Once upon a time, there was a time that returned.
It returned with the seasons, with the winds, with the seeds.
It returned as questions return, as dreams do, as wrinkles do.
It did not ask to be spared, nor invested.
It gave itself, it opened, it played along.
Then came the man of the machine,
and he put wheels on time.
It was sliced into even pieces.
Each slice a task. Each task a duty.
And from that day on, time never came back again.
It ran.
The Earth turns. Blood pulses. The waves return.
This cyclic rhythm—innate to the reality around us—shaped for millennia our way of living.
In our becoming Sapiens, we lived immersed in a cyclical perception of the events that define life on this planet.
We were one among many species—not seeking a place in the world, but living in it, with the same naturalness as every other creature passing through the Earth.
Today, if you asked any modern person to draw History on a sheet of paper, you would almost certainly see the pencil move to trace a straight line: events of the past on the left, hopes for what is to come on the right.
No sign of return. No hint of a cycle.
And yet, an individual life probably rests more truthfully on the curve of a parabola than on the rigidity of a line.
So why, at some point, did we replace the circle with a straight line? What happened that led human beings to break the cycle and force its form into a path with no return?
As long as communities lived immersed in the cyclic rhythm of nature, their representations of the forces that moved those cycles reflected the idea of return. There arose deities guarding the natural elements, honored through hymns and rituals marking the repetition of the seasons. Heaven and Earth did not promise arrivals, but returns.
Then, at some point in history, an idea took hold:
the idea that time no longer came back, but flowed in a single direction—toward salvation, redemption, the end of time.
And so the many gods tied to each aspect of life and nature were sacrificed on the altar of one: a single creator god who gave meaning to the entire narrative of time.
With the rise of monotheism—particularly the religions of the Book—a linear conception of time took shape, built upon a single origin (Creation), a central event (Revelation), and an awaited end (Judgment, or Fulfillment).
Cyclicity was reduced to an archaic memory—superstition, paganism.
The eternal return gave way to the history of salvation, moving toward a “beyond” that was not cyclical but eschatological.
In that moment, time ceased to be a field in which to dwell and became a road to be followed—
a road traced by an external authority, by a superior will, assigning linear meaning to the events of the world.
When the religious horizon lost its hold on collective imagination, the straight line did not return to a circle. There was no longer a god to dictate time’s course, yet the idea remained that life must race toward a goal. The promise merely changed form: no longer eternal salvation, but material well-being. No longer redemption of the soul, but redemption of the human condition through growth.
Modern thought inherited from religion the linear skeleton of time, while that external authority—that superior will—took the shape of a new divinity in the making: development.
A notion as simple as it was absolute: tomorrow must be more than today, and the day after tomorrow more than tomorrow.
The destination was no longer the hereafter, but an indefinite “better,” always projected one step ahead.
On this terrain, technique found its natural habitat.
No longer one tool among many, but the key to accelerate the race.
And it could not fail to become the central instrument of the mechanistic worldview—the paradigm shift that spread by turning everything into a set of resources and gears.
Technique ceased to be a means to an end and became an end in itself: the tangible sign that progress was underway.
Every innovation was taken as proof that the line continued forward, and that stopping would be a betrayal of the promise.
As Jacques Ellul insightfully wrote in his prophetic work The Technological Society (1964), technique does not merely offer solutions—it imposes a logic, a rhythm, a new form of temporality.
It accelerates—and with it, perceived time accelerates.
It brings about a new conception of life’s flow, one that allows no “time for,” only “useful time.”
Time, once a space of meaning, becomes a container for performance.
The straight line becomes an obligation.
In many parts of the world—especially where modernization has not yet imposed its full pace—time still retains a lived quality.
It is not just measurement, but relationship: with the land, with others, with the rhythm of bodies and seasons.
This kind of time, which serves not to produce but to live, is regarded with suspicion by those who have already surrendered to the logic of efficiency.
And where time has not yet been colonized, a mechanism of “correction” is triggered:
technology is introduced not to meet a real need, but to replace a nonconforming logic.
A telling example occurred in some rural areas of East Africa.
Farmers there had developed an effective agroecological method: they planted certain species around their fields that attracted crop-eating insects, thus protecting the grain.
Those same plants were then used as fodder for livestock, creating a balance between agriculture and animal husbandry—a virtuous, resilient, local cycle.
But this practice was criticized by technical and institutional voices: it lacked the “proper technologies.”
In the name of modernization, they promoted the adoption of patented seeds and synthetic pesticides—often produced by large multinational corporations.
A supposed backwardness was denounced, while the complexity of local agricultural knowledge was ignored.
This dynamic is deeply ideological: it hides economic interests under the guise of technical rationality.
It promotes the introduction of technologies that foster dependency on patents, external inputs, and global markets—in places where forms of balance already existed between production, environment, and lived time.
Ellul’s thinking helps us see this for what it is: not a simple transfer of technology, but a process of anthropological redefinition.
It is an attempt to align perceptions of time to a single paradigm—that of performance and accumulation—making “modern” both territories and minds that still resist.
In some parts of the world, people still live time differently: not as something to be measured, invested, or earned, but as something to be lived.
Time follows the rhythms of nature, of bodies, of relationships.
It is not a race, but a presence.
This way of living time seems strange—even irritating—to those who now believe that every minute must serve to produce something.
Where slowness remains a virtue, some see a problem to be fixed.
And so “modernization” arrives: technologies, rules, and systems designed to make everything faster, more efficient, more in line with Western models.
Yet behind this drive lies a hidden belief: that there is only one right way to live—and that everyone must adapt.
In truth, many of these transformations do not arise from people’s needs, but from the economic interests of those who profit from a uniform world—
one where the same seeds, the same software, the same educational models can be sold everywhere.
Jacques Ellul warns us: the problem is not technique itself, but the idea that everything must submit to its logic.
When time becomes merely a tool to produce more, we lose something essential: the freedom to choose how to live.
That is why, in some cases, saying no to forced modernization is not backwardness.
It is, on the contrary, a form of lucidity.
It is defending the right to another possible time—
more human, slower, more our own.
A time that does not rush toward an imposed finish line,
but returns, as the seasons, the winds, the seeds return.
A time that, like the wave, knows how to come back—
that gives, opens, and plays along.
Where every arrival is also a return,
and tomorrow never overshadows today.
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