A few weeks ago I asked you guys what I should write about; my friend answered with time (or more specifically, the notion of being stuck in time).
First and foremost, thank you for the submission because that means people actually read these things. Second, I really wish you hadn’t picked something so existential as this but I’ll do my best.
Time in itself is a pretty straightforward concept to grasp. It’s how we as a conscious species have been able to record events and the length of energy spent on said events. After a bit of arguing and debate, we somehow have been able to agree on a single unit of measurement amongst all of us, with a few exceptions that usually vary based on regions and culture.
The main take aways from this massive social experiment are two main points:
Point 1: Time is unavoidable.
Like a busy highway, the only direction to go is forward. There will always be exceptions and outliers, like the team of Russian scientists who were able to simulate the reversal of time by fractions of a second (the keywords here being “simulate” and “fractions of a second”). Although interesting, there’s no way to bring ourselves back in time to watch the first dinosaur walk the earth or stop a major historical event (this will be important later on so just bear with me).
Point 2: The concept of time towers above every other subject matter.
Time (technically) is relative based on the person and their place within space time, but it still exists nonetheless. No living being has been able to surpass or control time. No one has been able to harness or multiply time like other resources, making it such a precious topic of conversation. How we live our lives is reliant on this concept. It’s been here before us and will continue to exist once we leave this life.
My grandmother always used the analogy of sand on the earth’s surface to describe our time in this life: “There’s a whole lot of time and not a whole lot of you”. Putting that into perspective (thank you internet), you are MAYBE one of roughly seven quintillion five hundred quadrillion or 1/700,500,000,000,000,000,000.
Why am I telling all this information?
I have no idea.
Is this a lot to take in?
Absolutely.
But I do know that our time is quite finite. It is the only thing man cannot bargain with or buy. It is Gods final weapon. Writers, philosophers, religious figures and everyday citizens like us have written and thought for centuries about this concept. But ultimately, all of us, at least once in our lives, have felt like we were burning time.
Whether it’s picking the wrong line at the grocery store, or getting boxed in by a pair of trucks on the highway, there’s a sense of helplessness you feel as you watch others progress forward as you are stuck watching them pass by. Think back to Grade 10 math class where you feel like everything you’re learning is going in one ear and out the other. Have you ever met someone that shares your birth year but on a completely different trajectory in life? Causing you to pump the breaks and take a quick detour into the never ending loop of self-comparison and overthinking?
Comparison is a natural human instinct. It’s an evolutionary trait that has allowed us to asses situations and determine whether or not we should get involved or move on. But as humans, we’ve developed a little thing called self-awareness, a complex cognitive framework of assessing the environment around us. Combine this with mass media, the internet, and smartphones and you’ve got something that I like to call a total MESS of things.
I never thought I’d become “that guy”, placing problems on smart phones and technology. But let me go record and say that it is not ENTIRELY technology’s fault, but rather the fixation on media. This belief that we’re not going anywhere or achieving anything could have been caused by the massive online archive of everything everyone is currently doing and anyone else has ever done. The salty python slithers its way into our subconscious and before we know it an hour, a day, 2 months, a year has passed by as you fell down the rabbit hole because we were subconsciously fixated on what could have been.
The worst part about this whole scenario is that through all of this, no matter how big or small our chronological traffic jam may be, time doesn’t care at ALL. So why stress? No seriously, there’s no point in stressing. Like the analogy of the tea kettle, the water won’t boil if you keep staring at it (or even better yet your food won’t heat up any faster if you keep staring into the microwave) so don’t worry about it. Time keeps going, and so will you.
Let me know your thoughts on this. Have you caught yourself letting time fly by? Is time really the one true being that stands above all? Or are we just overreacting?
Be good, do good and I gift you with Astronomy by Blue Öyster Cult (just click on the cassette below and enjoy).
