We present a pedagogical and critical exposition of the Higgs mechanism within the Standard Model, including its formal structure, explanatory achievements, and unresolved conceptual challenges. The mechanism elegantly explains mass acquisition for gauge bosons and fermions via spontaneous symmetry breaking, but leaves key questions open: the origin of Yukawa couplings, the negligible role in hadronic mass, and the cosmological constant problem arising from its vacuum energy. As a complementary perspective, we introduce Chronon Field Theory (CFT), a topological field model in which both inertial and gravitational mass arise from solitonic excitations of a causal temporal vector field. We do not claim that CFT supplants the Standard Model, but propose it as a promising theoretical approach to unresolved foundational problems. Our aim is to motivate further investigation into whether such a temporally grounded ontology can advance the understanding of mass, gravity, and field unification.