This column critiques cultures and philosophies using an A-versus-B method—not to engage in absolutism, but solely for contrast. Through my practice of Existencia and multidisciplinary investigation, we examine cultures, philosophies, and notions in this way to show the difference between how some of us have lived and moved through the world and the philosophies and ways of life we can choose to adopt.
Time is often treated as a universal truth; measurable, objective, and inevitable. Seconds pass. Calendars turn. Deadlines arrive. But our relationship to time is not neutral, nor is it natural. It is learned, enforced, and defended. How we understand time determines how we work, how we rest, how we relate to one another, and how power moves through our bodies.
Some of us are taught to experience time as something that happens to us—an external force that disciplines and demands. Others are taught to experience time as something we are inside of—a rhythm we participate in, not a resource we extract from. These distinctions are not philosophical curiosities. They are political. They shape labor systems, economic models, spiritual practices, culture, environmental policies, and whose lives are deemed valuable.
This column begins with a claim: our dominant relationship to time is contributing to cognitive exhaustion, ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and ethical erosion. The way time has been structured under capitalism and colonial modernity has normalized the extraction of land, of labor, of intention, and the right to be. When time becomes money, life becomes debt.
Across disciplines and cultures, there are other ways of understanding time—ways that do not center productivity, accumulation, or legacy. Ways that do not demand constant growth or linear progress. Ways that prioritize continuity, reciprocity, presence, and care. This series is an investigation into those alternatives—and into what becomes possible when we loosen our grip on the clock.
Existencia is a practice where we release the focus of time and turn inward. A practice whereby unravelling and deconstructing our belief systems, sense of self, relationship with our bodies, and purpose. I created it to radicalize people through small, intentional actions taken daily; actions that slowly, steadily loosen the grip of colonization on our bodies, minds, and communities. Existencia is a return inward. A refusal of urgency. A release of time as a measure of worth. Through the unraveling of inherited belief systems—about productivity, purpose, identity, and success—we create space for something else to emerge: alignment, memory, and collective imagination.
This inquiry arrives at a familiar cultural moment: the beginning of a new year. A season saturated with rhetoric about optimization, discipline, and reinvention, often divorced from reflection, sustainability, or the realities of the body. We are encouraged to move faster, plan harder, produce more, even as the natural world around us slows, rests, and regenerates. While many individuals are resisting this narrative, the dominant cultural script remains unchanged.
Rather than asking how to become more efficient within broken systems, this series asks a different question: What if the problem is not how we use time, but how time has been defined?
We are often told that time is known only through change; that without change, time would not exist. But history complicates this claim. Political regimes repeat themselves. Economic crises cycle. Empires rise and fall along eerily familiar patterns. If time is defined by progress, why does so much feel recursive? This tension—between change and repetition—has animated scientific, spiritual, and philosophical inquiry for centuries. It has also shaped how societies organize labor, narrate history, and justify domination. To investigate time is to investigate power.
For the purposes of this column, time will be explored through three broad frameworks: linear, cyclical, and vertical. These are not rigid categories, nor are they mutually exclusive. They are lenses, each revealing different assumptions about purpose, value, and being.
Linear time moves forward. It has an origin, a trajectory, and an endpoint. It privileges beginnings and outcomes, causes and effects, growth and arrival. Within this framework, progress becomes a moral good, and stagnation becomes a failure. This perception of time is embedded deeply in Western thought. Aristotle formalized the narrative structure of beginning, middle, and end, not as a neutral storytelling tool, but as a philosophy of movement toward resolution. Science mirrors this orientation in its fixation on origins and ultimate explanations: the Big Bang as the beginning of everything, the search for a unified theory, and the belief that all complexity can eventually be reduced to a single truth.
Linear time also underpins thermodynamics’ arrow of time, in which entropy increases and disorder expands. Decay becomes evidence of movement. Forward motion becomes inevitable. But linear time does more than describe reality–it disciplines it. It gives rise to productivity culture, legacy thinking, and the belief that one’s worth is tied to output. Purpose becomes something to be achieved rather than something to be lived. Existence must be justified through accomplishment.
