The Labyrinth of Time | How Modern Time Is Making Us Anxious, Rushed, and Disconnected from the Present

In the organizer's words:

Overview

⏱️Schedule:  Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🗣️Language: English

We're obsessed with time. We track it, save it, waste it, kill it, and never seem to have enough of it. We measure our lives in deadlines, calendars, and the anxious ticking of clocks. But what actually is time? And why does our modern relationship with it feel so… exhausting?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the way we experience time isn't natural—it's constructed. Different civilizations have had radically different relationships with time, and the linear, productivity-obsessed version we live under is a relatively recent invention. One that's making us anxious, disconnected from the present, and perpetually running toward a future that never arrives.

This talk is about stepping out of that loop.

What we'll cover:

• How ancient civilizations understood time—and what we've lost in the shift to modern clock-time.
• Why "objective time" is a useful illusion—and how it quietly alienates us from our own experience.
• How modernity turned time into a scarce resource to be exploited, optimized, and managed—and why that framing is making us miserable.
• The existential roots of time anxiety—and what our fear of impermanence reveals about how we confront (or avoid) mortality.
• Insights from Eastern philosophy on the "Eternal Now"—and how deconstructing past and future can reconnect us to the only moment we actually have.

Speaker

Miguel Estéfano Mora Vera

Miguel Estéfano Mora Vera is a philosopher who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, specializing in the existential legacies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. By synthesizing Western and Eastern perspectives, he offers fresh insights into the nature of reality and the modern human condition. Also an active musician and composer, he views the creative process as a vital extension of his philosophical work.