I recorded this episode on Christmas Eve, not out of allegiance to any particular religious institution, but because Christmas Eve still does something rare in the calendar.

It creates a pause that doesn’t belong to any authority. It marks an ending without demanding resolution. It gives many of us permission to stop moving for a moment and ask where we actually are.

This episode is about time — not as abstraction, not as philosophy, and not as technology — but as lived experience. Specifically, what has happened to our shared sense of time over the last decade, and why so many of us feel so displaced inside it.

The story inside this episode begins in 2016.

People remember 2016 as a particularly bad year, as if it announced itself. It didn’t. It arrived quietly and then began taking things away with unsettling regularity. Bowie. Prince. Cohen. Fisher. Cultural figures who felt less like celebrities and more like structural supports. By the end of that year, the calendar itself had become suspect. Loss no longer arrived with space around it. Events stacked. Grief turned ambient.

In hindsight, that’s why 2016 feels strangely nostalgic now. It was the last time loss still arrived with punctuation. People mourned together. The calendar still felt like a shared object, something communal rather than mechanical.

Everything after blurred.

COVID flattened time completely. Days lost texture. Weeks collapsed. Months passed without landmarks. “COVID time” entered the language because nothing else could hold the disorientation. When lockdowns lifted, time didn’t recover — it accelerated. Entire years compressed. Memory misfiled whole seasons. The world resumed motion without recovering rhythm.

AI followed close behind, not as spectacle or rupture, but as subtraction. Roles disappeared quietly. Skills aged overnight. Many people weren’t fired; they were simply no longer called. By the middle of the decade, millions were still standing where March 2020 had left them, while systems continued advancing without synchronization.

By late 2025, another phrase began circulating, first as a joke and then without humor: NPC. Not metaphorically. Literally. Background characters inside someone else’s machine. The comparison resonated because it mapped too well.

As time felt less inhabitable, people did what humans have always done. They looked backward. Ancient calendars resurfaced. So did old warnings about time itself. The Book of Enoch reappeared, not for its angels or apocalyptic imagery, but for its insistence that when rulers alter the calendar, disorder follows. Not because the heavens change — but because human reckoning does.

By December 2025, attention turned upward again. An interstellar object passed through public consciousness. Astronomers were calm. The math closed. There was no threat. The sky behaved perfectly, which somehow made it worse. Precision without meaning unsettled people already out of sync with the calendar.

At the same time, arguments about years returned. Snake. Horse. Collapse. Acceleration. These weren’t predictions. They were attempts to locate ourselves inside time again.

The episode closes by asking a quieter question.

If earlier countercultural movements, from Timothy Leary onward, tried to escape systems that felt dishonest or misaligned, what does agency look like now that there is no outside left to retreat into?

The answer isn’t withdrawal. It’s re-entry.

Calendars were never neutral. They were built to make time inhabitable — to space loss, to allow for return, to insist that beginnings and endings mattered. When they fail, people don’t abandon time. They rebuild it together.

That is the work waiting for us in 2026.

Not to outrun time.Not to optimize it.But to inhabit it again — deliberately, imperfectly, and humanly.

Thank you for sharing this pause in time.