Metabolic refusal.

The body cannot follow. Civilization has accelerated beyond the tempo of the biological organism that once served as its substrate, severing the alignment between systemic demand and human cognitive capacity. Human metabolism — slow, cyclical, embodied — meets a world that no longer pauses, waits, or resets. Coordination fails when the organism can no longer set the pace: not from any external disturbance, but because it has reached its temporal limit. The mismatch is structural. The synchrony that once linked attention, memory, digestion, and motion can no longer keep pace with the tempo of incoming conditions. Perception lags events; action lags the consequence. The nervous system registers not chaos but compression: too much, too fast, without intermission. Meaning accumulates without integrating; interpretation falls behind the pace of events. There is no crisis, only duration. No event, only the pressure of continuity. The subject is pulled across intervals it cannot absorb, unable to complete the metabolic cycle that once shaped experience: intake, processing, integration, rest. The refusal is not chosen; it is entropic. Metabolism no longer scaffolds coherence. Human time persists, but only as residue. This is the initiating disjunction of Machine Time: a world whose operations outpace the organism that once defined its tempo.