After I read this piece, Undualing, about the disconnection between nature’s and our civilisation’s timing/speed/frequencies I found a few other people reflecting around this same topic.

• Kris De Decker @ the great simplification describes how we will have to adapt to nature, e.g. his website runs on solar power and is sometimes offline.

• Douglas Rushkoff names it perfectly @ Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff. The ancient Greek had two words for time:

  • Kronos: time on the clock and

  • Kairos: human timing

After some reflection I realised that oftentimes I had felt something similar within myself: when I want to finish some task on the laptop and I do not attend to my baby, when I want to make the most of my time in the office and I do not take the time to properly greet my colleagues, etc.

In fact, it is probably the same I started to notice when I switched from a western society to the Tanzanian: why is everything so slow, so inefficient, so unproductive? Why do my colleagues need 2 hours to discuss or decide something that I and other westerners do in 10 minutes? Why do greetings require 3-4 questions and answers instead of a simple: Hey! Hello!

I also realised that this disconnection between Kronos and Kairos is nothing new to me, it is core to the distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources that I learnt at school. The latter are those for which at our current usage rates (Kronos), stocks get eventually (when is eventually?) depleted because they are “refilled” at a slower speed (Kairos).

A number of questions come to mind:

• What are we, as a civilization, rushing for? What are we optimising for?

• What is the end goal? What is enough?

• When do we want to reach there?

If I want to visit my mother at her home, I will walk, bike or take the train depending on what time it is and when I want to be there. In this example, the goal and the timeline are clear; but, I, honestly, don’t know what our (implicit) goal as civilization is and neither what the deadline is.

Another example to illustrate this is my first business experience: I felt that my colleagues were too slow to produce enough according to our targets. The question is: how were those targets established? Well, it was basically a matter of competition: how much are people ready to pay for our product in our market? How many products do we believe we can sell and thus, how fast do we need to produce to lower our production costs and break even?

Something felt wrong to me and I asked myself: aren’t my colleagues, with their “slowlife”, optimising for something more meaningful than I am? i.e. spending quality time with the people around them.

Because, what was enough for us in that business? Enough was just enough to beat our competition, i.e. to exploit people or nature more than others do, to be more innovative or technologically advanced than them, to convince potential clients about the benefits of our products, to play political games to gain favours from powerful people, etc.

Notice also how disconnected this is from what our productive system is supposed to achieve: satisfy needs (profit is just the incentive we set to do so, right?). In our case I found myself thinking how to “push” colleagues to work faster and people (potential clients) to buy our products.

Ideally, I believe we should pause, collectively reflect on such questions and agree on their answers.

That is a difficult task, it feels like trying to stop a wave or the wind. Still, we can all find small moments to generate micro reflection moments with those around us.

Another interesting question is: What is the engine behind that unstoppable wave? And what do we need to understand to shift gears and live a life adapted to kairos?

What People in The week call “The story of more” encapsulates many factors with precision, but, what are some of those factors?

Capitalism? Colonialism? Markets? Profit? Private property? The state? Monopolies? Money? The current monetary system? Power abuse? Fear? Our accounting system? The metrics we use? Financial system? Consumerism? Commodities? Corporations? Marketing? Globalization? Competition? Democracy? Lack of democracy? Us? Nature?

In fact, what are each of these concepts (+ many others not listed here)? What does each of them mean and what are the relationships among them?

There is a lot to unpack and understand there (collective intelligence). But slowly, we can probably make sense of what is going on and find some common ground.

When trying to make sense and to find common ground I have realised that there are at least two basic topics, for which urgent agreement is needed, else I feel that conversations get stuck or do not make sense.

Ecological destruction

It is sometimes said that this complex engine is the source of most of the material abundance we live in. We humans are lazy, we need carrots or sticks to work. Competition is the engine of innovation and technological advance. Those might be partially true, but I also believe that we have gone too far: nothing on Earth grows indefinitely because that means destroying what supports us. The paper clip maximizer is a good analogy.

Power/inequality

I also think that just because some people believe that there is never enough (that the end goal is unreachable), all 8,000 million people on Earth should not simply follow and behave as if there was never enough. No problem if some people always want more, but we should not create and live in systems that force everyone to live in a “there is never enough” mode.

To finalise I would like to mention a few examples that bring some hope.

I recently got to know about a stone mine in my town where anyone can easily get a mining licence and where miners only use simple tools. Apparently not long ago some people started to use dynamite to speed up the process, but others complained because they realised that their livelihood was being endangered: if they all used dynamite the mine would get depleted soon and they would no longer have an income source. I see this as a nice attempt to synchronise Kronos and Kairos. It, sure, will have many drawbacks (e.g. how do these people compete with others surrounding mines that are privately held and use more advanced technology?), but it seems that people paused, collectively reflected and found answers to questions like:

What is the end goal? What is enough? When do we want to reach there?

Gregory Landua in this podcast episode mentioned what he defined as the best managed common pool resource in the world (admitting thereafter that it was far from being sustainable): In Alaska fishermen agreed to fish salmon in the sea instead of simply waiting for salmon to go upstream the river. A “waste” of resources that ensured that salmon would live in that ecosystem forever.

Asante for reading.

Learn more: Governing the commons by Elinor Ostrom.

