Time loops as evolutionary tools

breadcrumbs back to grandmother's house

My Friends!

I’m just back from a very cool experience, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), which occured at an airport hotel in Orlando that abuts a retention pond and a canal with no visible alligators. So if you are a glass half full kind of person, it was a waterfront conference replete with salamanders, egrets, Great Blue herons (my favorite), some giant caruncle-faced Muscovy ducks, and Spanish moss. I love the Spanish moss—the cascading wraiths that hang from the oak and cypress trees.

Don’t touch though. Chiggers. Chiggers live in those parts.

But let me tell you what ICFA actually is…ICFA is a scholarly conference where people research various aspects of language, storytelling, television, folklore, and other expressions of the fantastic in art and media. The conference brings together academics, writers, artists, and graduate students who share a deep interest in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other speculative genres. Participants present papers, give lectures, lead panels, and engage in interdisciplinary conversations spanning literary criticism, media studies, cultural theory, and creative writing.

Fellow Stonecoast alum and writer Beth Anderson and I presented on the dearth of depicted female characters in their 40s and 50s. We asserted that this perimenopausal age is rarely seen in speculative fiction (or any fiction), and most female depictions jump from the mother archetype directly to the crone. But let me tell you, this phase is ripe for storytelling—if writers dare to take on the taboo of exposing it. Blood (so much blood), sleeplessness, loss of oxytocin (the caretaking hormone), erratic and dramatic swings of mood and sexual appetite, anger, despair, and longing—all of which culminate in a whole new kind of person. From a sociological and evolutionary perspective, this shift encourages children to go and seek their fortunes elsewhere. There’s always a reason for these things.

While I was there, I got to listen to one presentation by Quinnipiac media studies professor Summit Osur (zi/zir) that made my brain explode with a million ideas. It was titled, “Television Unspooled: Trauma, Addiction, Mental Health and the Progressive Politics of the 21st Century Televised Time Loop.”

Zi spoke about how early television time loop stories often repeated events exactly, emphasizing the claustrophobia or inevitability of the cycle. The protagonist would retain memory, but the world around them reset entirely, making their efforts feel isolated.

But in more contemporary iterations, we start to see “echoes” or artifacts that remain across loops—emotional residues, physical objects, or narrative hints that suggest something is “leaking” through the repetition. These remnants often function as breadcrumbs, giving the protagonist a sense of progress or change and offering the viewer a more layered mystery.

the writings of a mad woman?

While I was listening to zir, I wrote down examples of real-life loops: work, school, days, weeks, seasons, years, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, breakfast, lunch, dinner, dog walks…Wait, I said to myself, is everything just a loop?

This hit home for me. I wondered if this time loop narrative structure Osur was talking about was an oblique evolutionary tool that we humans developed to help ourselves out of our own psychological anxiety loops—which seem to be a prominent feature of modern society, at least here in the United States, where 48.5 million (16.7%) Americans (aged 12 and older) battled an acknowledged substance use disorder in the past year. Where according to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 19% of American adults (57.8 million) were taking antidepressants in 2024.

We are depressed. We are in our heads. We are struggling to get out of our negative loops.

I probably thought of narrative loops as an evolutionary tool because long ago I worked with an herbalist when I was quite ill with Lyme disease. The herbalist talked about how the Earth and all of its inhabitants are constantly seeking homeostasis—any automatic process that a living thing uses to keep its body steady on the inside while continuing to adjust to conditions outside of the body or in its environment. He said that when a new pathogen like the Lyme spirochete enters an ecosystem, herbalists look to see what else arrives at the same time. As winters have warmed in the Northeast, many plants and animals now live here year-round that couldn’t before. Among them are those nasty Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks. But so have invasive species in the plant world, like Japanese knotweed—which was discovered to have antimicrobial properties effective against Lyme. The Earth offers her balance—the way a body sends white blood cells to a cut in order to keep that human performing her daily loops. So maybe, as our psychological anxieties and ruminations increase, this modern loop narrative offers us some clues on how to escape them. Remnants, echoes, new pieces of information, small changes—these clues in television episodes are the same ones we need to escape real-life ruminations.

Sometimes I get stuck in loops. For example, if I’ve said something stupid or unkind, I’ll keep the loop going until I either make myself sick thinking about it or exhaust myself into sleep. Sometimes passive experiences like time passing or looming deadlines will decay a loop and I can escape, but sometimes the loops require action—a phone call to the friend I may have offended, opening the credit card bill I didn’t want to face, actually telling someone they hurt me, making the doctor’s appointment, foregoing the afternoon cookies, the evening drink, the social media…

I want to circle back to another one of the great teachings of Douglas Adams that comes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (spoiler alert 🚨—skip ahead four paragraphs for a spoiler-free and now completely disjointed reading experience): A supercomputer named Deep Thought is asked to find the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” And after thinking for a long 7.5 million years, Deep Thought finally reveals that the answer is... 42.

However, the characters then realize they don’t actually know what the ultimate question is, making the answer essentially meaningless. Their quest shifts to finding “the ultimate question” in order to understand what 42 means, which becomes the central theme throughout the series.

I do love how Adams attempts to find cosmic meaning and ends up with an answer that starts the quest all over again. A loop, no? But here, Douglas Adams was wrong. He was being cheeky to make a point about loops. The ultimate question is: how do we get out of our own way? The ultimate answer to the ultimate question is: we have to look for the breadcrumbs of the healthy cycles that exist in our negative ones. We can go round and round in the same circle. We can climb (which implies effort) up the spiral like a ladder—or let gravity, that constant antagonist, pull us down the spiral.

Some loops are prisons we can’t break out of—so we have to learn how to create healthy mini-loops within the ones we can’t escape.

Loops can be portals too. There are repetitive destructive behaviors and repetitive healthy behaviors. It’s good to play the mindfulness game of breadcrumb-hunting: to determine which kind of loop you’re in, and whether you want to be in it.

Loops can heal and protect. Ransom Rigg’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has a time loop designed to shield the special children from monsters in the outside world. My grandmother’s house was like this. I’d be transported out of the real world and into the safety of fried chicken, cookies, easy books, card games—a gentle routine of deep sleep and comfort.

speaking of cheeky!

If you’ve come back to read my Substack again, I’m grateful to be part of your loop, and to have you in mine. This is a good loop for me where I’m really just explaing things to myself, or to escape loops that have been ingrained in me—the prescribed pathways in the axons of my nerves, designed by my ancestors. Other times, I write to combine ideas that stem from the many aspects of my life into one place so I feel whole and I can notice the funny looking ducks and the Spanish Moss.

I wonder what loops you travel in that make you feel whole.

Until next time, may your loops be gentle, your echoes kind, and your breadcrumbs easy to follow.

Ciao,
n