Living on Fake Time - Hustle Culture is Killing Your Natural Rhythm
The exhaustion you feel is because you are operating on fake time that has no relationship to your actual life force.
Modern society operates on artificial time that has no relationship to natural cycles, human biology, or authentic creative flow.
In essence this means there is no place for you to flourish as a human being in this context.
If a clock is your authority - THE authority: dictating when to wake, when to create, when to rest, when to produce and even when to reproduce then where is your autonomy and sacred rhythm?
Sacred timing is the intelligence that knows when to act and when to rest, when to speak and when to listen, when to expand and when to contract.
It's the rhythm your body broadcasts 24/7 that you've been trained to override.
The hustle culture mentality promises that speed equals success, that urgency equals importance, and that constant motion equals progress.
But this artificial acceleration has created a generation living in chronic temporal dissonance : people ignoring their natural cycles who are forced to perform on unnatural schedules.
Notice what you've already sacrificed to fake time: the creative projects you abandoned because they weren't moving 'fast enough,' the relationships you rushed into (or out of), the rest you denied yourself because it felt 'unproductive,' the decisions you rushed because artificial deadlines felt more real than your inner knowing.
You’ve been conditioned to believe that your natural rhythm is insufficient, your organic pace is laziness, and your authentic timing is inefficient, in other words: everything that you naturally are is wrong.
How Hustle Culture Hijacked Your Sacred Timing
The industrial revolution changed how humans fundamentally interact with themselves and with others.
You become a task on your to do list and people around you are transactional.
Before mechanized production, human activity flowed with natural cycles: seasonal changes, lunar phases, circadian rhythms, and the organic unfolding of creative projects.
The 'chronic' state of emergency operates on manufactured scarcity - the lie that there isn't enough time, opportunity, or resources to allow for natural pacing.
You are convinced that slowing down means missing out (FOMO), when actually speeding up means you skim the surface of multiple opportunities rather than going deep into the ones that truly align with your natural rhythm. You become a spiritual and creative dabbler instead of a master. (This guarantees that you remain a consumer on the hamster wheel.)
This mentality commodifies your existence, turning every moment into a potential profit opportunity and every activity into a metric measured by economic output.
As a result, rest feels like lost revenue rather than essential recovery and play feels frivolous instead of rejuvenation and for the fun of it.
This relentless drive fragments your relationship with time itself, making it impossible to access the timeless states where your deepest creativity and wisdom emerge. This is patriarchy in full effect - controlling your relationship to time itself ensures you never access the cyclical, regenerative power that threatens linear systems of control.
Your natural flow operates in expansion and contraction cycles that hustle culture curses as inconsistency.
Periods of intense creative output are naturally followed by periods of integration and rest.
Seasons of outward engagement require balance with seasons of inward reflection. But the grind demands constant expansion without honoring the contraction phases that make expansion possible.
The "limited time offer" mentality has infected every area of life, creating false urgency around decisions that would benefit from reflection. Career choices, relationship decisions, spiritual practices, creative projects - all get rushed because of artificial deadlines that have no relationship to the natural timing these decisions require. You make choices from urgency rather than clarity, from manufactured pressure rather than inner knowing.
Hustle culture's addiction to speed creates a nervous system state that's incompatible with the inner stillness required for accessing sacred timing. Social media algorithms exploit this by creating artificial urgency around content consumption : the endless scroll, the fear of missing updates, the addiction to real time information. These distractions fragment your attention and pull you out of present moment awareness where your natural timing can be accessed. You end up living in reactive mode instead of creative flow.
Your natural rhythm isn't broken it is alien to you and negotiating what you naturally are in tuned with can feel dangerous.
Why Your Body Knows Better Than Your Calendar
Your circadian rhythm operates on a natural 24-hour cycle that determines when your body is optimized for different types of activity.
Morning hours naturally support focused cognitive work. Afternoon energy is ideal for collaborative and social activities. Evening time naturally calls for reflection and integration. Forcing your body to perform against these natural rhythms creates chronic fatigue and diminished capacity.
Women’s bodies operate on additional monthly cycles that create natural periods for creation, action, reflection, and release. Ignoring these rhythms in favor of linear productivity creates hormonal imbalance, creative blocks, and emotional (and physical) exhaustion. Your body knows when to push forward and when to pull back - but you must be perceptive enough to hear and heed.
Your creative projects have their own organic gestation periods that can’t be rushed without compromising quality. Ideas need time to develop, skills need time to integrate, and visions need time to mature before they’re ready for manifestation. Rushing creative work produces shallow results that lack the depth and resonance of work that’s allowed to emerge in its natural timing.
