What Time Binds

A public lab notebook for closing the Korzybskian Gap—and growing a civilization that can live with its own power.

We’re living through a strange mismatch: our tools keep compounding, while our institutions, habits, and moral reflexes move like they’re wearing ankle weights. In Adulthood of Humanity (AoH)—my book planned for publication in 2026—I call this mismatch the Korzybskian Gap.

What Time Binds is where I work on that problem in public.

This Substack exists for one purpose: to help readers see the gap clearly, name the outdated maps that keep steering us into it, and practice the kind of long-horizon thinking that makes a mature civilization possible.

What I mean by “What Time Binds.”

Yes, humans are tool-makers. But we’re also time-binders: we inherit knowledge, refine it, and pass it forward—across generations, not just across news cycles. So, in our case, time binds knowledge.

But that capacity is under pressure:

• attention systems that profit from urgency

• institutions that reward short-term performance

• cognitive overload and inequality that shrink “bandwidth” for long-term judgment

• tribal certainty that feels like clarity

What Time Binds is my effort to protect and strengthen the human ability to think across time—especially in an era of AI-scale acceleration.

What you’ll get here

I write from a place I know well: the tension between the Engineer and the Gardener.

The Engineer in me respects power. It loves systems, leverage, feedback loops, and tools that scale. It asks: What works? What’s efficient? What can we build? It sees how technology compounds—and why the Gap keeps widening when our institutions can’t keep pace.

The Gardener in me respects limits. It cares about soil quality: trust, meaning, attention, childhood, community, and the slow conditions that make human beings and societies stable. It asks: What’s being depleted? What will this do over time? What needs protection to grow?

What Time Binds is where those two parts of me work together—without pretending one can replace the other.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• The Gap, explained without slogans
  Clear breakdowns of the mismatch between exponential tools and slower human systems—using real examples, not panic.

• Ghost Maps (the outdated scripts still running the show)
  Posts that identify stale assumptions in politics, culture, education, and tech—then replace them with maps that match the terrain.

• Tools for thinking like a Time-Binder
  Practical habits and mental frameworks to protect attention, increase judgment, and build what I call a stronger cognitive immune system in a noisy world.

• Global Brain field notes
  How the networked world shapes us—what the attention economy rewards, what it erodes, and why “more information” so often produces less wisdom.

• Type 1 thinking: institutions that can handle our own power
  Sketches, models, and critiques aimed at governance and civic design that take long horizons seriously—because the future can’t keep being treated like an externality.

This is a working notebook for people who want to think clearly, build responsibly, and stay human while the tools keep getting bigger.

Who this is for

What Time Binds is for you if you’re:

• trying to make sense of AI and social change without surrendering to panic or cynicism

• tired of tribal certainty posing as analysis

• working inside institutions (education, government, industry, military, nonprofits) and feeling the lag firsthand

• hungry for frameworks that travel across domains: tech, culture, governance, and human cognition

This is not for you if you want:

• daily outrage content

• partisan talking points dressed up as “insight”

• a clean villain story with easy heroes

Why subscribe?

Because some ideas are too important to be left to algorithmic mood swings.

When you subscribe, you’ll get:

• Full access to every post and the archive (until I open paid tiers, which will be closer to publication.

• New editions delivered to your inbox—no searching, no missing the thread

• A community of readers who care about long-term thinking and institutional maturity (without the performative certainty)

I’ll publish consistently, and I’ll keep the work grounded: what I’m seeing, what I’m testing, what’s holding up, what isn’t.

How this supports Adulthood of Humanity (2026)

This Substack is the public workbench for AoH:

• a place to pressure-test concepts like the Gap, Ghost Maps, and time-binding

• a way to build shared language with readers before the book lands

• a running set of examples that show why this isn’t theoretical—our failure to mature has measurable costs

If AoH is the blueprint, What Time Binds is the field manual in progress.

A simple invitation

If you’ve felt the mismatch (power without maturity, speed without wisdom) you’re in the right place.

Subscribe. Read. Argue in good faith. Help me bind time.

(To learn more about the platform that powers this newsletter, visit Substack.com.)