Living Beyond the Empire’s Clock

Rejecting the urgency of the news cycle and reclaiming time for moral work that outlasts regimes

Most mornings, before I even sit up in bed, I feel behind. The Echo buzzes, and suddenly I’m sprinting in place. Another executive decree from a president who thrives on chaos. Another Supreme Court ruling, dropped without warning, overturning decades in a single sentence. Another scandal cooked up to fill airtime. It feels as though every morning begins in crisis and ends in exhaustion.

Maybe you know this feeling: the chest tightens, the mind races, and every headline shouts that this—right now, this hour—is the breaking point. But I’ve started to recognize the pattern. This isn’t just anxiety; it’s tempo. A deliberate, manufactured rhythm meant to keep me off-balance.

I call it the Empire’s clock. A ticking machine designed to make us shallow, reactive, and tired before we even start.

Authoritarian systems have always been master clockmakers. Rome dated years by emperors as if time itself bowed to Caesar. Stalin carved life into five-year plans and even experimented with a “continuous work week,” where workers had staggered rest days so families could never gather at the same time. The Nazis proclaimed their Reich would last a thousand years; it lasted twelve. Every tyranny understands the same trick: control the tempo, and you control the people.

Today’s empire is no different. Trump’s second administration runs not just on lies but on tempo warfare. One day it’s tariffs detonated overnight, destabilizing global markets. The next day it’s a loyalty purge of career officials, carried out by sunrise. Courts drop rulings like thunderclaps at the end of a term, entire precedents erased before we can catch our breath.

None of this is random. It’s the Empire’s clock, and it’s designed to make us sprint until we collapse.

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The Tyranny of Urgency

Urgency has become the water we swim in. Every headline feels like a referendum on survival. Every push alert is its own miniature apocalypse.

I know how often I let myself move to that rhythm. I scroll, I refresh, I panic. I let my mood be dictated by algorithms built to profit from my exhaustion. And I know I’m not alone.

But here’s the truth: urgency serves the empire. Endurance defeats it.

History is clear. Enslaved peoples in America sang freedom into centuries of bondage—songs measured not in days but in generations. Dissidents under Stalin kept diaries, each entry a fragile defiance against enforced silence. Vaclav Havel called it “living in truth,” a discipline that wasn’t glamorous but was stubborn, patient, and slow.

Urgency belongs to power. Endurance belongs to us.

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Another Kind of Clock

So what does it mean to live beyond the Empire’s clock? I don’t pretend I’ve figured it out, but I know it starts with choosing another rhythm.

The monastics once marked their lives in hours: dawn, midday, evening, night. Not alarms of panic, but bells of prayer. Indigenous communities still move by cycles of season and ceremony, rhythms that presidents can’t touch. Even the simple act of planting a garden is a rebellion: the soil moves at its own tempo, and no news cycle can rush it.

And sometimes, for me, it’s as small as sitting with Baldwin for an hour, reading the same paragraph again and again until it lives in me. It’s resisting the itch to rush forward, choosing instead to deepen. That may not sound like much, but in this culture of perpetual motion, it feels like open defiance.

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How to Reclaim Time

I don’t want to make this sound abstract. Here’s what I’ve tried—sometimes clumsily, sometimes with real success:

• Limit exposure to the spectacle. I check the news twice a day, not twenty. That isn’t negligence; it’s strategy. If they want me addicted to the drip-feed, then my refusal is rebellion.

• Dedicate sacred hours. Writing without my phone nearby. Cooking slowly. Walking without earbuds. These aren’t luxuries. They’re survival skills.

• Measure in years, not days. I ask myself: what will endure from this season? The tantrums will fade. But the habits of attention, compassion, and memory—that’s what I can pass on.

It isn’t about withdrawing from politics. It’s about conserving strength. When I step off the empire’s treadmill, I’m more capable of choosing my actions wisely.

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The Parallel Republic of Time

And if enough of us live this way? Something remarkable happens.

We create a parallel republic—not bound by the empire’s ticking but by the slow arc of justice and the stubborn labor of love. In this republic, we don’t let today’s scandal erase yesterday’s truth. We don’t measure democracy by the president’s tantrums but by the long continuity of human dignity.

Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke of the “arc of the moral universe.” He didn’t promise a quick fix. He promised a long bending, measured in lifetimes. Baldwin reminded us that “love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without.” That isn’t instant work. It’s long work, sacred work, requiring us to resist the empire’s stopwatch.

This republic of time is already here. We just have to choose to live in it.

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Historical Clocks and Broken Time

Every empire has believed its clock eternal. Rome reformed calendars. Stalin redefined weeks. Nazis boasted of a Reich with centuries ahead.

And yet every empire’s clock has broken. Gears rust. Bells fall silent. The hands stop turning.

Tacitus, paraphrased, once wrote of Rome, “They create desolation and call it progress.” That line has echoed for two thousand years while the emperors who inspired it are long forgotten.

And Juvenal’s bitter line—“The people long only for two things: bread and circuses”—could have been written this morning. Empires don’t just manipulate economies and politics; they manipulate time itself.

But time has always slipped their grasp.

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Talking Myself Through It

Let me be honest: I’m not writing this because I’ve mastered it. I’m writing it because I need to remember it myself.

I need to remember that I don’t have to check the headlines at 6 a.m. I need to remember that a president’s decree can’t stop the rhythm of a garden, or the slow growth of trust in a friendship, or the quiet power of a book read slowly.

I need to remember that turning away from the Empire’s clock isn’t complicity—it’s survival.

And maybe you need that reminder too. Or maybe you’re steadier than I am, and I need to borrow some of your endurance. Either way, we’re in this together, trying to find a rhythm that doesn’t destroy us.

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Breaking the Clock

The empire’s clock will not last. It never does.

Trump’s tantrums will pass. The Court’s rulings will be challenged and reshaped. The outrage cycles that dominate our mornings will be footnotes in history books.

But our heartbeat—that lasts. Our memory, our love, our stubborn endurance—that’s the rhythm that carries civilizations forward.

We don’t need to sprint to match the empire’s drum. We can walk at the pace of our own heartbeats, steady and stubborn.

The empire ticks in steel and fire.
We pulse in blood and breath.

The empire’s clock will break.
Ours will not.

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