Alex Tarnava on time as an exponential force, chaos vs. control, and why acting now reshapes everything that follows.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In a reading from StressHacked: The Mind, where you recount the whole of your chapter “Time As An Exponential Force,” you offer a great piece of advice, that admittedly I think about quite often. For the sake of the solutions-oriented reader of The Saturday Exhale, I’ll state this advice (in my own words) first, and then get to what I want to ask you about it after.
The advice is, as the title of this chapter suggests, time is “exponential” and time “accrues” consequences depending on when decisions are made and not made by an actor. A simple example you provide in your chapter is knowing when to send an email to a co-worker, consultant, or client. You can do it immediately after they send the inquiry, let’s say on a Friday afternoon, keeping momentum up and ensuring the project is in the back of their mind over the weekend; or you can wait until Monday morning when your co-worker, consultant, or client is occupied with different work. A decision to fire off an email in 30 seconds, immediately, rather than doing it after playing 48 hours, on-and-off, of a Medieval-themed computer role playing game (not to ‘self-snitch’ too much) could be the difference in mitigating a weeks long-delay or making or breaking a project entirely.
This is why philosophers since at least since Immanuel Kant have called time ‘transcendental’; time simply describes the condition upon which all activities take place and it is therefore a priori, that is granted to you before experience. Albert Einstein famously synthesized the transcendental condition of time with that of space, claiming it is the same matrix of activity.
In line with your idea that time is an exponential force, I am reminded of what is argued by Edwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? According to him, living beings, and highly-complex systems in general, generate a lot of entropy, or what can be vulgarly called disordered states of matter, by producing heat and waste products. It is this entropy export that, according to Schrödinger, allows living beings to “purchase” the temporary ‘orderness’ we see in our lives. It’s as if an extraordinary amount of effort is required to stabilize existence such that subsequent efforts become easier and easier. Does this sound like cosmic hormesis to you?
In short, do you see a parallel between your idea that time is an exponential force and Schrödinger’s that order is a temporary “purchase” among entities who generate (productive) chaos?
AT: This actually leads, in a way, to something I’ve been thinking about this weekend. I’ve just wrapped up speaking at a health-focused retreat that has a theme on mind-body connection. I was speaking on hydrogen, but sat in on some others who spoke about the mind. Some of the speakers had some interesting insights, and others—while having some points I would concede, and backstories I find admirable—were advocating for the type of “toxic positivity” I speak about in StressHacked.
This type of toxic positivity is undertaken in order to create an illusion of control, or “order.” It’s the delusion that the chaos of existence can be subdued through adhering to strict structures within the mind, and behavioral patterns that are non-negotiable and rigid. To me, this “order” undertaken to avoid chaos, and purported to help with efficiency and success, is horrifically inefficient at the best of times, and disastrous when the illusions shatter.
Efficiency is accepting the chaos, existing within it, and using our energy at the right moments to move with the ebbs and flows of the currents that appear at different intensities and directions without warning. That email we receive at 4:59 PM is one of these chaotic currents—we can fight it, maintain order, and end our work at 5:00, but the loss of time, and therefore energy, will be extreme. Or, we can ride that wave and maximize energy, and time, to save our reserve for the next current. In this way, allowing ourselves to be almost weightless in the chaos is what truly preserves our energy, stalls entropy, and allows us to accomplish more than we could ever imagine.
VG: Time, to me, seems to be two things. The first is that it’s an accounting of decay, dissolution, or aging. You state that “time is the most precious resource” we have for this reason. We can’t cheat time, at least not yet.
Another thing time seems to be is a relative relationship between these pools of order and chaos that you describe, as time can also be analogous to speed or acceleration. Consider an eddy in a body of water. An eddy is a localized swirl within a larger current where water folds back on itself by concentrating force in one place. Time appears to be analogous to this as it “forces” pockets (eddies) where actions, attention, and consequences matter more than in other pockets. I believe this is what you mean by the exponential nature of time and it also explains a pithy statement by Nick Land, that “civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference.” What he is saying is that civilization is about choosing whether to consume or “produce” time—that is, creating these pockets of time where our actions are more impactful and consequential than they would be otherwise.
Time is one of the great mysteries of human experience and we’re not going to figure it out in this newsletter. However, I think what we’re both saying, in addition to what Schrödinger and Land are saying, is that time is not a fixed resource but a relative resource that manifests differently by how we use time: by choosing to accelerate or slink back, we can make time an asset rather than a burden. Do you agree?
AT: Absolutely, and in addition, our decisions in this regard subjectively alter our lived experience. Namely, our time is limited, but our perception of life, and the events that make it up, is based on our subjective interpretation of the actions, consequences, struggles, failures, and successes which we endeavor. By choosing to act in the appropriate moments, we not only compound the force of time externally, but also amplify the experience of it internally, leading to a life that is more “full,” one in which we have truly “lived” to a greater extent. Isn’t that what it is all about?
VG: Probably this is what life is about, though I’m not sure. In The Stone Wall we had a debate about what is the main driver of human action. You argued there is a thin window where curiosity can emerge, sandwiched between two states of unease, each materializing for polar opposite reasons; I argued the main driver is the reduction of unease as such, in line with Ludwig Von Mises. I ultimately came down on your position (at least I am highly sympathetic to it), though I still view human action as negative, that is about making one stand out in an environment that is unsympathetic and uncaring to you (or anyone). Purpose is about making the best of a bad situation, and often we are “clearing the brush” of our problems rather than building something that lasts. In line with the time discussion we just had, I view much of life as preparation for some moments that really alters one’s life and the life of one’s interlocutors, usually by acting such that it retroactively changes the meaning of the past. That is a discussion for another time, though—either in The Stone Wall or upcoming installments of The Saturday Exhale.
