Time Is Literally Not Real So Stop Worrying About It

We’ve been selling our time way too cheap for way too long

A couple of days ago I was looking at a friend’s Facebook page, and thought “Huh, she hasn’t posted since October 8,” which seemed to me must have been months ago.

It took me several minutes to realize that October 8 had been a week earlier. What did I think the date was? No idea. Could have been the 5th of June or the 10th of Vendémiaire. And how can I be expected to know the month, when 2021 still feels like it should be a decade in the future?

This inability to grasp the passage of time plays out in a variety of ways. “Brian and I talked a couple of months ago.” Nope, it was 2016.

But why do we obsess with knowing times and dates, past and future? What’s important is what we’re doing right now.

What’s your time worth?

These days we all carry a clock in our pocket, and have easy access to a host of other devices eager to tell us if we’re late for something.

We count out our goals and achievements in hours, days and years, using a personalized internal calculus to determine whether we’re doing things fast enough or soon enough, and mostly deciding we aren’t.

Like Prufrock, we measure our lives in coffee spoons, always looking towards some future moment, and ignoring the one we’re living in.

We measure our worth in hours spent at labours we despise, to earn money we don’t need, to buy things we never use.

Time is a fraud

And why should we know the “whens” of things? Time isn’t an absolute, it’s relative depending on where you’re standing and how fast you’re travelling.

It has no objective reality.

Einstein — the real one, not meme Einstein who haunts the Instagram pages of moisturizer-shilling influencers like a wild-haired Tony Robbins — figured that out more than a century ago.

“People like us who believe in physics,” he wrote famously, “know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

To add to the general confusion, time also moves faster as you get older. That’s why childhood summers lasted forever, and nowadays the years wave cheerlessly at us from the roadside as we accelerate past them.

There are scientific explanations for this phenomenon, although my personal theory is that it’s just the universe screwing with us.

Time, by any yardstick you apply, isn’t real. It’s a standard we agree on so we can all get to the restaurant at the same time.

It sure feels real

It sure does. But the way we see it today is far different from the way our ancestors did.

Standard time didn’t exist until 1883, when it was implemented across North America to simplify railroad schedules. Before that it was chrono-chaos, with each city setting their own time zone. A train passenger could leave Toronto at 6 am and arrive two hours later in Buffalo to find it was already 10 o’clock there. If you had a connecting train leaving at 9 o’clock Buffalo time, you were out of luck.

Within a few decades, the needs of commerce had dragged the rest of the world into standard time, meaning we can fly around the globe to find ourselves in a strange and wondrous new culture, but still slaves to the same universal clock.

Standard time makes systems efficient. Without it, we wouldn’t have science or industry. We also wouldn’t have capitalism, nuclear weapons, or climate change. We wouldn’t be able to order silk underwear made by child labourers in Bangladesh for Next Day Delivery in case we get lucky on Tinder.

Well, shit.

But it wasn’t always like that.

For a million years, humans marked time by the movements of the sun, the moon, and the seasons. It was a simpler world, and one we evolved to thrive in.

Not, “The morning meeting starts at 8, be there on time or find a new job”.

Instead, “Anyone who wants to go hunting tomorrow, meet by the big oak tree whenever we’re all awake”.

Time didn’t rule our lives then, and it doesn’t have to now.

We sell our time too cheaply

Ideally we’d dispense with time entirely, but our brains are hard-wired for it, plus it would be confusing if everything happened at once.

And we can’t all go back to casual hunting and gathering style. I prefer my air traffic controllers to know what time my flight is coming in.

The concept of time as servant is valuable. But as master it’s insane.

What matters is whether what I’m doing in this moment has value.

If Covid has taught us anything — and that’s a big “if” — it’s that the world doesn’t fall apart when we stop doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Or maybe it falls apart in the right way.

People are abandoning soul-destroying work, deciding that it’s not worth it to run their lives by someone else’s clock. Not worth it to devalue and neglect those things that defined ten thousand generations of humans, things like love, play and contemplation, in favour of some future raise or promotion or an Amazon box full of consumer crap.

People are learning to give joy the time that it deserves. And demanding to be allowed to do so.

Time is all we really have, and most of us are selling it way too cheap.