When traveling from the US to Australia, an entire day disappears. On this trip, it was a Monday. Generally, flights depart the US in the late evening and, anywhere from about 15 to 22 hours later, touch down in the land of Oz. My plane left Houston on Sunday evening around half past eight and, after 17 and a half hours, deposited me in Sydney on Tuesday just after seven in the morning.
The first time or two that you make the trip, it’s quite discombobulating. Even more surreal is the trip home where, nearly every time, you arrive before you leave. For instance, my return flight leaves Sydney on Wednesday morning just after 11 and arrives in Houston an hour earlier the same day. Lose a day going over, gain a day going back.
The secret to beating the jet lag, if there is one, is to sleep as much as possible during the second half of each flight. Because of the tailwinds, flying east normally takes less time than going west. It translates to about a two hour difference in flight duration between most points in the US and Australia.
It’s got me thinking about how human beings conceptualize time. Time is culturally dependent, understood as linear in some places and fluid in others. It’s a non-renewable resource and an input of production. Like Adam Smith’s water-diamond paradox illustrates, our perception of time’s value fluctuates wildly. At some points, time is priceless while at others we look to waste, or even kill, it. We know time passes and we’ve created both simple and complex ways to mark and measure it but, unlike every other variable from speed to mass, we have no way to objectively alter it. Time is the only true constant in our universe.
I’m still not sure what I’m doing with the gift of time I’ve been given. Good news is that I have the next 15 hours to noodle on it.
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
View all posts by liz
1 Comment
You’ve got a way with words, as they say. Love this post.
Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
You’ve got a way with words, as they say. Love this post.
LikeLike