Generatology™

If we had been born on a planet without the rhythm of day and night, human civilisation might never have existed.

Most known remains of Homo sapiens have been found across West Asia, North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe. What these regions share is their location within latitudes where water sources were relatively stable, and where cold and warmth, cloud and sunlight, followed discernible rhythms.

Anthropologists would say that environmental predictability made hunting, agriculture, and planning for the future possible, thereby allowing societies to form. But let us take the question one step further back.

The alternation of light and dark, the rise and fall of tides, the passing of seasons — rhythm is difference in nature. It allows humans to sense time, distinguish one thing from another, and recognise the relation between “I” and “the world”. Without regular differences in the external world, there would be no stable point of reference. Cognition could not reliably distinguish self from other; human beings would not become aware of themselves as human, and civilisation could not arise.


The familiar idea that a day contains 24 hours is often simplified as the time it takes the Earth to complete one rotation. But the Earth rotates in approximately 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. This discrepancy of several minutes results from the shift in perspective caused by the Earth moving about 0.9856° along its orbit each day: it must “rotate a little further” for the Sun to appear in the same position as it did the day before.

A year is not exactly 365 multiplied by 24 hours; the Earth’s orbital period is approximately 365.2422 days. Nor does noon necessarily occur at precisely twelve o’clock. The moment at which the Sun returns to its highest point shifts by roughly sixteen minutes in either direction, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. None of it resolves into a smooth whole number. The human circadian rhythm, meanwhile, is approximately 24 hours and 12 minutes. It varies from person to person, but remains slightly longer than both the Earth’s rotation and the solar day.

In other words, everyone’s watch is inaccurate, because it is aligned neither with the universe nor with the body. It is aligned only with — another watch.

Institutions are patch systems that smooth out the irregularities of natural phenomena. They erase difference, allowing human societies to coordinate around a shared consensus. Clock in at nine. Lunch at twelve. Meeting at two. Send the summary at five. The more seamlessly the system operates, the further we drift from our relation with rhythm.

Notification dots on apps, unanswered emails, milestone markers on Gantt charts: time is divided into a sequence of tasks waiting to be completed. At first, it was work. Then it became life. What time to eat, what time to exercise, what time to sleep, and for how long; travel destinations checked off one by one, items removed line by line from a to-do list. By the end of the day, we no longer remember why we were busy. We are already arranging the tasks of tomorrow.

Institutions always leave us feeling that we are not useful enough. Like the twelve minutes that disappear each day, once we forget the unnaturalness of systems, our cognition is gradually taken over without our noticing. We come to fear what remains unfinished, and to fear that we have not managed ourselves efficiently enough.

Can we reclaim the body’s natural rhythm within modern society? This is the proposition of this book, and the point of entry through which it invites readers to explore alongside it.

To bring this book into publication, I have filled out government forms across multiple countries and endured countless interfaces and application procedures left over from the last century. It feels like speaking to someone who has no real interest in knowing who you are.

When we grow impatient with systems, it is usually not because of the systems themselves, but because entering them requires us to surrender control over who we are.

Educational background, title, gender, nationality. We know that no set of labels can encompass us, yet without those labels, the “I” cannot be recognised by the system. If we cannot state an identity the system permits, we appear out of place within society.

Eventually, the self that can be recognised comes to cover the entirety of who we are. We learn to bind ourselves to the functions society expects of us, never able to “simply exist”.

This is the misalignment of modern institutions: the self that systems demand us to surrender has gradually exceeded the price required to sustain civilisation. What we exchange is no longer only time and labour, but the right to recognise who we are. We have almost forgotten that systems are merely a byproduct of civilisation. Human beings and rhythm are where civilisation begins.


The book will unpack the intentions of systems — why they take form and how they operate — giving us the possibility of recovering rhythm and initiating the next phase of civilisational generation. Ultimately, it may reveal how systems have drifted from the principles governing all phenomena, and why that drift continues to trouble us.