I admit that at first I almost took it quite personally.
Then I contemplated whether I was being gaslit for some unknown reason.
Next I considered it was some version of the Mandela effect — the social phenomenon where large groups of people share a memory that others dispute.
Perhaps it all took place in an alternative reality.
Moving beyond those explanations, I began thinking that maybe it was a strange supernatural phenomenon, like the Scottish village in the Lerner & Loewe musical Brigadoon, a mysterious place that vanishes into the mist, reappearing once every hundred years.
All of this over an Instagram account and a telling post that appeared… and then just as suddenly vanished.
The subject — while not a ride or die friend — was someone I’ve known for two decades, hosted in my homes multiple times, and shared dozens of meals with on both coasts.
To make things easier, I’ll just call him “Nelson,” in honor of the Mandela phenomenon.
Although I’ve taught a few Forbes’ names in my private yoga days, Nelson was definitely at the top of my very short list of “People I Know Most Likely to Become a Billionaire.”
To be fully candid, he was also the top name on a slightly longer list of mine: “People I Know Most Likely to Have a Personal Scandal that Becomes a Mini-Series Produced by Ryan Murphy.”
These are, of course, not mutually exclusive, but often profoundly intertwined with each other.
In short, Nelson is quite a character, and while he once had a vigorous social media life, in the last few years he had vanished online except for a largely neglected professional Twitter account.
I was, therefore, quite surprised to see a posting on Monday of a personal triumph:
Not quite front-page news in mass media, Nelson’s tech/financial success was well covered in financial and industry press (Bloomberg, Investing, Nasdaq channels).
It was a landmark moment and I, like dozens of others on Instagram, congratulated him for his stellar achievement.
And then — barely 24 hours later — not only the post, but the account itself mysteriously disappeared.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the theme this month — Dancing with Time, meditation HERE — on many levels.
In the Transformation Book Club — you can join HERE for just $5 a month / $50 a year — we’re reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.
His central theme is that:
“Productivity is a trap.
Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed,
and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”
This week, a dear friend also introduced me to the related work of Henri Bergson HERE:
Henri Bergson, a prominent French philosopher, introduced the concept of ‘duration’ (la durée) to describe time as it is experienced.
For Bergson, time is not a series of discrete, measurable moments but a continuous, flowing experience.
This perspective emphasizes the qualitative, rather than quantitative, nature of time.
In Bergson’s view, duration is the lived experience of time, characterized by fluidity and indivisibility.
It contrasts sharply with the mechanical and segmented way in which time is often represented.
It’s more like how poets conceive of time, including such greats as:
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets:
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future.” - Rilke, Duino Elegies:
“Only a moment? We let it pass; but in it we are.” - Emily Dickinson:
“Forever – is composed of Nows –”
Poets, that is, and wise souls, like Vlad.
In many ways, dogs embody Bergson’s idea of duration.
Obviously, they don’t live in measured time of clocks and calendars.
Their reality of time is in the immediacy of experience, of being in the now.
Even so, I’ve noticed that Vlad is not oblivious to schedules.
He is fully aware of the timing of predictable events such as walks and feedings.
In fact, he actively anticipates them.
He is simply fully embodied in the moment itself, in a way that de-mechanizes time and focuses on the actual experience.
This allows him to exist on a spectrum from serenity to delight, or as William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The next day, after Nelson’s IG post and account vanished, I did a little further research.
A quick Google search revealed details of the triumph he had posted about, as well as refreshed my memory of a mini-scandal of his that Page Six covered over a decade ago.
[Again, he’s on both my lists: “Most Likely to Become a Billionaire” and “Most Likely to Become the Subject of a Ryan Murphy Mini-Series.”]
More importantly, even incognito browser searches did not reveal the account, confirming that I hadn’t been blocked but that it had been deactivated.
Apparently, this is a relatively rare but not utterly unheard of behavior.
High-profile executives and founders sometimes deactivate or scrub their accounts for privacy, security, or brand reasons.
Then, when a milestone happens (IPO, acquisition, new product), they’ll reactivate briefly to amplify the moment.
It’s also not unique to CEOs — celebrities do it sometimes, too.
In August of 2017, Taylor Swift famously erased all her socials — Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
Everything went completely blank.
A few days later she began posting cryptic snake videos, all of this to build hype for her Reputation album released that November.
This was, of course, a spectacular success, contributing to making Reputation the bestselling album of 2017.
Beyond this textbook example of how scarcity and disappearance can fuel success, however, I think there’s something more at play in the narrow window of Nelson’s fleeting reappearance.
Here is something else I learned about dogs and time this week.
The Flicker Fusion Rate (FFR) is the threshold where a rapidly flickering light is perceived as continuous.
For humans, it’s about 60 Hz (60 flashes per second).
That’s why movies flickering at 24 frames per second or TVs at 60 Hz look smooth to us.
Dogs have a higher FFR, however, around 70–80 Hz.
In one sense, Vlad and his friends are literally processing more moments in a second than we do — they have a finer temporal resolution, a keener awareness of movement within time.
By their very nature, they are Bergsonian philosophers: living in a denser, more flowing now, enjoying more moments than our narrower experience of time allows.
In Brigadoon, the village’s minister, Mr. Forsythe, prayed in the 18th century for protection from outside influences.
That’s why the town was enchanted so that it would vanish into the mist and reappear for only one day every hundred years.
With Nelson, however, I think the vanishing is less meaningful than the reappearance.
I’m reminded of a classic saying, one which feels like it should be an ancient Zen koan but is not.
It’s from George Berkeley’s 1710 work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Arguing that physical objects exist only as they’re perceived — eerily dovetailing 250 years later with quantum physics’ “observer effect” — he wrote the classic question:
“If a tree falls in a forest
and no one is around to hear it,
does it make a sound?”
In 2025, however, that statement might be revised to:
“If something amazing happens,
and you don’t post about it on Instagram,
did it actually even happen?”
Dancing With Time by living fully in the present moment is the ideal of course, but an endless challenge.
As Burkeman writes:
“It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep,
and therefore failing.”
Unlike Vlad, humans find it hard to live in that Bergsonian duration — that forever composed of “Nows.”
I think that’s why Nelson needed to reappear on the socials for those 24 hours.
I’m keenly aware of my own desire to have my finest achievements displayed on the refrigerator door with magnets — ideally for all eternity.
In the end, I can’t fault Nelson for taking his short-lived victory lap.
Although he vanished right afterwards — any future Brigadoon reappearance entirely unknown — for those 60 flickers per second, it may indeed have been the “Eternity in an hour” his soul needed.