CONCEPT
Temporal Vertigo
The disorientation that occurs when an organism can no longer maintain a coherent sense of past-present-future relationships because the patterns that held last year no longer hold, producing plans rational on old maps and wrong about the world.
Temporal vertigo is the specific cognitive phenomenon the acceleration produces: loss of the projection capacity through which organisms maintain coherent temporal orientation. In stable environments, the past is a reliable guide to the present, and the present is a reasonable basis for projecting the future. In moderate change, projection requires adjustment but remains feasible. In extreme acceleration, the past is actively misleading — the patterns that held last year do not hold this year — and the projection apparatus produces outputs that are not merely inaccurate but systematically wrong, because they assume a rate of change that no longer obtains.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phenomenon is distinct from ordinary forecasting error. Ordinary forecasting error produces predictions that are off by degrees. Temporal vertigo produces predictions that are categorically wrong — plans rational on their own terms for a world that has ceased to exist. The executives whose 2026 planning was based on pre-December