There’s never enough time. We might be on time for this, but we already worry about being late for that. The clocks are ticking. Even when some days pass, our times remind us ever so tirelessly that our time will come. Sooner or later.
Most of us feel at the mercy of time that we’ve neatly categorized in hours and minutes, weekdays and weekends, to make us feel in control. Meanwhile, most of us are chasing the free minutes, the holidays that’ll recharge us swiftly so we can go back to our schedules.
In that, loneliness has become temporal, too.
In the latest episode of The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple), I speak with Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes, a temporalist, a researcher on our relationship with time, born and raised in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the founder of Temporality Lab, a transdisciplinary practice rooted in decolonial perspectives on time and ancestral knowledge.
Our world runs on calendars and clocks that are, of course, purely invented. What Gustavo Nogueira calls chrono-colonialism, and its roots go deeper than most of us realize:
The mechanical clock appeared in European monasteries around the 13th century, first to regulate prayer, then labor. By the 19th century it had become a tool of industrial capitalism — time was something you could sell by the hour, and workers’ bodies were expected to synchronize to it. In 1884, Greenwich Mean Time was established as the global standard — not by science, but by colonial administration. The Gregorian calendar, imposed across colonized territories from the 16th century onward, replaced indigenous seasonal, lunar, and ancestral cycles with a single Christian-European framework we live by to this day.
“We learned to be in such a rush, in such a fast pace, guided by a lot of values that talk about scale, productivity, efficiency, growth. That doesn’t allow us to pay attention in the temple, in the rhythm, that things want to emerge inside of ourselves.”
When everyone is living inside their own individual timeline, optimizing their own schedule, pursuing their own goals, extracting value from every hour, something breaks in our capacity to be genuinely with each other.
“Around the world, we have people that are connected to the land, to the territory, to the rhythms of nature, to the rhythms of themselves. We are just not aware of these cycles because we are so exposed — through media and through other moments of our daily life — that make us believe that we are wrong to question this fast pace.”
But perhaps we can remember and commemorate our many relationships to time again?
Listen to the full conversation of The Oneliness Podcast “Decolonizing Time: On Loneliness, Ancestral Knowledge and Belonging with Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes“.
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With love, as always,
Monika
