Living Vertically in a Horizontal World
On time, depth, and misread lives
La linea orizzontale ci spinge verso la materia,
quella verticale verso lo spirito.
— Franco Battiato, Inneres Auge
Age has never felt like a problem to me.
Among artists, it rarely does. Age differences dissolve quickly there. A conversation, a shared seriousness, a way of looking at things matters far more than chronology. A twenty-year-old and a sixty-year-old can meet without friction if they are equally inside the work.
Yet outside of those spaces, age suddenly becomes charged. Awkward. Legible in ways that feel reductive. Not because of time itself, but because of how time is being measured.
Over the years I’ve come to realise that this discomfort isn’t personal. It’s structural. It comes from inhabiting one axis of time while being judged by another.
Most social systems operate on a horizontal axis of time.
Horizontal time is sequential. It moves forward. It ranks, compares, and orders. It cares about before and after, ahead and behind, early and late. It translates time into milestones: education, career progression, visibility, relevance. It is the time of CVs, timelines, promotions, and expectations about where one “should” be at a given age.
Horizontal time is not wrong. It is useful. It allows coordination, planning, and shared reference points. Entire societies depend on it.
But it has a blind spot.
Depth does not register on a line.
There is another way of inhabiting time: vertical time.
Vertical time does not move forward so much as downward or inward. It deepens. It accumulates. It refines. It allows repetition without stagnation, return without regression. In vertical time, things become sharper rather than newer.
This is the time artists, musicians, writers, thinkers, and craftspeople often inhabit without naming it. It is the time in which pauses are not gaps, silence is not absence, and maturity is not decline. Work ripens invisibly here. Much of what matters happens without producing immediate signals.
Vertical time cannot be ranked. It resists comparison. It is not easily narrated.
And that is precisely why it often goes unrecognised.
In artistic contexts, this vertical orientation is intuitively understood. Age differences feel secondary because what is being sensed is not position but presence. Not where someone is on a timeline, but how deeply they have entered their material.
Outside of those contexts, the same vertical movement becomes difficult to read. Someone who is no longer racing forward, but also not retreating, appears ambiguous. Hard to place. Unclassifiable.
Horizontal systems don’t know what to do with people who are not progressing in expected ways. When depth is mistaken for delay, refinement for stagnation, and patience for failure, a subtle form of misrecognition occurs.
Over time, many people internalise this misreading. They begin to experience their own vertical movement as a personal shortcoming.
This confusion carries a cost.
When vertical lives are judged horizontally, people feel late when they are deepening, inadequate when they are consolidating, and invisible when they are simply no longer performing. The problem is not age. It is the imposition of a single axis where two are required.
Some people respond by flattening themselves back onto the line. They accelerate, simplify, perform relevance, translate depth into optics. Others withdraw, convinced something went wrong.
A few accept the friction and live with it.
Not everyone needs to live vertically. Horizontal time is not the enemy. But suffering arises when we mistake one axis for the other, when we expect depth to announce itself as progress, or maturity to resemble speed.
Some lives move forward in time.
Others move inward.
Trouble begins when we insist these are the same direction.
Living vertically in a horizontal world does not mean rejecting society, ambition, or material reality. It simply means recognising that not all movement is visible on a timeline, and not all value announces itself as advancement.
Age, in this light, is not a problem to solve. It is a coordinate — one among others.
And sometimes, the most meaningful motion is not toward the next point on the line, but toward what has been quietly forming all along.
Modern Intuitions is an ongoing exploration of symbolic thinking, decision-making and cognitive structure. Subscribe if you’d like to follow its unfolding.