There is a distinct difference in the quality of light between a winter afternoon in Northern Europe and in Northern California. Growing up in Germany, the winters were long, gray, and indistinct. The days felt like a void that needed to be filled with structure; we relied on clocks to impose order on the gloom, the ticking mechanism serving as a defense against the formless dark. In California, however, the sun governs with undeniable authority. The light shifts dramatically from the marine layer of the morning to the golden haze of the afternoon, a celestial timepiece that requires no batteries and needs no argument.
Yet, despite living under this commanding sun, modern society largely ignores it. We have constructed a civilization that prides itself on conquering nature, and in doing so, we have attempted to conquer time itself. We live in what the sociologist Michael Young termed a “metronomic society“a world governed by the linear, mechanical beat of the clock rather than the fluid, cyclical rhythms of biology and the cosmos.We find ourselves caught in a temporal paradox: we possess devices that measure nanoseconds and save us hours of labor, yet we suffer from a collective “time famine.” We are exhausted, anxious, and perpetually “behind.” To understand this modern malaise, we need to look beyond the symptoms of stress and examine the deep philosophical and structural architecture of time. In this short essay, we will explore the ancient tension between the two dimensions that govern reality: the cyclical and the linear—and how the human unconscious rebels against the clock-based metronomic culture we have built.
The Geometry of Existence: The Circle and the Line
At its core, the conflict is mathematical and geometric. The structure of reality is built upon the interplay of two distinct shapes: the circle and the line.
The cyclical dimension is the domain of permanence and recurrence. In mathematics, a cycle is a return to the origin; it is the sine wave of the heartbeat, the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of the electron. Cyclical time keeps things the same by reproducing the past. It gratifies the deep human aspiration for stability. As Young notes, “permanence is a dance,” sustained by the ceaseless repetition of acts. Just as the ocean remains constant though its waves undulate, the cycle ensures that life continues through iteration.
In contrast, linear time is the dimension of novelty, displacement, and the unique. It is the vector in geometry—a quantity having direction as well as magnitude. It is the arrow of history, the accumulation of knowledge, and the trajectory of a human life from birth to death. Linear time introduces the new; it prevents existence from becoming a stagnant loop.
The crisis of the modern world arises because we have allowed the Line to tyrannize the Circle. We have prioritized the “becoming” over the “being.” We view time as a currency to be spent, a resource to be mined, or a road to be raced down, forgetting that biologically and spiritually, we are designed to move in circles.
Myth, Religion, and the Conquest of the Sun
This shift from the cyclical to the linear is not merely a product of the Industrial Revolution; it has roots in the evolution of human consciousness, myth, and religion.
In pre-modern and indigenous cultures, time was almost exclusively cyclical. The Maya of Central America, for instance, lived within a complex system of interlocking cycles—a sacred almanac of 260 days and a solar year of 365 days. Their history was not a straight road but a great wheel; they believed that history would repeat itself, that the gods of the past would return to carry the burden of the days once more. For the Maya, and for cultures like the Balinese, time was a habitat, not a measure of progress.
The pivot toward linearity occurred with the rise of Western monotheism. While pagan religions celebrated the eternal return of the seasons, the Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a dramatic, linear narrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Apocalypse. Time became a stage for a divine drama with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. The goal was no longer to maintain harmony with the cycles of nature but to move toward a final salvation.
However, the Church was wise enough to graft this linear theology onto a cyclical calendar. The liturgy repeats every year—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter. This blending of the Jewish lunar calendar with the Roman solar calendar created a synthesis where the “arrow” of salvation moved forward, but the “wheel” of ritual kept the community grounded. The modern secular world has retained the arrow (progress and profit, endless growth) but largely discarded the wheel (ritual/rest), leaving us spiritually unhinged, suspended between the past and the future.
Time in the Unconscious
If sociology examines the human relation to the clock on the wall, psychoanalysis examines the clock in the mind, and finds it wanting. The most radical critique of the metronomic society comes from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Lacan famously scandalized the psychoanalytic establishment by introducing the “variable-length session.” In the standard Freudian world (and the modern corporate one), time is a container to be filled: a 50-minute hour, an 8-hour workday. Lacan argued that this standardization is a lie. Time in the unconscious is not chronological; it is logical.
Lacan proposed that human time is structured by three logical moments in the comprehension of reality, not by the ticking of a second hand:
- The Instant of Seeing (l’instant de voir): A moment of pure perception or encounter.
- The Time for Understanding (le temps pour comprendre): A period of processing and hesitation. Crucially, this time is elastic. It expands or contracts based on the subject’s anxiety and their relationship to the truth.
- The Moment to Conclude (le moment de conclure): The act of certainty, the moment when the subject can act.
The “Metronomic Society” creates neurosis because it tries to standardize the “Time for Understanding.” We are told we must learn a skill in a semester, grieve a loss in a week, or produce an idea by 9:00 AM. But the unconscious cannot be synchronized to bureaucratic planning. By forcing the elastic time of the mind into the rigid grid of the clock, we produce profound alienation.
