Preface
This post is a little different, this is me reflecting on the concept of time as a constant and the amount of effort that has been used to make us build our entire lives around it and how healthy it all is.
Time as a constant
If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve noticed that I like to question everything we think we know, and very often find that some things have just been said over and over again until people start believing them and reciting them as universal truth. One of those things happens to be time.
The first time I heard someone refer to time as a constant, I had to stop and raise an eyebrow and ask myself a very idiotic question, which I guess eventually found an answer.
The question I asked myself was, “Do we have any evidence to support the claim that a second was the same 3 million years ago?
Then came an even stranger question: “if no one was measuring time back then, how can we even tell?”
As it turns out, the question was apt, because, guess what, we measure our day by the rotation of the Earth, and the rotation of the Earth is not a constant, as you can read here: https://www.space.com/16380-leap-second-earth-rotation-moon.html
So if our “day” is a unit of time and that unit of time is relative to the rotation of the earth … you can guess where I’m going with this, right?
Time as a social tool
Now, if you look at our modern society, you can’t help but notice that time plays a crucial role in our social lives. Every social interaction is determined by time. We have been led to believe that nothing works without counting or measuring it, it has become a major cornerstone of everything we do on a daily basis.
Lord William Thomson Kelvin said: “What is not defined cannot be measured. What is not measured cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded”.
Can you imagine your life without time? Without counting? Without measuring? Did the inventors of time see where this was going? That we would become slaves to this beautiful/horrible invention?
Wait, you’re not serious, you’re not really against this idea of time?
Well, I guess if you think about it, it helps to “find the time” to be with your loved one, to be with your kids, to meet with some friends. No, I don’t see any harm in that, that part is even helpful, it helps to bring some order into our lives, I actually appreciate that.
It is only when you start measuring everything in your life that it really becomes a problem in my eyes. For example, if you say “I’m going to spend 15 minutes a day learning a new language,” is spending 30 minutes a bad thing? If you want to enjoy a workout at the gym, but you say, “I only have time for an hour at the gym today,” when it’s something you enjoy immensely? When you start measuring your breath and heartbeat, how long does it take you to read a page in your favorite book? Where is your only child supposed to be at the age of 4, developmentally?
Now it becomes a problem for me, this is no way to celebrate life!
Money getting in the way, yet again
So where does it all come from? Think for a minute about all the phrases you know about time. What do most of them have to do with?
M O N E Y ! ! !
We are programmed from a very early age to think that time has to do with money, you need time to make money, this is where the concept of time starts to disappoint, time and measurement becomes an obstacle in our lives instead of helping us make more sense of it all.
How often have you heard people say things like, “I wish I had more time”?
This is because the simple truth is that what you do with your time matters, every second of every minute of every hour of your life. You decide what you are going to spend it on.
So stop looking at the clock and go do something with the time you have!
Stay educated,
Aviram
