Welcome to The Museum of 2026

This New Year’s, as most New Year’s, Janus, the Roman double-headed deity of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways, finds many of us feverishly reviewing the past year in our rear view mirror…

While simultaneously scanning the way ahead -well at least as far as the next bend in the road

And, once again, we are supported in this by an entire Industry dedicated to convincing us that our lives, and even Time itself, are linear.

Some of the technology available would have been at home in any Roman villa circa 49 ADE:

Calendars

(named after the Roman word for the first day of the month, kalends)

Where else but these glossy, cellophane-wrapped, pin-on-the-wall (or hide-in the drawer until next time Auntie comes around) Relics of Christmas Past can we find Doctor Who standing shoulder to shoulder with The Traitors (rather than The Daleks) and Minecraft (as opposed to The Minotaur)?

Not to mention Harry Webb (Cliff Richard) sandwiched between Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.  Surely that particular ménage à trois alone is enough to utterly debunk the myth of time’s linearity for once and for all?

Apps, Hacks and Meta-Hooks

(and other alternatives to the paper-based perennials)

The modern equivalent to Roman charms, amulets and status bling, we now have digital watches counting out our footsteps, rings that measure our stress (big deal, my ring has been doing that for decades!) and social media walls offering end-to-end, day to day, memory snaps and short-form videos.

Of course, The Business of Pleasure is no more immune to The Myth of Linearity than any other sphere of endeavour. 

But we can probably be forgiven more than most. 

Performances really do need to be correctly scheduled, and signposted, to ensure our that audiences turn up at the right performance, time, date and year.

But even with our best efforts, things go wrong.

People outside of The Business of Pleasure cannot imagine how many of their fellow audience members regularly get any one (or any combination) of those four co-ordinates wrong.

But once you get beyond simple delivery dates and times and enter the (more-or-less) fanciful realms of business plans, projections and Gant charts, don’t be surprised if your paths cross those of hairy ‘Middle Earth’ Hobbits, happily halving variable weightings to hedge their predictions, alongside Knights of The Round (Board) Table questing for the Holy Grail (Projected EBITDA) battling with terrifying ogres (Accountants and FDs) shrieking “Cut, Cut, Cut!” (or similar) like deranged Hollywood movie directors.

Which isn’t to say that realistic and well-thought-out goal-design won’t massively improve the odds on achieving our targets, and uniting teams around reachable, but stretching, objectives.

At a cocktail party in 1890, America's leading Industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, offered an up and coming young management consultant, Frederick Taylor, $10,000 dollars ($280,000 in our money) if he could give him "a piece of business advice worth hearing.” Taylor, who would later become known as the ‘Father of Scientific Management’ allegedly replied:

“Well Mr Carnegie, I would advise to make a list of the ten most important things you can do.  And then start doing number one.”

Carnegie paid up on the spot.

Time … A Business of Pleasure?

A 2021 review* of ‘the literature linking time perception and reward, including neurobiological and behavioural studies’ observed:

‘…All behaviours unfold over time, and as a result, time is an implicit dimension of all behaviours whether they relate to movement, identification, feeding, communication, co-operation, or competition.  Ongoing research has identified that the neurotransmitter dopamine, conventionally associated with reward and motivation, is critically involved in human time perception. Given the neurobiological overlap, there is reason to believe that time perception and reward processing may share common information processing pathways. However, for the most part the subfields that study time perception, reward, and motivation have been largely independent.’

Or as Mr D Jones-Bowie of Bromley-By-Mars so aptly put it:  “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”

And turns out that the simple act of listening to that track on his Hunky Dory album will actually bring about ‘Ch-ch-changes’ to our perception of time. As the same review pointed out:

‘…In physics, time is a singular, fundamental quantity, inexorably bound to the second law of dynamics.** Psychological time, on the other hand, is both relativistic and multifaceted. It is well known that the perceptual experience of duration can be distorted by external factors, such as music and emotion. Phenomena such as these have been long recognised, and thus models describing how we perceive time have a substantial history.’

But when it comes to how we perceive our own personal history, perhaps we should sling away the diaries, the FB Memories and much-scrawled Cliff Richard calendars, and take our cue from the Visitor Attractions Chapter of The Business of Pleasure…

A History of the Year in 12 Objects.***

At the end of each month, simply pick one object that, for whatever reason, seems to best sum-up what you've been going through during those twenty-eight plus days.  Then, at the end of the year, lay the twelve objects out end-to-end, in your own Museum of 2026.

Perhaps beside a copy of your own Taylor-Carnegie Top-Ten Priority-List?

(...while listening to Cliff Richards Young Ones?)

Not as a time-capsule, but as touchstones, and stepping-stones, Tardis and Time Tunnel, to help you touch, and trace, where time touched you.

DT

2 January 2026

*Dopamine and the interdependency of time perception and reward. Bown J Fung, Elissa Sutlief, Marshall G Hussain Shuler Neuroscience Behavioural Review, Feb 2021.

**' In any energy transfer, total disorder (entropy) of an isolated system can never decrease over time; it will either increase or remain constant. '

***A shorter the game-changing BBC Radio 4 / British Museum series written and presented by Neil MacGregor

IMAGE:  Museum of the Home, Kew.