It's not hard to run late. Time is a more fluid concept that you might think. And I'm not talking about relativity. Before time became enslaved to an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world, it was tied to an official chronometer in Greenwich kept in synch to assist maritime navigation. This accounts for those references to GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time that turn up in those odd little meeting request messages dispatched by Outlook. Not that I paid much attention. Even when I owned a watch, I had little concept of a universal constant. Periodically when I turned up to get my hair cut, the clock in the salon was always five minutes fast. So naturally that meant I was always late and my hairdresser always yelled at me. I seriously considered synching my clocks to his one. His mean time was considerably meaner than that of Greenwich.

But my hairdresser had a point. Whatever the universal time might say, it is irrelevant unless the people meeting up have the same basis of measurement. Consider what happened during the French Revolution. On November 24, 1793, a decree of the Convention Nationale introduced a decimal division of time. After that point, if you were to ask a fellow revolutionary in Paris what the time was, they might have answered seventy five minutes past six. Naturally confusion abounded. Many watches created during that period had a double display of both classical and revolutionary time. Unfortunately like the Revolution itself, the temporal schizophrenia was also shortlived. After 18 months, clocks went back to normal. And the French found other things to be uniquely French about.

Francophiles were not the last to meddle with clockwork. Despite what you might think - the word Swatch was not originally intended as a contraction of Swiss (Made) Watch, but rather Second Watch - a fun, casual accessory to your main time keeping device. In the late nineties, right after the first Internet boom - the Swatch company decided to re-invigorate some of the spirit of the decimal revolution and introduce Swatch Internet Time or Beat Time. Beat Time divided the day into 1000 .beats with @000 being midnight and @500 being noon. Controversy abounded, not least because being very European about the whole thing - the Swiss chose Central European Time rather than Coordinated Universal Time as the basis of the system. But the bigger problem was, just like in the French Revolution, no one could be bothered to learn a new system just to hang out with each other more effectively.

In a way I wished they had. As someone who lives nomadically in the cracks between timezones - my calendars and conference calls are always in a state of constant confusion. It finally made me think - if time is the primary tool we rely on for organising our interactions with other members of society - how can we make clocks more social? Should a clock not be a social network, or a social network not be a clock? I pondered the thought as I watched the Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo's human clock and quirky calendar. With it's crazy Pachinko sound track, here was a clock that gave you a sense of the life behind the minutes and seconds that ruled us.

So what if your watch instead of just telling you it was 3pm, also informed you what your work colleagues had planned for the next few hours, or what your friends were planning on doing at 8pm when you all finished work. We all have a forward light cone of things that we might do. Sharing this information makes more sense from the perspective of social co-ordination, than simply adhering to a systema of standardised timekeeping. At the The Long Now Foundation, they are making plans to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. Like the monks in Neal Stephenson's Anathem - it is a clock designed to give us a deeper perspective of historical time extending far beyond our impressions of the immediate moment. I like the romance of the idea, but for me - a clock is only useful if it can give me a sense of possible futures not extended pasts.

Whoever said there was no time like the present was quite mistaken. There is no time in the present. Like a garden of forking paths, it would be nice to know what I could do with the next minute rather than simply be aware of it's passing. Rather than historical time, it would be social time. Time enough, you would hope, for me also to think about buying a new watch.

There is drawer in my house that is a graveyard. Adapters, gadgets, phones, music players, digital cameras - all once proud icons of the state of the art, now just a kind of art of the static. I know a Japanese blogger who inscribes in marker pen the date he buys a new toy so that he knows for how long he has had it. That strikes me as macabre. I don't want to be reminded of the half life of contemporary treasure. But still, it raises an interesting question. Should we despair at obsolescence or rejoice in the cult of the new?

Obsolescence is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Think long enough about the logic of mass production and you will start believing in the divine necessity of building things designed to be thrown away. If we become wealthy through work, and work is created through things being made - then making something too well reduces the necessity of its continual replacement. You might remember the satirical scenario in Huxley's 'Brave New World' where the citizens of a perversely happy Utopia vie to entertain themselves in games and activities that use the maximum amount of resources. There is no doubt that waste creates wealth, but what does it do for happiness?

Well, it's hard to say - for the simple reason that the reason we buy things now has little do with replacement and everything to do with desire. Few people buy a new product because their old one is broken. They buy because objects and their ownership offer passports to worlds of pure symbolic joy.

Take Apple for example. Have you ever heard of a company where people hang on press releases like the Second Coming, turn up to product briefings as though they are spiritual rallies and immediately seize upon the latest version of whatever perfectly good gadget they previously owned to embrace the new, new thing? And it's not just technology. In Hong Kong, there is an entire black market trade in last season's luxury goods. For those that must have the latest look handbag - the handbag itself is worthless - it's the newness that counts. Cantonese fashionistas and rich wives trade in their precious commodities often months after purchase - to be snapped up by the lower rungs of mainland factory girls with their eyes on the prize.

There is an empty satisfaction in all of this. Continuous acquisition creates a kind of personal momentum that one can easily mistake for meaning. But to be honest, looking at my technology graveyard - i only feel remorse. When I think about the things that really make me happy - my old mechanical cameras, my fountain pen, my leather worn diaries, my beat up old leather satchel - it is their longevity that I prize. At some point in my owning them, they seem to have lost whatever brand signal they once possessed. Now they just radiate my own personal signature. I love that. It's like they stopped becoming mine and started becoming me.

And as to my own personal obsolescence, well - I'll guess I'll just have to get back to you on that one.

Every time I grab my bag and walk across the gangway onto a plane, I wonder just how much longer we are going to be able to get away with this. Riding these massive metal leviathans spewing out environment destroying toxins like some kind of medieval dragon. And if that sounds strange, don't forget that doctors once recommended cigarettes too.

We have become addicted to an idea of globalism. But what that really means, is that at some point travel stopped becoming a luxury and started becoming public transport. We catch planes now the way that people catch the bus. Somewhere along the line, we conditioned ourselves to to the idea that a holiday is not just a break from work, it is a removal from the familiar. Except really, there is almost nowhere left like that. The more we spread ourselves across the planet, the less the planet is less different to anywhere else. And yet because I still travel in search of elsewhere, I have in mind that I should buy carbon offset credits every time I do. The idea that somewhere a tree is being is planted might lessen one's moral checked luggage - but I'm under no delusions. Carbon credits are no more than medieval 'indulgences' re-imagined for the 21st century.

Someone once told me that the heaviest thing on a plane is actually its paint. I don't know about that. I suspect that these days there are a few heavy hearts too.

There is an old man who works at the end of my street in Hong Kong. Every day he sews clothes, repairs handbags, and stitches threads. He never looks up. When I walk past him I think of those sped up movies they play on TV of a plant growing, as the sun and stars move around in a blur. Except in my tailor's case, it would glittering skyscrapers growing, collapsing and rising again at high speed around him as he worked. I wish I could be there to take a picture of his expression at the moment he finally looked up.