After I read this piece, Undualing, about the disconnection between nature’s and our civilisation’s timing/speed/frequencies I found a few other people reflecting around this same topic.

• Kris De Decker @ the great simplification describes how we will have to adapt to nature, e.g. his website runs on solar power and is sometimes offline.

• Douglas Rushkoff names it perfectly @ Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff. The ancient Greek had two words for time:

  • Kronos: time on the clock and

  • Kairos: human timing

After some reflection I realised that oftentimes I had felt something similar within myself: when I want to finish some task on the laptop and I do not attend to my baby, when I want to make the most of my time in the office and I do not take the time to properly greet my colleagues, etc.

In fact, it is probably the same I started to notice when I switched from a western society to the Tanzanian: why is everything so slow, so inefficient, so unproductive? Why do my colleagues need 2 hours to discuss or decide something that I and other westerners do in 10 minutes? Why do greetings require 3-4 questions and answers instead of a simple: Hey! Hello!

I also realised that this disconnection between Kronos and Kairos is nothing new to me, it is core to the distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources that I learnt at school. The latter are those for which at our current usage rates (Kronos), stocks get eventually (when is eventually?) depleted because they are “refilled” at a slower speed (Kairos).

A number of questions come to mind:

• What are we, as a civilization, rushing for? What are we optimising for?

• What is the end goal? What is enough?

• When do we want to reach there?

If I want to visit my mother at her home, I will walk, bike or take the train depending on what time it is and when I want to be there. In this example, the goal and the timeline are clear; but, I, honestly, don’t know what our (implicit) goal as civilization is and neither what the deadline is.

Another example to illustrate this is my first business experience: I felt that my colleagues were too slow to produce enough according to our targets. The question is: how were those targets established? Well, it was basically a matter of competition: how much are people ready to pay for our product in our market? How many products do we believe we can sell and thus, how fast do we need to produce to lower our production costs and break even?

Something felt wrong to me and I asked myself: aren’t my colleagues, with their “slowlife”, optimising for something more meaningful than I am? i.e. spending quality time with the people around them.

Because, what was enough for us in that business? Enough was just enough to beat our competition, i.e. to exploit people or nature more than others do, to be more innovative or technologically advanced than them, to convince potential clients about the benefits of our products, to play political games to gain favours from powerful people, etc.

Notice also how disconnected this is from what our productive system is supposed to achieve: satisfy needs (profit is just the incentive we set to do so, right?). In our case I found myself thinking how to “push” colleagues to work faster and people (potential clients) to buy our products.

Ideally, I believe we should pause, collectively reflect on such questions and agree on their answers.

That is a difficult task, it feels like trying to stop a wave or the wind. Still, we can all find small moments to generate micro reflection moments with those around us.

Another interesting question is: What is the engine behind that unstoppable wave? And what do we need to understand to shift gears and live a life adapted to kairos?

What People in The week call “The story of more” encapsulates many factors with precision, but, what are some of those factors?

Capitalism? Colonialism? Markets? Profit? Private property? The state? Monopolies? Money? The current monetary system? Power abuse? Fear? Our accounting system? The metrics we use? Financial system? Consumerism? Commodities? Corporations? Marketing? Globalization? Competition? Democracy? Lack of democracy? Us? Nature?

In fact, what are each of these concepts (+ many others not listed here)? What does each of them mean and what are the relationships among them?

There is a lot to unpack and understand there (collective intelligence). But slowly, we can probably make sense of what is going on and find some common ground.

When trying to make sense and to find common ground I have realised that there are at least two basic topics, for which urgent agreement is needed, else I feel that conversations get stuck or do not make sense.

Ecological destruction

It is sometimes said that this complex engine is the source of most of the material abundance we live in. We humans are lazy, we need carrots or sticks to work. Competition is the engine of innovation and technological advance. Those might be partially true, but I also believe that we have gone too far: nothing on Earth grows indefinitely because that means destroying what supports us. The paper clip maximizer is a good analogy.

Power/inequality

I also think that just because some people believe that there is never enough (that the end goal is unreachable), all 8,000 million people on Earth should not simply follow and behave as if there was never enough. No problem if some people always want more, but we should not create and live in systems that force everyone to live in a “there is never enough” mode.

To finalise I would like to mention a few examples that bring some hope.

I recently got to know about a stone mine in my town where anyone can easily get a mining licence and where miners only use simple tools. Apparently not long ago some people started to use dynamite to speed up the process, but others complained because they realised that their livelihood was being endangered: if they all used dynamite the mine would get depleted soon and they would no longer have an income source. I see this as a nice attempt to synchronise Kronos and Kairos. It, sure, will have many drawbacks (e.g. how do these people compete with others surrounding mines that are privately held and use more advanced technology?), but it seems that people paused, collectively reflected and found answers to questions like:

What is the end goal? What is enough? When do we want to reach there?

Gregory Landua in this podcast episode mentioned what he defined as the best managed common pool resource in the world (admitting thereafter that it was far from being sustainable): In Alaska fishermen agreed to fish salmon in the sea instead of simply waiting for salmon to go upstream the river. A “waste” of resources that ensured that salmon would live in that ecosystem forever.

Asante for reading.

Learn more: Governing the commons by Elinor Ostrom.