Everything moves faster the closer you get to the end
Time is speeding up. It's not just you who thinks so.
Morning thoughts, July 27, 2025, 7:32 a.m.:
Have you been feeling lately like time is moving faster? I have. I think a lot of people have been feeling that way. And I think we’ve been feeling that way because time is, in fact, moving faster. Because what is time, really, if not the human perception of change? We get so used to thinking of these big, egregoric forces like time and culture and history as objectivities that exist outside of ourselves, as monumental forces that have nothing to do with us. We forget that it’s our perception, the engagement of our minds, that makes things “exist” in the first place.
Now, obviously I’m using metaphorical language here (I am a novelist, after all) and there are ways in which certain forces and things exist whether an individual perceives them or not. But someone perceives them. Or something. And I’m not sure anything can exist at all without someone’s or something’s perception of that thing.
So, back to time. Yes, it’s speeding up. Yes, the years and the months and the days really are going by faster than they used to. It’s not just you thinking so. It’s happening because time, whatever it actually is, feels to us like change. When little to nothing changes, time seems to drag. When everything changes rapidly—when there is a dramatic increase in novelty—time is a roller coaster on a downward plunge.
There has been a lot of novelty lately, a lot of chaos. A lot of things are changing rapidly, not at the scale of years or months but at the scale of weeks, days, or even hours. The decisions of many millions of individuals have accreted into the solid hyperobject of a major future event. This outcome has determined itself from the decisions of the many and the outcome itself has dropped into the substance of reality, somewhere in the nearish future (depending on how you define near.) Its mass has warped the fabric of our lives, pulling us and everything around us into the sinkhole of its weight. Like a star bending gravity and pulling planets into its orbit, we are all—everyone and everything—circling this future object, rolling along the edges of its warp, and like a marble dropped into a bowl, as we get closer to the accretion itself, the orbit tightens and we move faster, faster, faster.
This is not a new idea, and it didn’t originate with me. I picked it up from Terence McKenna, the 20th-century technophilosopher who often lectured on time, consciousness, and related topics. When I first heard McKenna speak on the subject of this future density, this event-to-come, this thing that’s warping the substance of reality to pull everything into itself, I thought, “Oh, that’s it. That’s the explanation for this sense I have that things are moving faster, reality is exploding up the vertical thrust of an S-curve, and I picked a hell of a time to come and live this life on Earth.”
McKenna’s various philosophies on time, consciousness, the nature of reality, eschatology, etc. are complex; I won’t try to summarize them all here. But one of his key beliefs was that the Universe, and indeed this thing we call “reality”, is, at the fundamental level, a generator of novelty. It prioritizes and even “prefers” complexity. We have no reached a point in the history of our species and in the history of our planet where everything has become so complex and novel, and this novelty multiplies at such a rapid rate, that we have nearly reached the end of what our current model of reality, physics, and consciousness can sustain. Soon we will complexify ourselves so hard that we smash face-first into that thing, the accretion that waits so heavily at the center of our present reality, the great gravitational force of the near future that has been pulling us at ever-increasing speed toward its unknown heart since the first hominid fashioned a tool of bone or of stone on the primeval savannah.
It will happen in our lifetimes. It will happen soon. I think people often assume, when I make references to the eschaton (which I sometimes capitalize with an almost reverent acknowledgement—the Eschaton) that I’m using metaphorical language there, too. It’s an easy assumption to make, for as we have already established, I am a novelist. But I’m being quite literal, as literal as one can be about a thing that is still unknown despite its ever-increasing proximity. We are about to meet The End of the World… but that’s not a scary thing. It’s not a bad thing. I actually think it’s going to be really, really good for the people who care about others—other humans, other life forms, other futures than the one the oligarchs want us to accept.
A theme I often visit in my fiction (especially in One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow) is that nothing really ends. Endings must be, by definition, also beginnings. When something ends, something new begins, even if it’s just a new reality that no longer includes the physical presence of whatever recently ended. For example, my cat Chupie died on the first of this month. What began was a new reality without him.
And so, The End of the World doesn’t have to be conceptualized as a bad thing. It’s all in how you look at it. During times of stability—times of minimal chaos, times of minimal novelty—there isn’t much opportunity for change. Conversely, when things are wild as hell, like they are now, we are flooded with novelty. Nearly any path we turn down might lead to a complete alteration of our collective reality. Right now, thanks to the explosion of novelty that has been firehosing us with nonstop chaos and disruption, we actually have an opportunity to end the current societal structures that don’t serve the majority. Obviously, it will require coordinated effort and vision to do that. But thank goodness, we all got these nice little tools back in 2012 (exactly when Terence McKenna predicted we would get them), these handheld supercomputers that allow us to communicate instantaneously with anyone anywhere on the planet. These devices that make boundaries, indeed the very concept of nations and religions and selves and all the other concepts that keep our species disunited, obsolete.
What can we make in this moment? With each flying moment, we move closer to the end point, that solid mass of What Comes Next. I believe that What Comes Next will be unspeakably beautiful, a remade reality from which hate is barred. But what a wild ride we must endure to get there. This is not a great time for people who like order, predictability, slow days and restful nights. Hang on. Even this madness won’t last forever.
McKenna summed up that booming complexity, that mad rush toward the Eschaton, with the immortal words “Everything moves faster the closer you get to the end.” It’s a concept I put into my next novel, THE ENDED WORLD, a work of contemporary literary fiction with a little flavor of sci-fi thrown in. We don’t have a release date yet because the book just sold to its publisher. In fact, I can’t even formally announce who is publishing the book yet because we are still wrangling the contract and it isn’t signed yet, but I’ll be able to make that announcement very soon (and I’m looking forward to it!) But I hope you’ll check out The Ended World when it’s published next year. It’s all my thoughts on eschatology and the holiness of this Eschaton that is pulling us into its dark, warm heart. It’s all my thoughts on how humanity relates to and creates its gods. It’s my hopeful, glad welcome of the future that’s coming, and an acknowledgment of the suffering we must go through, collectively and as individuals, to attain that kind of paradise.
Plus, one of the characters is a Medieval saint who’s accidentally resurrected as a holographic projection from an ex-nun’s iPhone, so that’s kinda fun.
Good morning! I hope your day is wonderful. I hope you hit pause long enough to notice something beautiful. I hope you take advantage of the novelty of Now to build a good path forward to a worthy future.
Disagree