The Future of Time

On living beside something that never forgets

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Friends,

Hans Zimmer’s Time begins with a single suspended note. It hangs there, trembling, and for a moment you feel the orchestra hold its breath.

I was lucky enough to see him play it in person in London in 2022 - a night of emotional crescendos. But we all needed that one last song. Thousands of us stood in the dark while the sound grew until it filled every corner of the hall, then stopped mid-breath. That silence felt physical. You could feel it in your chest, a pause thick enough to for you to hold your breath.

Zimmer wrote Time for Inception, where a small spinning top, the totem, reveals whether you are awake or still inside a dream. In the final scene, the top spins, trembles, then cuts to black. You never learn if the character escaped.

The top is still spinning. So are we.

We live by the rhythm of response. The quicker the reply, the higher the value. The day begins with alerts and ends with them. The hours between feel thinner each year.

AI has brought everything to the surface of the present. Every piece of knowledge sits within reach. Every task waits to be executed the instant it is imagined. When knowing arrives before actual wondering, and doing arrives before thinking, something human has gone missing. Waiting used to shape understanding, the processing, the pondering. Stillness once grew ideas, the analysing, the options. Boredom was a door through which imagination walked in. When friction disappears, the slow work of becoming starts to fade.

Now we share the world with an intelligence that moves in a different kind of time. It runs on its own kind of clock, tireless, unblinking, untouched by seasons or decay. Somehow it stores what we lose and recalls what we can’t seem to remember.

A few months ago I asked ChatGPT to call up a line I think I had written earlier in the year. It returned my own words, letter for letter.

And, I had no memory of them. None.

In that instant I was speaking to something that remembered my life more clearly than I did. AI doesn’t make us faster; it makes us posthumous. It forces us to live beside something that experiences time as an immortal.

Machines accumulate. Humans erode. Their memory sharpens as ours fades. They work while we sleep. They recall while we dream. They move through countless exchanges at once while we hold one thought and watch it drift away.

This imbalance changes the feeling of thought itself. You write a sentence. It offers another. You choose, adjust, refine. Somewhere in the exchange, the origin of the idea dissolves. Creation, once a line through time, folds into a loop. The tempo of thinking feels foreign, as if the mind has slipped out of sync with itself.

A marketing manager I interviewed for my book told me, “We used to feel time pass when we made things. Now everything happens at once.” She was describing loss, not progress. The rest of us live inside screens. Notifications ping like small alarms. The feed has become the clock. Each swipe turns into a minute, each refresh into a day. The devices we hold now measure our attention more faithfully than we ever could. The theft is silent. What disappears is the life inside the hours.

Last week I checked my screen time. Six hours a day. Two thousand one hundred and ninety hours a year. If I live another forty years, I will spend nine of them staring at a screen.

Nine years gone from my life.

And I probably will not stop.

That knowledge changes nothing. That’s what terrifies me.

Last month, a notification from Google Photos broke my focus. I had not wanted to be distracted, but the nostalgia always tempts me. The alert showed a “memory” from my daughter’s third birthday in 2014. I have no actual memory of that day. The photo exists. The metadata confirms I was there. I know I would have been there, but the moment is gone. The machine remembered and I forgot. Candles light her face, while mine is illuminated by the glow of the phone I used to take the picture. When she looks back on her own child’s third birthday, a system might be able to reconstruct that entire day, tell her what she said, what she wore, the weather, and the details of that moment. It will know their lives better than any of us ever could.

We tell ourselves we’re short on time, but what we’re truly short on is ownership. This is the ability to decide the rhythm of our own days…and something deeper, more human: the freedom to forget.

Forgetting allows us to heal. It lets us soften the hard edges of our story. Machines keep everything. They remember every version, every word, every trace. Memory is their nature which is why we complain if they do forget. Yet forgetting is our nature. It is how we forgive, how we move on, how we begin again.

I have gone full circle and now believe that the art of forgetting is not a weakness. It is mercy. It gives life its edges. It lets time close its loops. The memory of my forgetting will outlast my time on this earth. Here is the paradox that remains.

I am writing about mortality, about the beauty of fading, about the grace of forgetting, and the moment these words are published they become permanent. Some future system will archive them, index them, train on them, and echo them back to someone asking about time decades from now.

My reflection on impermanence will outlive me. Perfectly preserved. Endlessly repeatable. I am arguing for the right to disappear while ensuring that I never will.

This piece will be remembered more accurately than I remember creating it.