Furthermore, Lacan (and Freud before him) understood that psychic time flows backward as much as forward—a concept known as après-coup (retroactiveness, in German: Nachträglichkeit). A trauma at age five may not be traumatic until age twenty, when a new event rewrites the history of the first. We are constantly re-editing our past. The linear arrow of history (“I was born, then I grew up, then I succeeded”) is a conscious fiction we tell ourselves to hide the chaotic, circular rewriting of the self.
Shattered Time and the Dead Mother
The psychoanalyst André Green, a student of Lacan, took this darker. He observed that for the modern, depressed subject, time is neither a comforting cycle nor a progressive line—it is “shattered time” (temps éclaté).
Green wrote of the “Dead Mother” complex—not a mother who has died physically, but one who is psychically dead (depressed, absent) to the child. In the presence of this absence, the child falls into “dead time” (temps mort). The reassuring rhythm of life stops. The subject is frozen in a perpetual waiting room.
This mirrors the condition of the modern subject. We often feel we are “killing time,” a violent phrase for a violent act. We kill time because the gap, the “time for understanding,” is too painful to bear without the guarantee of a result. We fill the void with distraction, scrolling, and productivity, because we have lost the capacity to simply be in the cycle. We have murdered the “living time” of the pulse and replaced it with the “dead time” of the schedule.
The Biological Imperative: We Are Solar Machines
Philosophy and psychoanalysis frame the concept and the experience of time, but biology dictates how we embody it. The most profound argument against the metronomic society is that it violates our physiological constitution.
Chronobiology reveals that we are creatures of the sun. We possess internal “biological clocks,” specifically the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the hypothalamus. These are not passive responders to the environment; they are innate genetic programs. Experiments with “free-running” subjects—people isolated in caves without light or clocks—show that humans naturally drift toward a “day” of about 25 hours. We have an internal rhythm that is constantly “entrained” or reset by the sun to fit the 24-hour solar day.
In a healthy state, an organism is “homeorhythmic.” We do not maintain a static state; we maintain a dynamic equilibrium through constant rhythmic adjustments. The industrial world, however, treats the human body as a constant variable. We have “colonized the night” with artificial light, demanding efficiency at 3:00 AM when our cortisol levels and body temperatures are plummeting. We force “larks” and “owls” into the same 9-to-5 grid. The factory worker—or the modern corporate equivalent—is expected to function with the regularity of a piston, ignoring the fact that human biology is a symphony of oscillating chemicals, not a rigid mechanical output.
Habit: Society’s Gyroscope
If biology regulates our internal cycles, what regulates our social cycles? The answer lies in the often-undervalued concept of habit.
William James famously called habit “the enormous flywheel of society,” the force that keeps us doing what we have done before. Habit is the social equivalent of genetic replication. Just as DNA copies itself to maintain the form of an organism, habit copies behavior to maintain the form of a society.
Habit is an evolutionary necessity because it economizes mental energy. If we had to consciously deliberate every action—how to tie a shoe, how to make coffee, how to greet a colleague—we would be paralyzed by the sheer volume of decisions before noon. By relegating recurrent behaviors to the realm of the automatic, habit frees our higher cognitive powers to deal with the unforeseen. The linear obsession of the modern world often denigrates habit as “boring,” failing to realize that without this cyclical substrate, the linear progress of innovation would be impossible. We can only move forward because we have a solid, repetitive foundation to push off from.
Conclusion: Restoring the Solar Balance
The solution to the metronomic crisis is not to smash the clocks or return to a pre-industrial agrarian existence. We cannot unlearn the calculus of linear progress, nor should we wish to; following the path of linear time, we discovered medicine, technology, and the very concept of human rights and evolution.
However, survival requires a restoration of balance. We need a reconciliation with the sun: It is time to recognize that social evolution does not have to be a straight line into a mechanized future; it can be a Hegelian spiral that re-integrates the wisdom of biological rhythms.
This means philosophically accepting that “all days are not equal.” It means respecting the “Great Sleep” of the night and the seasonal variations of energy. It means validating Lacan’s “logical time”—allowing ourselves the time to understand before we are forced to conclude.
How do we harmonize the Arrow and the Circle? This is ultimately a question about how to be fully human in an age that treats us as functions. The answer lies not in choosing one dimension over the other, but in giving our lives authentic direction—meaningful projects, genuine commitments, the capacity to build and create across time, while grounding that forward movement in the restorative rhythms that biology and the cosmos provide. Only by respecting the pulse of our own body, the rhythm of day and night, and the wisdom encoded in habit and ritual, can we cure the temporal vertigo that afflicts us. We must learn to inhabit a world where time is not a taskmaster to be obeyed, not a currency to be hoarded, but a medium in which we express ourselves – it is our time.