From Geopolitics to Loneliness, There Is Only One Metric: Time

People tend to believe that "progress", be it technological or otherwise, will inevitably solve today's problems. This mentality, be it within geopolitics or personal relationships, shares the same narrative structure as science-fiction: Take one success, assume unlimited scaling, ignore coordination costs, ignore noise, ignore failure modes, ignore limits! In Reality Time is finite. Possible options are effectively unbounded. Possible standards are effectively unbounded. If options and/or standards exceed the amount of time available to evaluate them, decision making fails, or becomes arbitrary.