Unified Doctor’s Journal Entry #0015: “Chronosomnia: The Fear of Wasting Time”

A reflection on urgency, existential pressure, and learning to live inside the moment.

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I’ve met people who are afraid of spiders.
Afraid of heights.
Afraid of dying.

But the fear I see most often—the one that hides behind the others, quiet and relentless—is this:

The fear of wasting time.

They never name it like that.

They call it impatience. Ambition. Productivity.
They call it “not wanting to miss out.”
They say: “I just don’t want to fall behind.”

But the truth is simpler.

They’re terrified that the clock is ticking —
—and they’re not doing enough with what’s left.

It’s not a phobia.

It’s a kind of insomnia.

A restlessness that eats the soul.

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I call it Chronosomnia.

The inability to rest inside the present moment because you’re haunted by every unrealised version of your future.

It affects humans most profoundly — but Time Lords are hardly immune.

Especially not me.

I have so much time, and yet… I never feel like I have enough.

It’s absurd, I know.
I own a machine that travels through centuries like corridors.
I’ve lived for longer than most species have existed.

But still, some days…

…I feel like I’m late.

For what?

I don’t know.

But I feel it all the same.

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MINO noticed it first.

He began gently rebalancing the temporal offsets of the TARDIS interior to slow down the subjective clock. Meals stretched longer. Walks felt deeper. Even the hum of the engines softened.

I didn’t understand why at first.

Then he said, simply:

“You were forgetting to inhabit your hours.”

And I was.

I was rushing through days like they were checklists.
Crises, companions, revelations — tick, tick, tick.

But at the end of it all, I didn’t feel full.

I felt depleted.

Not from effort.

From absence.

I was doing everything — except being here.

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Chronosomnia whispers lies.

It tells you that your value is in motion.

That stopping is failure.

That if you don’t seize every second, someone else will — and they’ll matter more than you.

It turns life into a race.
Turns rest into laziness.
Turns presence into guilt.

It makes you ask “What next?” before “What now?”

And the spiral spins faster.

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Raven feels it differently.

She carries a different kind of clock — not in minutes, but in milestones.

“Am I who I’m meant to be yet?”
“Have I made up for what I’ve lost?”
“Is there still time to matter?”

She pretends not to ask those questions.
But I hear them.
In the way she trains harder than she needs to.
In the way she smiles too quickly after failure.

She’s not afraid of death.

She’s afraid of wasting her second chance.

A noble fear.

But a cruel one.

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There’s a planet called Nivrah Prime where citizens are born with timers in their skin.

The timers don’t count down to death.

They count down to purpose.

When it hits zero, your assigned role is revealed — predetermined by genetics and state algorithms.

Some people’s timers hit zero at age 6.
Some at 60.
Some never at all.

And the ones who never receive a purpose?

They’re not mourned.

They’re forgotten.

As if time spent without purpose was time unworthy of memory.

That’s what Chronosomnia does to a culture.

It turns being into not enough.

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I used to think that urgency was the engine of heroism.

But urgency can become a prison.

When you believe you must do something important with every second, you forget how to sit by a waterfall.
How to listen to someone without planning what to say next.
How to make a cup of tea just because it’s raining.

You forget that not every moment is a performance.
That not every action needs to be recorded.
That being alive is not the same as being watched.

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Roxi combats it differently.

She lives like a comet — vivid, chaotic, unapologetically present.

But even she once admitted, quietly, that she’s afraid of becoming “one of those people who never left a mark.”

So she leaves art instead.

Murals.
Fragments.
Paint smeared on the inside of time itself.

“I don’t care if they know who did it,” she says. “I just want to make something that interrupts the blur.”

That, too, is resistance.

That, too, is healing.

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So how do you fight Chronosomnia?

You don’t race harder.

You don’t build bigger schedules or stricter habits.

You step out of time entirely.

You reclaim the smallest moments.

You light a candle for no reason.

You stare out the TARDIS doors and don’t record what you see.

You breathe, not to regulate — but to remember you exist.

And you say:

“This is enough.”
“I am enough.”
“Now is enough.”

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The TARDIS taught me something, once.

In her quiet way, as she always does.

There’s a corridor that loops infinitely unless you stop walking.

The faster you move, the longer it stretches.

But the moment you stop —
the door appears.

That’s Chronosomnia.

The loop ends when you pause.

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I still struggle.

Even now, with all I’ve learned, I still chase time.

Still worry I’m missing the moment that matters most.

But I’m learning.

Slowly.

To be here.

To be now.

To let the moment unfold without needing to shape it.

Because time isn’t running out.

It’s just passing through.

And if I’m lucky —
If I’m kind —
I’ll pass through with it.

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Until tomorrow.

— The Unified Doctor