In our understanding of the present, too, misunderstandings abound. We tend to view the present moment as fleeting. Like the white rabbit, racing and skipping ahead through the enchanted forest, glancing at his pocket watch, fitful and flitting - yet never captured. As noted by the godfather of phenomenology, Henri Bergson, this misunderstanding stems from our confusion about how things are ***measured***, versus how they are ***experienced***. We measure time in fractions of planetary rotation - seconds, minutes, hours. But that is not how we experience it. Bergson pointed out that there is the **time of the clock**, clean and divisible, a metric imposed upon reality, and then there is **lived time** (durée réelle), fluid, elastic, shaped by consciousness rather than arithmetic. The two exist side by side, but they do not move in synchrony. One is imposed, the other experienced. One measures, the other subjectively **is**. This discrepancy - between time as it is quantified and time as it is lived - is not merely a philosophical curiosity. It is one of the great engines of uncertainty in human life, a fissure that runs through science and politics, society and institutions, traditionalists and progressives. We are caught between two realities, each equally real, yet irreconcilable in their logic. Music is a prime example: Beethoven's Opus 27, Nr. 2, also known as the *Moonshine Sonata*, is nothing but a sequence of frequencies that change over time. However, what we perceive are delicate harmonies of deep anguish. We hear the melancholy sound of a dismal and dejected man, played in the key of a broken heart. This discrepancy between ***objective measurement*** and ***subjective experience*** is a great source of uncertainty and confusion. It has driven a wedge between science and politics, society and institutions, traditionalists and progressives. Yet, both are equally real. Their boundaries are blurry and permeable. Science, and by extension modern governance, aligns itself with objective measurement - the segmented, mechanical time that can be recorded, analysed, and converted into policy. Economics depends upon this, structuring markets around fiscal quarters and growth projections, as though human behaviour can be plotted on a Cartesian grid. The state operates in legislative cycles, education in semesters, industry in production quotas. Society, however, does not move so cleanly. It moves in waves of **feeling**, in surges of **urgency** and **exhaustion**, in the unpredictability of **collective mood**. A political movement does not unfold in neat quarterly reports. The experience of a single year under war or economic crisis is not equivalent to a year of peace, no matter what the clock suggest. This schism manifests in the perennial war between traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists are, in many ways, **defenders of lived time**, of the organic rhythms of culture, memory, and continuity, the sense that a society must evolve in accordance with its own internal pulse rather than the mechanical urgency of progress. Progressives, conversely, seek to synchronise human affairs with the **accelerating time** of technological and social innovation. The former demand **stability**, the latter demand **movement**. The former experience the rush of change as dislocation, as a violation of the intuitive sense that societies must change in step with their own **inner durée**. The latter see stagnation as an existential failure, a refusal to align with the trajectory of history. The conflict is not about ideology alone; it is about tempo, about the very perception of **movement through time itself**. Thus, uncertainty reigns, because we are asked to live in two worlds at once. We plan our lives according to **measurable time**, but we experience them in **felt time**, and the divergence between the two creates a kind of existential dissonance. We elect governments based on **statistical progress** but revolt based on the erosion of **lived security**. We develop technology at an exponential rate but struggle to integrate it at a human pace. The world is both moving too fast and not fast enough, depending on which lens one looks through. And so, we argue—not merely about policy, but about reality itself, about what counts as “real” time. We have become **temporal dualists**, caught between the measured world and the experienced world, uncertain which one we truly inhabit. The truth, of course, is that we inhabit **both**, and it is this irreducible fact that continues to divide, confuse, and propel us forward, whether we are ready or not. [[Future|Next Page]]