Dead giveaway title heh.

I used to think about time the same way I understood how a clock worked, because that’s how I was raised to look at time: divided into 12 segments, each of those into another 60 mini subsections, so on and so forth. This was a very practical way to utilise and work with time as all my daily activities seemed to depend largely on what the clock dictated: 7am school, 5pm play in the park, 10pm bed. Of course I would argue when I wasn’t actually feeling tired but there seemed to be no reasoning with the clock. It was doctrine, one I never understood and hated very much, because of how systematic and unwavering it was and mostly how it seemed I couldn’t reason with it.

I come from the tropics and we have one season, hot wetness; and you could always rely on the sun going down and coming up at roughly the same time all year round, which really reflected this understanding of time that the world seems to share. However, that’s hardly how I would describe my experience of time. I doubt anyone ever truly experiences time in such a uniformed and unvaried way. They say time flies when you’re having fun but it slows down when you’re bored, and I think that has a lot to do with how time actually works. The way I see it, on some level, time flies when we don’t pay attention to it and thats when it actually behaves erratically or is relative to what we’re doing or rather our perception of what we’re doing and whether it’s something that does(nt) require strict attention. However when you start paying attention, time begins to move slowly. In a way, if you wanted to slow down time, all you’d have to do is stare at a clock all day and suddenly you’ll realise you’re living some seriously long days.

The standard way of looking at time.. it can’t be measured and standardized because each of us experiences it differently, whereas a clock is more of a measurement of Earths’ position relative to the sun, can be measured and is something we all share simultaneously. But why call it time? Isn’t it a measurement of place? Shouldn’t we be asking “where are we?” instead of “what time is it?”? We tend to look at this individual perception of time as something arbitrary or a silly notion but consider if we were taken and put on another planet where the rotation and orbit of the planet takes ten times as long as our own, would we have to adjust time to suit that yearly cycle? Does that make the average lifespan of the average person only 5-7 years? I’m just 24 cycles around the sun from the earth old. I mean there are countless examples of how our clock based understanding of time is not really good enough as there have been many experiments [for instance] where people deprive themselves of light and they lose all track of time, hours turn into days and it’s entirely disorienting. Time, I think, has a more fundamental connection to quantum mechanics. I’m not a physicist and obviously don’t have the credibility to talk about any of it but I am a science enthusiast, and the way I see it time reminded very much of the double slit experiment; when we don’t observe it, it’s just a wave of possibilities and the moment we pay attention it becomes more rigid. The way we experience time is relative to how much attention we give it.

When you quickly glance at a clock you’ll notice that the first second hand actually takes a while longer than the preceeding one. This is actually constantly happening and watching a clock is simply an easy way to observe this effect. The reason this happens is that in that quick glance our eyes still see everything that happens in-between and it takes a moment for our brains to quickly analyse the information. The more information we process in a shorter period of time, affects our perception of time. The quicker we can process all this information may well have a direct correlation to how much control we can have over time, if you can for arguments sake process information at or near the brains processing equivalent of the speed of light, you could potentially exist in your own little time bubble where everything around you becomes extremely slow. Clearly the human brain can’t actually process things instantaneously, but perhaps there are ways to speed it up exponentially. I believe that “the zone” is a very real example of how humans are able to harness this idea of having some diction over time, by processing so much information in such a small windows of time that they perform tasks to their full potential almost seamlessly.

I reckon it’d be pretty sweet if we could have that kind of control over time wilfully. Or maybe I just spend too much time thinking and need to get out more.

This thought has been bugging me more than I like, might be worth looking into some ideas to test this huhu