Within capitalism, this logic turns violent. People are taught—implicitly and explicitly—that they must earn the right to exist. That their exhaustion is meaningful. That their exploitation serves progress, even if the benefits are concentrated elsewhere. The obsession with legacy—whether framed as generational wealth, empire-building, or individual success—depends on someone else’s labor being rendered invisible.
When time is linear, growth is assumed to be good. Economic expansion is celebrated even when it produces displacement, ecological destruction, and social harm. The language of “development” masks extraction. Consider so-called high-growth economies in the Global South, where rising GDP often coincides with land theft, environmental devastation, and the prioritization of foreign capital over local life. Growth, in these contexts, is not neutral; it is colonial continuity. Time moves forward for some by stealing time from others.
Cyclical time tells a different story. It does not rush toward an endpoint. It returns. It repeats. It remembers. Agricultural societies have long organized life around cycles, seasons, harvests, and rest. Many spiritual traditions do the same. In Hinduism and Buddhism, existence unfolds through samsara: cycles of birth, death, and rebirth shaped by behavior and awareness, not accumulation. The goal is not constant improvement but liberation from attachment.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, often framed as radical, echoes much older Eastern and Indigenous philosophies: if matter is finite and time infinite, then existence repeats. Meaning is not found in novelty, but in how one inhabits repetition. Cyclical time emphasizes interconnectedness over individual purpose. You are not here to conquer time; you are here to participate in it. Nature is not a resource; it is a relation.
Vertical time does not move forward or return; it deepens. It is not concerned with before and after, but with beneath and within. Where linear time measures duration and cyclical time tracks recurrence, vertical time measures presence, awareness, and depth of relation. It is experienced not through accumulation or repetition, but through attunement. In vertical time, transformation does not require novelty or progress; it requires descent. Attention moves inward, downward, toward what has been buried, ignored, or fragmented by speed.
Ascendance within vertical time is not upward mobility in the capitalist sense. It is not improvement, optimization, or transcendence away from the body. It is the integration of layers, memory, grief, intuition, and ancestral knowledge into conscious relation. One ascends by becoming more whole, not more productive. Mystical traditions across cultures gesture toward this orientation: the Sufi practice of fana (dissolution of the ego), the Christian contemplative emphasis on stillness, the yogic understanding of time as something that collapses in states of deep awareness. In these frameworks, time does not disappear; it thickens. Moments become portals rather than units.
Vertical time resists governance. It cannot be scheduled, scaled, or extracted. Because it privileges interiority and embodied knowing, it threatens systems that rely on visibility, output, and constant motion. This is why cultures of domination have historically distrusted stillness, silence, and introspection, particularly when practiced collectively or by those deemed disposable. Vertical time interrupts the economy of urgency. It restores the body as a site of knowledge rather than a site of compliance. Ascendance, here, is not escape from the world, but a more ethical way of inhabiting it; one that makes exploitation harder to justify and domination harder to sustain.
Across spiritual traditions, time is rarely linear in the capitalist sense. In Sufism, time spirals; each return offering deeper understanding and ascendance. Growth is internal, not accumulative. In Buddhism, presence matters more than progress. In many Indigenous cultures, wisdom flows from ancestors and elders, not from novelty or speed. These frameworks challenge the masculine, conquest-driven orientation of Western modernity. They center care, continuity, and collective survival. They refuse the idea that faster is better or that newer is wiser. Colonization disrupted these relationships over time, imposing urgency where there was rhythm, extraction where there was reciprocity. “Time is money” was not a universal truth—it was an imported discipline.
This column will move across quantum physics, thermodynamics, sociology, anthropology, architecture, religion, and spirituality; not to arrive at a single answer, but to loosen certainty. Quantum theory already destabilizes linear causality. Sociology reveals how time is socially enforced. Spiritual traditions remind us that meaning does not require speed. This work is not about proving one worldview superior to another. It is about contrast. Disruption. Remembering that the way we live now is not the only way we have ever lived, and not the only way we could live again.
Somatic Exercise
We’ll end by turning inward, with the body. Take a breath in. Take a breath out. Let the breath slow without forcing it. And ask yourself, not to answer immediately, but to carry forward: Where in my life do I treat time as something I must earn rather than something I belong to? Which rhythms do I inherit, and which have I consciously chosen? What would change if progress were measured by collective well-being instead of productivity? These questions do not demand urgency. They ask for honesty. They unfold in their own time.
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