By the time you read this article, the two trees in the photograph were already long gone. Had this article been about these trees, it would be a complete waste of time. As time is money, we cannot have trees slowing us down as we rush around the island to get things done.

When the holm oaks close to Lija cemetery were destroyed, a social media storm was kicked up. When, some days later, the two majestic trees in the photo were marked for destruction, appeals were made to save them. (The Times of Malta, September 1, 2017). Once this storm had ebbed, the chainsaw gangs were unleashed, and these trees disappeared overnight. The road was widened by a few centimetres, the traffic continued (not) to flow, and no one seemed to notice.

As this happened at the start of a new semester, I ran a quick informal ‘change-blindness’ ex­periment with my students, using two images, one showing the trees and the second showing the same space without them.

This simple experiment is commonly used to demonstrate our weakness in perceiving very significant changes that happen around us. As the science that backs up these experiments predicts, the majority of students failed to notice the very significant difference bet­ween the two photos when these were shown in sequence. Although it was expected, the result astonishes nonetheless.

This weakness in our ability to realise what is going on around us is shocking enough, but things become even more worrying when one tries to imagine the less obvious and more profound transformations that may be going on, completely unnoticed. Since the central issue here is not trees, but our notions and experience of prosperity and time, one must ask what transformations change-blindness may conceal in our experience and understanding of prosperity and time.

A tree’s early survival depends completely on the tiny patch of land in which it sprouts. The chances of a sapling actually surviving its first few years depend entirely on the slim probability that nothing steps on it before it matures. Even when mature, a tree still depends entirely on that one single patch of land for its continued existence.

But what does this have to do with our prosperity? If one follows this thought, one realises that for a least a whole century, up to September 20, 2017, no one felt the need to touch that patch of land in which these two trees grew. However, in precisely these prosperous times, this same space becomes essential for our needs.

One would imagine that an increase in prosperity would be associated with a reduction of needs. It turns out, however, that our prosperity coincides with a time of unprecedented needs. While I am certain that materially we are far better off than the people who planted those trees, it is striking that our needs turn out to be much greater than theirs.

What does this extreme neediness tell us about our prosperity? It may well be that the loss of these trees reveals a hidden transformation whereby material prosperity conceals a greater underlying poverty.

What we are hacking into and uprooting is not the trees, but our own humanity

Could this loss also conceal a parallel transformation in our perception of time? In this age of prosperity, when all imaginable luxuries are so tantalisingly within reach, the one most desired but scarcest resource is time. But what is time, and what can a phrase like “to have time” actually mean?

At some point in evolution, humans acquired the ability to deliberate and to form abstract concepts such as those of self and time. While all objects and animals live within time, only humans, and possibly a few other highly evolved animals, can actually experience or conceptualise abstract time.

Abstract conceptualisation re­leases us from the necessities imposed by nature and enables us to deliberate and to make choices. Freedom and choice are central to what it is to be human, but they are only possible through our evolved relationship with time.

But having acquired time consciousness, humans also immediately realise the finitude of this time; the fact that our time is extremely limited. The first step away from animal being and towards the state of human being also immediately places us on the edge of the abyss of existential angst. This angst triggers a defensive reaction within the self that has just emerged.

Our rising into the consciousness of time therefore creates two equal and opposite forces within the self. One force reaches out, seeking to extend our finitude by anchoring our time with what came before us and what will remain after we depart. We achieve this temporal extension through our concern for what lies beyond the individual self. Through our concern for our heri­tage and our own legacy, we extend both our temporality and nourish our own humanity.

The opposing force is the in­stinctive reaction to the realisation of finitude. This seeks to maximise the contents of the finite time of the threatened self. This force translates into an obsession with the moment, causing a narrowing of temporal focus, isolating the self from anything that is not immediately connected to it.

The human potential to experience time as a finite span that can be extended through choice and concern, continually faces the threat of clamping up, re­ducing humans to narcissistic egos obsessed with maximising the moment.

Major Western thinkers from Aristotle all the way to Heidegger, Einstein and Hawkins have em­phasised that our experience of, and engagement with time distinguishes the human mode of being, and contemporary think­ers like Byung Chul Han warn us that the recent widespread phenomena of ‘time-poverty’ represents a loss of the faculties of choice and concern, which distinguish us as human beings.

Enduring physical and cultural objects such as trees, buildings, rituals and traditions act together to create the underlying structures that bind the past to the present and to the future, by providing the anchored temporal poles necessary to resist the slide towards narcissistic egocentrism.

If we heed these thoughts, we may come to realise that our wanton destruction of trees and anything else that stands bet­ween us and our desperate race for prosperity are evidence that we are losing the essential human abilities to make choices, to nurture a meaningful engagement with time, and to express the capacity for human concern that reaches beyond the egoistic self and its immediate needs.

It turns out that what we are hacking into and uprooting is not the trees, but our own humanity.