So I rage-quit the news again. I didn’t want to just sit there while men (mostly men) behaved badly and got away with it, trashing our beautiful planet and its beautiful people.
I wanted to do something about all the suffering, all the wrongdoing.
Don’t we all wish we could do something? I had to do something.
So I went out to the front of my house, under the early autumn sky. I took with me an hourglass. I took a photo of it, empty against the sky, just the narrowing where one grain of sand passes through at a time.
See above. This is my Sanity Hourglass, and I wanted to show it to you.
I call it that because it’s keeping me sane at this mad moment in world history, when those who study world history can only wonder if anyone in charge ever has.
Out the front of my house I looked up at the blue and white sky and recalled this: For all the sand of time looming over us and falling away onto a pile below us, there’s only ever one grain of now passing at a time.
The sand in my hourglass isn’t just time though, it’s everything in my massive ancient shared mental life: memory, imagination and present experience.
All the complex history and culture in which my little life is nested.
The Sanity Hourglass forces it all through a tiny narrowing. One grain at a time.
In this model, each grain of sand up in the future chamber is a dream or fear of things that haven’t happened yet. Below the narrowing is a drop onto a pile of the past. Memories of all that has passed.
Which is a nice neat idea, right? Future above, past below. Plans and fears use imagination, and live above, while memories live below. Present experience now, imagination for the future, memory for the past. Simples!
But of course it’s not that simple. Deep parts of our brains can’t tell imagination from memory, or either from present moment experience. That’s how horror movies work.
And why I can’t do horror movies. It feels too real for me. I know it isn’t, but my deep brain doesn’t. It gets confused.
Deep brain confusion means that in the Sanity Hourglass there are plenty of grains above the narrowing that can feel like past experience, and grains below that could feel like the future.
Think about it: your past experience shapes your imagination of the future, while some memories can feel like they are still happening, or will happen again.
That might seem weird, but it’s really just evolution. We are descended from the tribes who survived, right? Because they somehow developed brains that convinced them that the past threats that had overwhelmed them hadn’t passed yet.
These brains that got confused about time protected our species by ensuring we erred on the side of caution at all times, to cover all possibilities. It wasn’t nice or easy, but it worked.
So now here in 2026 with our god-like technology, mediaeval institutions and paleolithic nervous systems (to misquote E.O. Wilson) we need to remind ourselves that technology is the latecomer to the party.
Long before we humans blew molten sand into hourglass shapes, we walked on millions of grains of sand, one footstep at a time. I think we must have noticed that one-at-a-time-ness. Because if deep down we couldn’t distinguish past from present from future, we needed ways to use our present moment focus to stay sane.
Mindfulness practices are some of the oldest culture handed down on our planet, and they encourage us to use the now as a respite from dwelling in the past and future. Nothing new there, especially not…now.
But then, we novelty-loving primates do like to have the old made new now and then, don’t we? And the enshittification of everything has sadly rendered mindfulness a meaningless middle-management weasel word.
It’s not alone. Many precious words have lost their meaning, scrolled into oblivion as an odd democracy claims some words for new things, and rampant autocracy hoovers up others.
This is where the Sanity Hourglass gets multi-coloured, because we live so very vicariously. Always have. Brains that confuse time also confuse self and other.
Am I angry or are you? Who’s the arsehole here? Who do I love? Who do I hate? Who should I kill? These projections organised small group living for tens of milennia, and still do now.
Only now we use screens that can expose us to the experiences of hundreds of others per second. Billions of possible interactions at any moment. So what does that do to our ancient hourglasses?
It gets weird in there, frankly. Our past piles up with different coloured grains of other peoples’ pasts, not just in our immediate tribe but from anywhere on earth.
Our futures contain the different-coloured imaginings of not just the storyteller or shaman in the cave but of writers, journalists, politicians, advertisers, influencers, bloggers, activists, lobbyists and trolls from the comments.
How do you sort that multi-coloured sandy mess out?
Here the Sanity Hourglass earns its name. It has an actual sane answer: One grain at a time.
Because in 2026 there is so much of everything, but you have only one body, and one moment in which to exist. Which is the only moment in which you get to choose anything. Everything else is out of your reach, above or below.
Sure, use the now to plan for the future, or use the now to reflect on the past.
But when you get lost there swimming in weird sand of many colours, as being human you surely will, just know to swim down if you’re in the future, or up if you’re in the past, and come back to the one place where it’s simple.
The one place that can hold how complicated everything is.
One grain at a time.
#psychiatrying
My Doctor's Handwriting 