🍄 The Future of Time Is Not a Line

Book your trip beyond the clock.

Oct 17, 2025

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Time for change:
What if the past, present, and future aren’t a straight line at all,
but raw material for invention?

Our memories aren’t dusty archives. They are launchpads, pliable and alive, built to propel us forward. This is humanity’s true time travel: the ability to leap back and forth in our minds, remixing fragments of what was to conjure what could be. Memory is not for looking back, but for imagining the future. Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander.

Chrono-Rebellion: Why the future of travel is through time itself

Most of us live as though time were a straight line: ticking forward, parceling our days into hours, our lives into decades, our calendars into workweeks. We say it’s “running out,” as if time were a commodity we could stockpile or lose. But what if that story is wrong? What if time isn’t a river sweeping us away, but an ocean we haven’t yet learned to navigate?

Science, philosophy, and lived experience all hint at a more fluid reality. Einstein showed us that time bends with gravity and speed. Neuroscience tells us that our minds actively construct the experience of past and future, stitching them together with memory and imagination. In altered states—during meditation, in the flow of creativity—seconds can stretch into minutes, weeks collapse into blinks. And some cultures don’t even have a word for “time,” suggesting that the linear story we live by is a cultural fiction, not an absolute truth.

Elastic Time: The radical survival skill of the 21st century

In this age of acceleration, notifications pinging, news cycles collapsing, AI compressing centuries of labor into moments, our relationship with time has become fragile. People feel perpetually “time poor.” We rush through experiences only to mourn how quickly they pass. The cultural epidemic of burnout is, at heart, a crisis of temporal perception.

Rethinking time is not just philosophy, it’s survival. If time is elastic, we can learn to stretch it. By creating more vivid memories, we lengthen our lives in retrospect. By savoring presence, we slow down the rush of hours. By exploring non-linear models—like the “block universe” theory, where past, present, and future coexist—we can open space for imagination, creativity, and compassion.

The New Frontier: Time Tourism

The term "time tourism" was likely not coined by a single person, but rather it emerged from the literary tradition of time travel narratives, particularly H.G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine. Speculative fiction has already planted the seed: from The Memory Collectors and its fictional Aeon Expeditions, a company offering hour-long trips into one’s own past, these stories are not just escapism; they are cultural rehearsals for what might be next. Just as space tourism moved from fantasy to a luxury industry, time tourism, whether through technology, neurohacking, or guided states of consciousness, may emerge as a frontier of human experience.

Imagine vacations designed not by geography but by tempo: a week that feels like a month, an afternoon that dissolves into timeless stillness, a retreat where linear schedules vanish in favor of cyclical or spiral rhythms. Already, altered-state practices, psychedelics, and mindfulness movements are edging us toward these possibilities.

When progress stops being linear

Why does this resonate now?
Because innovation itself is non-linear.

Creativity thrives when networks harmonize, when divergent and convergent thinking dance in rhythm. By loosening our grip on the clock, we create the conditions for breakthroughs, in science, in art, in how we live together. Time Tourism, then, is not just about escaping into illusion. It’s about learning to re-inhabit our hours, to bend perception into something more humane. It offers a chance to resist the tyranny of acceleration and to reimagine progress, not as a straight line, but as a spiral, looping back with wisdom while moving forward with hope. In the end, perhaps the great innovation of this century won’t be faster machines or farther planets, but a collective ability to step outside the prison of linear time, to travel instead through the many worlds already within us.

Could time travel tourism be the next space tourism?

Time travel, long a staple of science fiction, is edging closer to scientific plausibility, and perhaps even commercialization. New models in relativity suggest it could occur under ordinary conditions without paradoxes, opening the door for a future industry akin to space tourism. Instead of rewriting history, time travel might become a way to revisit the past for answers, memory, or connection, transforming our relationship to time itself. As Dete Meserve imagines in The Memory Collectors with Aeon Expeditions, the appeal isn’t changing events but being changed by them: to reconnect, relive, and return transformed.

Aeon Expeditions offers the extraordinary chance to relive one hour from your past—not as a simulation, but as true time travel powered by its SAM 5000 technology, created by founder Mark Saunders with leading scientists. Participants step back fully into a chosen moment, re-experiencing every detail with present-day awareness, yet without altering the future. The journey isn’t about changing history but about transformation through reconnection, reliving, and rediscovery—seeing loved ones again, gaining insight, uncovering truths, or reclaiming forgotten parts of the self. Safe, precise, and profoundly moving, Aeon promises what we all long for: more time with the people and moments that shaped us. With Aeon, you don’t change time, time changes you.

Time may not be running out.
It may only be waiting for us to learn how to travel differently.

What else we are wandering…

🕰️ Time isn’t the fixed, linear flow we assume—it’s relative, cultural, and actively created by our minds. Memories are reconstructed, not archived, and this flexibility lets us imagine futures as much as recall pasts. Novel experiences make life feel longer in retrospect, while routine compresses it. Rethinking time as malleable helps us live it more fully, not just count it. Time Tourism—trips into altered perceptions of slow hours, fast weeks, or non-linear living—invites us to explore this truth. (Source: Claudia Hammond, “What we get wrong about time”, BBC)

⏳ Time expansion experiences: Time doesn’t always move at the same pace—sometimes it stretches, sometimes it contracts. Beyond the everyday sense that boredom drags and joy flies, people often report “time expansion experiences” (Tees), where seconds feel like minutes. These moments arise in emergencies, peak sports performance, meditation, deep nature, or psychedelic states, and can create the uncanny sense of extra space to think and act. While theories range from fight-or-flight hormones to evolutionary adaptation, many who’ve experienced Tees insist they’re real, not illusions. At their core, Tees reflect altered states of consciousness, when the boundary between self and world dissolves and our sense of time radically expands.

🧠 How to alter the passage of time to feel fast or slow: Time perception isn’t fixed—it stretches and contracts like a rubber band, shaped by memory, attention, emotion, and context. Psychologist Martin Wiener explains that our experience of time comes in two modes: prospective (how it feels in the moment) and retrospective (how it feels in memory). Paying close attention can slow time as it unfolds, while novelty and new experiences expand it in hindsight. Meditation offers a third path, letting us dilate time in the present without boredom, while awareness of time’s malleability—what some call “timefulness”—helps us savor highs, endure lows, and reclaim the richness of everyday life.

🔄 Malleability and fluidity of time perception: Time perception is not absolute but deeply subjective, shaped by memory, attention, mood, physiology, and environment. Exciting or novel experiences can make time feel expansive, while routine or stress compresses it. Neuroscience shows no single “clock” in the brain; instead, multiple regions—from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex—work across scales from milliseconds to years. Digital technology, with its constant notifications, accelerates our sense of time, yet practices like meditation and flow can slow it down. As Kondo, Gheorghiu, and Pinheiro (2024) argue, understanding the malleability and fluidity of time perception is key to enhancing how we manage, experience, and inhabit our lives.

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