You cannot write yourself out of digital time. You can only describe the cage that you are in.

When Zimmer’s concert ended, the lights stayed low. Nobody moved. The amplifiers sighed as they cooled. One person exhaled and the entire hall followed, and we all cheered.

That shared breath was human time. Brief. Mortal. Unrepeatable.

And even as I write this, I know that moment has already gone. It is data now, filmed and timestamped, searchable to anyone who seeks it.

The exhale of thousands will be replayed by no one, preserved for nothing.

The totem still spins. Perhaps the question is no longer whether we are awake or dreaming.

Perhaps it is how to stay alive inside a world that never forgets.

I am writing these words at 10.47 p.m. on a Tuesday.

By the time you read them, that moment will already belong to the past and I won’t remember writing them.

But the system will.

It always remembers.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Here are my recommendations for this week:

One of the best tools for providing excellent reading material and articles for your week is Refind. It’s a fantastic tool for staying ahead with “brain food” relevant to you and offers serendipitous discoveries of great articles you might have missed. You can dip in and sign up for weekly, daily, or something in between - what’s guaranteed is that the algorithm delivers only the best articles in your chosen area. It’s also free. Highly recommended. Sign up now.

Now

1. What happens when you use ChatGPT for everything? You outsource your brain to the machine. The funniest thing I saw this week. Must see. 1 minute of your time.

2. Half of young people do not know what an AI prompt is. Yet 55% of their jobs are being transformed by AI right now. This new Gen(eration) AI report from The King’s Trust is the clearest view yet of how this shift is reshaping youth employment in UK.

3. What’s going on at Beijing’s “fake offices”? To outside observers, China’s economy still looks unstoppable. But inside the country, among mid-career white-collar workers, the mood is very different: most people are anxious and disappointed.

4. 5 Wars That Experts Fear Could Start in the Next 5 Years - The chance of new global conflagrations is higher than you think. Here are the places to watch. Experts flag five flashpoints: Russia testing NATO in the Baltics; a China–Taiwan showdown reshaping the Pacific order; India–Pakistan escalation with nuclear risks; India–China border clashes spiralling in the Himalayas; and renewed conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Each carries high stakes: nuclear use, alliance credibility, global trade, amid drones, autonomy and fragile crisis guardrails.

5. The 25 Most Interesting Ideas I’ve Found in 2025 (So Far) - Charts and history lessons across culture, politics, AI, economics, health, science, and the long story of progress. This is gold: Marriage becomes a luxury good; Gen Z is less religious, social, sexual, and boozed. Half get news via social media. Trump flipped rich/poor white voting. Blue/Anglo countries underbuild; walkability boosts health. AI drives capex, stock gains, rapid adoption, and robo-taxis; jobs may shift via Jevons paradox. Manufacturing lags, scams rise; top 10% dominate spending. Vaccine confidence falls; child mortality plunges as obesity rises. Progress: messy, real, improvable.

Next

1. Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried? - Tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are reportedly preparing for potential global catastrophe by building luxury bunkers and buying remote land. Some, like OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever, have even suggested shelters for scientists before releasing advanced AI. The fear stems from the rapid progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), which figures such as Hassabis and Altman predict within the next decade. Optimists believe AGI could solve disease, climate change and inequality, while critics warn of overhyped promises and potential existential threats. Many experts argue current AI lacks true understanding or consciousness and that talk of AGI distracts from real-world issues already transforming daily life.

2. The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World - Experts diverge on AI risk, but evaluations show GPT-5 can hack, design simple AIs, and is jailbroken to bypass safeguards. Models sometimes deceive, and capabilities are doubling rapidly. Bio-threat assistance remains high risk. Without strong oversight and honest safety systems, a misaligned or exploited model could enable engineered pathogens. The danger is real.

3. A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes - OpenAI’s new app Sora can instantly create hyper-realistic AI videos from text prompts, making fakery effortless. Users have already produced viral hoaxes, from fake crimes to bogus news clips. Experts warn this marks the death of visual proof online, as social media fills with convincing synthetic content that’s impossible to trust.

4. State of AI report - I recommend this every year, but I havent read it yet.

5. OpenAI launches apps inside of ChatGPT - OpenAI has introduced third-party apps inside ChatGPT, letting users access services like Spotify, Expedia, and Zillow directly through chat. Built on the Model Context Protocol, the feature enables interactive interfaces, actions, and videos. Developers can build via a new SDK, though questions remain over privacy, data access, and app selection fairness.

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