I think our Western-European inherited culture is very fixated on eschatology...an eschatological sense of time particularly. We want the universe and everything in it to have a beginning point and an end point, Genesis to Revelations and the Big Bang Theory to inevitable entropic disintegration. This probably explains our other fixation on hours and minutes. Just once I'd like to wake up naturally in the morning on a weekday, without the garish buzz of the alarm clock.
