What’s weird is that this seems backwards in some ways. Linear thinkers like cause and effect, an inherently temporal concept–the cause must happen before the effect. Meanwhile on the Holistic side, relationships exist in the space between things.
It’s almost like spatial and temporal are referring to what their practitioners take for granted, or perhaps what they assume. The LPS expends his mental energy in the spatial realm because he’s assumed that time is fixed, and the causal chains are set in stone. But the HPS sees time as stretchy and fluid and where the problem can be solved, while spaces are fixed.
I think that helps explain why Holistic/ temporal thinkers don’t engage well with Timelocks, even though semantically they seem well paired. It’s not that the HPS doesn’t understand time; they don’t understand how it could be locked.
Pairing Holistic and Timelock in the storyform seems to create a sort of vicious circle between the audience and the story. The Linear thinkers in the audience can’t empathize with the Holistic MC, the Holistic thinkers in the audience can’t buy in to the Timelock, and since the HPS Main Character doesn’t feel properly pressured by the Limit–being unable to really understand it–there’s a dissonance at the heart of the story that further alienates the audience.
Sorry, I guess that’s a bit off-topic.