Theories of Time

I recently read a book I’d been curious about called The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book theorizes that history changes through generational shifts, and that these changes happen in predictable and repeatable patterns.

One of the big questions the book poses is the nature of time. The authors present three theories for how time functions:

1. Time is cyclical (the four seasons; the cycle of birth, life, and death)

2. Time is linear (things are getting progressively better)

3. Time is chaos (there’s no order at all)

Until the Renaissance, the authors contend, people experienced time as cyclical. Life was marked by the repetition of seasons and birth and death. There was no technological progress. The world was a loop. When people started counting years they had to make the case why this was worth doing. 

This changed with the Renaissance and the acceleration of technology. This created a linear sense of time. For the first time humanity felt it was improving. Given enough time and technology, problems could be solved. This is largely how the world sees time today.

There’s a fourth metaphor for time also worth considering. 

This metaphor comes from a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a self-help guide for artists. Cameron writes:

“You will circle through some of the same issues over and over, each time at a different level. There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path. Our aim here is to find the trail, establish our footing, and begin the climb.”

Cameron’s wisdom brings our metaphors of time together. We will repeatedly face the same challenges — the cyclical notion of time — even as we seek linear growth — the progressive notion of time. Put them together and you get a fourth metaphor: time is a spiral.

We constantly circle the same themes and challenges in our lives. The past keeps echoing back. Those echoes are opportunities to make better decisions and grow into more mature versions of ourselves (shifting the spiral “up”) or to make worse decisions and regress (shifting the spiral “down”).

This way of explaining time may seem theoretical, but it has real-life applications. Especially as navigating time is much easier when you’re aware that the spiral exists.

As the authors of The Fourth Turning note, when people saw time as cyclical in the pre-modern world, no one tried to pretend winter wasn’t coming. The world cycled between fat and lean times. People survived the lean because they prepared during the fat. The truth of life was plain to see.

In a world where we believe time is progressive, we lose our capacity to prepare. Getting ready for the worst feels wasteful and ungrateful in a society premised on the belief that a better future is always just around the corner. Even the existence of a Plan B can challenge the entire value system.

Our awareness of time is meaningful. Compare Matthew McConaughey’s cryptic “time is a flat circle” refrain from True Detective — a bleak refutation of the spiral theory — to Bill Murray’s transformation to escape a conditional loop in Groundhog Day. It was only when Bill Murray was aware that he was in a loop and what the object of the loop was that time moved forward. 

Awareness shapes the world of today and successive generations. In my book I visualized this process as the Values Helix — a spiral.

Seeing time as a spiral creates forgiveness. Even as we move past a challenge, we should expect another version to return. This awareness gives us permission to grow without demanding perfection, and opens up the longer journey towards mastery. Our struggles simply mark another loop on the climb.

Recommended

• This extraordinary obituary of the writer Charles Webb, author of The Graduate:

Mr. Webb’s novel, written shortly after college and based largely on his relationship with his wife, Eve Rudd, was made into an era-defining film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, that gave voice to a generation’s youthful rejection of materialism. Mr. Webb and his wife, both born into privilege, carried that rejection well beyond youth, choosing to live in poverty and giving away whatever money came their way, even as the movie’s acclaim continued to follow them.

Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.

“When you run out of money it’s a purifying experience,” Mr. Webb told The Times of London after the couple moved to England. “It focuses the mind like nothing else.”

• This wildly imaginative essay by my friend Rhys Lindmark on post-capitalism, Bentoism, values pluralism, and other future-thinking ideas is great.

• One of my favorite people to read is Ana Andjelic and her newsletter The Sociology of Business. Last week she and I had a conversation about how to create meaning as a brand in 2020 that you can watch here. It includes a five-minute presentation on the meaning of Frank Ocean.

• I recently gave a talk for Adobe about Brian Eno, Madonna, Apple, and my transition away from Kickstarter that you can watch here.

• Some recent podcasts appearances I’ve made: Tom Bilyeu, Erik Torenberg, Rhys Lindmark.

• Two recent essays sent to the Bento Society list: Coherence and Flow, on using Bentoism to create lasting flow states, and Lab Notes, which details what happens in the experimental Bentoism events I host.

• One recent Bentoism experiment had groups of people pretend to be the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter and redesign their offerings based on where we are now. Video of that is here.

• You can RSVP for all Bentoism events here. There are events on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. I’m teaching a workshop with Creative Mornings on July 22 that you can RSVP for here.

Peace and love my friends,
Yancey