Time’s Fickleness

Time is such a complex idea, but… we don’t actually see it as such do we? It appears to us as so natural, mainly because it’s embedded within our everyday life. Maybe some of you have actually sat down by yourselves or with a friend and chatted about time as a concept and tool. Whether you have or haven’t, I reckon this post will still be of your interest. 

First, I’m going to briefly refer to time as a tool, specifically how our modern day society measures it. In case any of you weren’t aware, our more general measure for time are based on orbits. For example, a year is a full rotation of our earth around the sun's orbit. A month is a full moon cycle (so basically a rotation of the moon around our orbit). And finally a week is one of the 4 main phases of the moon. But, there are a few measurements that are a bit trickier.

As most of you must know, a day has 24 hours, an hour 60 minutes, and a minute 60 seconds. Why is this the case though? Based on research, we somewhat mimic how Babylonians measured their time in this regard. This ancient society embedded the number 12 and it’s multiples (especially 60) with mystical significance. Henceforth, we utilize 60 as the base number for both minutes and hours. The Babylonians as well divided the day into light and dark, and each of these segments into 12 smaller sections (based on their fascination for this number). If you were to sum up both sides (12 for light and 12 for dark), the result would be 24, that is to say, the amount of hours a day has. 

Now that that’s out of the way, lest talk about time in its more abstract form, as a proper idea or concept. Humans tend to attribute significance in an arbitrary fashion towards things that wouldn’t normally have a “natural” significance. I’ll follow this up by stating an example. Let’s compare a few scenarios, would a minute microwaving food be the same if you’re terribly hungry and waiting desperately for the sweet relief of that beeping sound, or if you're totally chilling, maybe doing other activities while you wait? Essentially yes, but at the same time it isn’t, a new concept is introduced, our perception of time. Time isn’t subjective, but it’s perception is, and this is where our arbitrary significance reigns. 

Another subjective factor to take into account is actually also related to our perception, but this time it’s linked to a cultural aspect. Think about when you tell your friend that you’ll be at their house in ten minutes, or when you tell your mother that you’ll stop playing video games in 5. Those 5 or 10 minutes aren’t always precise, right? So this would imply that our perception of time isn’t an individual act, but in fact it’s a social and cultural construct. If you were to visit another society, where punctuality is a norm, then saying you’ll be there in 10 minutes should actually mean 10 minutes and not some form of approximate. But of course you wouldn’t naturally know this since in your culture, saying 10 minutes known to be taken lightly. 

As a closure to this post I’ll propose something. How about we view certain moments as pure moments and nothing else? Normally when you're in a specific moment, you’re also thinking about the past and future, because essentially that’s what time is, a succession of events shaping a past, present and future. But if we were to value certain moments as an individual act, maybe we’d be able to appreciate them more for what they are. In no way am I proposing to get rid of our perception of time as a whole, but sometimes it’s just a good aa idea to look past that mundane concept.