.

The discipline reaches beyond paid work. Timesavers cannot properly celebrate solemn or joyful occasions, regard daydreaming as almost an offence, and find silence difficult to endure. When quiet threatens, they make an angry, ill-tempered noise. Leisure is also subjected to calculation: entertainment and relaxation must yield as much as possible in as little time as possible. At factories and offices, enjoyment and pride in work give way to the demand to complete the greatest amount of work in the shortest time. Notices insisting that time is precious or equivalent to money appear across workplaces and businesses, and even in schools and kindergartens. The new order leaves no part of ordinary life outside its reach.

The physical city takes on the same logic. Older buildings are demolished and replaced by modern ones stripped of features now deemed unnecessary. Instead of designing different houses for different inhabitants, builders choose identical homes as cheaper and faster to produce. On the northern outskirts, huge developments form endless rows of multistorey blocks that look alike. Their streets run straight toward the horizon, and the surrounding countryside becomes a disciplined desert. The inhabitants’ lives follow the same pattern: planned and programmed down to each movement and moment. Uniform architecture is not simply a backdrop to the transformation; it gives visible form to a society that increasingly treats variety as waste.

The cost to relationships and children

The city’s advertised future and its lived present move in opposite directions. People gain income and possessions, but their lives become poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The central loss is not simply leisure: people lose opportunities to attend to one another. The phrase that might send someone to visit Momo is unknown to the timesavers, who lack someone to listen to them. Even if they knew of such a listener, they would be unlikely to visit unless the matter could be handled in five minutes, because they would judge a longer encounter wasteful.

Children feel the change particularly sharply because adults no longer have time for them. This deprivation later acquires an institutional form: authorities establish child depots in neighbourhoods, where children whose parents are too busy can be left and collected when convenient. Play in streets, parks, and other places is forbidden; children caught playing are taken to a depot, and their parents fined. Momo’s friends are divided according to their home districts and placed in different depots. Supervisors choose their games, which must serve an educational purpose, displacing games the children invent for themselves. The children gradually forget how to be happy in small things and how to dream; after weeks, they resemble miniature timesavers, sullen and resentful, making an angry noise rather than the lively sounds of their former play.

That contrast is already suggested by the children’s visits to the amphitheater. They are able to invent better games when Momo is with them, even though she does not supply a stream of ingenious suggestions; her presence is enough to set their own ideas moving. Later, when Momo encounters Paolo, Franco, and Maria in the city, she can hardly recognize them. They wear gray uniforms, their expressions are stiff and lifeless, and they barely smile when she greets them. The encounter gives the social transformation a human measure: the city’s pursuit of efficiency has not only reorganized work and buildings but separated children from play, from one another, and from the ease with which they once met Momo.

The paradox of saved time

The spread of time-saving is presented as both a social process and a misreading of what time is. Its slogans promise that people will make more of life, but the measures enacted in their name cut away work’s enjoyment, unhurried relationships, silence, celebration, and imaginative play. The gains are visible in speed, money, standardized buildings, and controlled schedules; the losses accumulate in shorter-feeling days, thinner relationships, and monotonous lives. The governing paradox is that people believe they are securing time for the future while the present becomes less fully lived. As the city embraces saving ever more completely, its inhabitants have less, not more, of the life that time was meant to serve.