From Time Wrinkling to Time Razing Disruptions: Understanding Temporal Resilience

Under established and known demands for their time, individuals are in general temporal equilibrium. When exogeneous shocks alter those temporal demands, objective and subjective temporal misfit ensues, and individual functioning suffers. We propose a theory that describes the process of temporal resilience—as in, resilience about time, not over time. The theory starts with disruptions of temporal equilibrium and ends with individual functioning trajectories as temporal resilience outcomes. We argue that while the displacement of temporal disruptions (i.e., the dissimilarity in temporal demands pre- and post-disruption) has a negative effect on individual functioning, their duration (i.e., the length of occurrence of the disruption) has a reverse J-shaped one. Then, using displacement and duration, we develop a typology of disruptions as time wrinkling, ripping, reshaping, and razing. Next, we propose that individuals can react to those temporal disruptions via three temporal resilience responses: adjusting, absorbing, or adopting. These three responses differentially and respectively allow the individual to return to either objective, subjective, or both forms of temporal fit. Further, depending on the type of disruption, each temporal resilience response sets the individual onto particular trajectories toward the previous temporal equilibrium or to a new, more optimal one.