Your body’s wisdom about timing extends to major life decisions and transitions. Career changes, relationship shifts, moving home(s) - your body often knows months or years before your mind that a transition is approaching. Learning to read these subtle signals allows you to prepare for changes rather than being blindsided by them.
When Productivity Becomes Spiritual Violence
Life forces energy isn't a renewable resource that can be endlessly extracted without consequences. The “grind mentality” encourages you to push through fatigue, override your body’s signals, and sacrifice rest for productivity. This approach fragments your life force by demanding constant output without honoring the natural cycles of regeneration that sustain long-term vitality aka not putting 'it' back in.
The glorification of busyness has made rest and reflection feel like moral failures rather than biological necessities. You feel guilty for taking breaks, ashamed of needing downtime, and anxious about periods of low productivity. This guilt around natural rhythms creates additional stress that further depletes your life force and disconnects you from your authentic timing.
The constant pressure to “level up” and “optimize” creates a chronic state of dissatisfaction with your current reality. You’re always trying to be somewhere else, achieve something more, or become someone different rather than fully inhabiting your current experience. This future-focused orientation pulls you out of the present moment where your natural timing can be accessed.
Being in reaction mode is not where your personal power lies, it keeps you tethered to someone else's agenda or to performance.
Your Body's Intelligent Rebellion
Your resistance to artificial urgency isn’t procrastination that's wisdom. When your body and psyche resist rushing into action, they’re often protecting you from premature decisions or actions that haven’t had sufficient time to develop. What hustle culture labels as laziness is often your system’s intelligence about timing.
Natural rhythm includes periods of apparent inactivity that are actually essential for integration and preparation.
Seeds germinate in darkness before they sprout.
Personal transformations require periods of inner work that look like “doing nothing” from the outside but are actually doing everything from the inside. The pace that feels natural to your system is the pace that allows for depth, quality, and longevity.
Reclaiming sacred timing begins with recognizing that most urgency is manufactured and most deadlines are arbitrary. Very few things in life are actually urgent in the way that hustle culture suggests. Learning to distinguish between genuine urgency and manufactured pressure allows you to respond from wisdom rather than react from conditioning.
Your relationship to time transforms when you stop measuring productivity by hours worked and start measuring it by quality of output and alignment with natural rhythm. Some of your most productive work happens in flow states that exist outside of linear time. Some of your most important development happens during rest periods that look unproductive from the outside.
Breaking free from fake time means creating boundaries around your natural rhythm and protecting it from external demands that don't serve your highest good. This might mean saying no to opportunities that require you to override your natural pace, setting limits on availability during your natural rest periods, or choosing projects that allow for organic development rather than forced timelines.
When you work with your body's energy cycles, honor your creative gestation periods, and trust your inner timing, you produce work that has depth, sustainability, and authentic power. You become productive in ways that enhance your life force rather than deplete it.
Reclaim your sovereign right to exist in your own temporal reality.
Stop rushing what wants to emerge slowly. Start trusting the timing that your body has always known. The clock on the wall isn't the authority on your life. Your life force is. And your life force operates on sacred time that no productivity system can optimize because it's already perfect.
Your natural rhythm is your pathway to sustainable power. Stop letting fake time kill it. The next time you feel the urgency to rush, pause. Listen for a whispered response beneath the manufactured urgency - that's your sacred timing speaking. Trust it.
Fonda shares: 'When I was a massage therapist, I noticed the common thread of physical pain that people expressed. It inspired me to pull on the 'why' of pain: No matter what walk of life, the disconnect (pain) is basically the same.
People are fearful that the love (they are seeking in all areas of their lives), they aren't worthy of it.
The fact IS unless and until you accept yourself, to remember your worthiness and love yourself in plain sight - no one else's love can full you up. This is the Wholeness journey + the cycle of pain can cease.'
Fonda Clayton Smith is the founder of Wholeness Lab, a sanctuary for high-achieving women who are ready to stop performing and start embodying their Sacred Wholeness.
When you're tired of seeking external validation, questioning your intuition, and feeling divided between who you are and who you're expected to be, Fonda's unique blend of sovereignty coaching creates the container for your return to center.
Fonda is a Certified Life Coach, Polarity Therapist, Licensed Massage Therapist, published author, podcaster, and guide for women reclaiming their energy and boundaries after years of putting everyone else first.
Through The Sovereign Seat™, she offers a sacred pathway back to the woman you've been editing out of your story.
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