Generatology™

If we had been born on a planet without rhythm, 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 heat, cold, light, and darkness moved with discernible rhythm.

The alternation of light and dark, the rise and fall of tides, the passing of seasons — rhythm is the difference of nature, allowing the relation between “the world” and “I” to become recognisable. Environmental predictability made hunting, agriculture, and future planning possible. It also allowed humans to sense time and distinguish the world. Without difference, human cognition could not arise; language would have no ground from which to occur, and society could not take form.

Sunrise and sunset are nature’s information: the language of rhythm.
Rhythm is the basic condition of civilisation.

The common notion that a day has twenty-four hours is often simplified as the time it takes the Earth to complete one rotation. But the Earth’s rotation takes roughly 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. Those missing minutes arise from the Earth’s daily orbital movement of about 0.9856°, which shifts the angle of observation; the Earth must “turn a little more” for the Sun to appear to return to the same position as the day before.

A year is not exactly 365 × 24 hours. The orbital period is approximately 365.2422 days. Noon, too, does not always arrive at exactly twelve o’clock. The Sun’s return to solar noon fluctuates by roughly plus or minus sixteen minutes, sometimes earlier, sometimes later; in any case, it is not a smooth integer. The human circadian rhythm is approximately 24 hours and 12 minutes. It varies from person to person, but is generally 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 like a patch system that smooths out the unevenness of nature: clock in at nine, lunch at twelve, meeting at two, send the summary at five. The more smoothly the system runs, the more distant our relation to rhythm becomes. We are disciplined by the institutions we have built. Like those twelve minutes that disappear each day, little by little, somewhere we fail to notice, our actions begin to obey the system rather than the rhythms of nature.

Institutions always make us feel that we are not “useful” enough. If one cannot internalise institutional logic, one appears out of place. We live inside the degrees, titles, and identities granted by institutions. The “I” must always be bound to some function, and can never simply exist.

Can we recover the natural rhythm of the body within modern society? This is the proposal of this book, and the opening through which it invites the reader to enter.

In preparing this book for publication, I filled in government forms from different countries and went through countless application systems with interfaces that seemed to belong to the previous century — as if pitching to someone who did not actually want to know who I was. When we feel impatient with institutions, it is usually not because of institutions themselves, but because, in entering them, one is required to give up control over oneself.

Institutions provide options while restricting the right to choose. What we believe to be our own choices are often merely options already framed by the system.

Please do not misunderstand me. This book does not intend to overthrow institutions. Institutions allow us to live without constant environmental threat, and to develop society with stability. It is only that we can all sense, to some degree, that the self we give to institutions has gradually exceeded the freedom we receive in return. We are almost forgetting that institutions are only a by-product of civilisation. Humans and rhythm are the beginning of civilisation.

This is not a book of spiritual self-improvement, but a book of structure that reflects on institutions through natural rhythm. If we cannot see structure, institutions will eventually determine, unconsciously, what we should say, what we should do, and even what we should think.

This book attempts to unpack the intentions of institutions, so that we may have the chance to recover rhythm and initiate the next generation of civilisation. It does so by logically arguing for a proposition that appears absurd, yet cannot be denied:

Human beings and the universe share the same design structure.