Two Temporalities

A World Transformed by a Change in the Era's Rules

Curiously enough, people around my friends and me have recently been falling into depression one after another. Individuals who were once vibrantly active in the world are, as if undergoing an inversion, succumbing to depression and finding the very act of living difficult. Witnessing these figures, I have continued my contemplation on this inverting world; the scene appears to me as a signal that a process of culling has begun all at once, driven by an invisible force. What on earth is this? I will attempt to decipher this phenomenon through the lens of a change in the world’s rules and the transmutation of time that symbolizes it.

First, as a major premise, every rule in the world we have believed in has already changed. If the rules based on the world we trusted have altered, it is only natural that those who lived believing in the former world would feel the pain of a dissociation between the era and the self. I suspect that because the human being was made the subject in the rules of the old world, a specific illusion functioned powerfully: the idea that individuals endowed with subjectivity decide matters, and by following a sequence involving decisions at a collective dimension, they improve the world. Indeed, within the categories of the old world, this was a generally applicable rule, an iron law spoken of even as an international universality. But what would you think if that itself were a fiction? Here, the troublesome concept of the “subject” surfaces, erroneously thought to have been discussed to exhaustion.

Since I was born and raised in the Japanese cultural sphere, I am free from the risk of dependence on this old-world subject from the perspective of the linguistic world. In other words, there is no necessity to cling to the modern subject. This is because that subject and my individual existence are not equal. When viewed from that perspective, something interesting comes into view. The fantasy that “the subject changes the era” is clearly an old-world rule; while correct within that rulebook, we have reached a stage where that former rulebook must be discarded now that we have transitioned to the new-world rules. There are dimensions where this change of rules between the new and old worlds can be discussed superficially, but what must not be forgotten is the transmutation of the concept of the subject itself. That is to say, what we must thoroughly realize is that the concept of the subject we have believed in has already mutated.

Thinking of the largest dimensions of change in the era, the Great Conjunction of December 22, 2020, where Jupiter and Saturn aligned in Aquarius, can be considered the starting point. This is a phenomenon where the four major elements of “Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water” shift approximately every 200 to 240 years, a topic actively discussed mainly in the context of spiritualism. Marking this day as the boundary, the era has transitioned from the “Earth Era” to the “Wind Era.” If we posit the old world as the “Earth World,” the characteristics of the past 200 years were defined by possession, including material, money, land, authority, stability, and organization, and it was an era possessing the subject in the modern sense.

However, if the new world is the “Wind World,” the characteristics of the next 200 years will be information, intellect, experience, human networks, movement, and sharing, wherein the intensity of the old-world subject is mercilessly nullified. The nature of this era is discussed in various ways, but the essential point is the understanding that we have all already crossed the decisive moment where the perception of the subject has completely changed. In other words, all people are being asked whether they can live as a “Wind Subject” of the new world, as opposed to the “Earth Subject” of the old world; we must consider that even if the word “subject” is the same, the two are distinct existences with entirely different phases. The problem here is that we still drag along the confusion of regarding the Earth Subject as truth or universality. At this juncture, people who premise their lives on such a subject are mercilessly culled by the era. Personally, the discomfort I have felt toward the idea of the subject is becoming visible as a discomfort toward the past Earth Subject, but this concept of the subject differs from the Wind Subject.

Furthermore, along with the entry into the Wind Era with its roughly 200-year cycle, a change of era on a larger time axis is occurring. This is the Age of Aquarius. This is a massive shift in eras that switches approximately every 2,160 years, determined by which constellation the vernal equinox point resides in due to the precession of the Earth’s axis. The past 2,000 years were the Age of Pisces, characterized by dominion, religion, devotion, ambiguity of boundaries, self-sacrifice, and belief. In contrast, the characteristics of the Age of Aquarius are considered to be science, reason, freedom, equality, philanthropy, and originality. While the characteristics of the Age of Aquarius might seem to have already been unfolding at a glance, when we consider the characteristics of the Wind Era coexisting within it, a vision emerges where each individual existence becomes independent while harmonizing with the whole.

We entered the Wind Era in earnest triggered by Pluto, the star of destruction and regeneration, moving completely into Aquarius on November 20, 2024. This means that the dizzying fluctuations of the world we all experienced in 2025 were the very turning point where the Wind Era began. Therefore, everyone must set aside value judgments of good or bad for a moment and place the understanding of the fact that the rules of the era have completely changed at the center of their thinking. This is because everything leading up to value judgments of good or bad, or feelings of rejection, is based on the rules of the former era. As history makes self-evident, a change in the rules of the era presses mercilessly upon the people living in that time. To repeat the aforementioned perspective, believing that the subject can transform the era is a rule of the old world, a characteristic of the Earth Subject. Now that the era has changed from Earth to Wind, attempting to live while holding onto that rulebook should be regarded as carrying a significant risk.