We do need to make the next evolutionary step sociological, than technical.

In many ways, we are still flat earthers living on a round planet and haven't internalized the implications. We are linear and goal oriented, while reality is cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback generated.

Consider time; As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is as the present moving past to future, while the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. Like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That culture is about synchronizing society as a larger social super organism, using the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem there is some universal flow, but everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. As you so effectively describe.

"Energy" is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Lives go birth to death, future to past, as life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, while the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

Consider that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in and it would seem that structure is entropically centripetal. The waves tend to synchronize inward, even though the constituent energy radiates out.

Which is how our mind sorts signals from the noise, what resonates and synchronizes with our prior beliefs. Which tends to make those initial assumptions foundational to how subsequent information is organized, even though they arise from necessarily smaller information bases. Creating an epicycles effect, where the old models are more likely to be patched, than falsified.

Until such time as they can no longer effectively contain the various contradictions, tensions, waste, etc. Then break down.

Cycles of expansion and consolidation, within larger cycles rising and falling.