by Garo Kerdelian | Staff Writer

Time.

It controls our lives. We struggle to be early for class, regret spending too much time on social media, and curse our sleep schedules during exam periods. We constantly race with time; we call it “money” and try not to waste it; but eventually, we inevitably become its obedient slaves.

Yet rarely do we ask – what is time? Do we all perceive it the same? If so, are common perceptions justified, or do we need to alter them to develop a holistic worldview and lead healthier lives?

Time is usually defined as a continuous sequence of events occurring in succession and associated with change – a clock is supposed to measure the periodic passage of time. I will deal with two notions of time: physical time and philosophical time. Only by exploring the two branches separately can we develop a unified view of what time is and what to do with it.

Have you ever wondered how a second is defined? Even if you did, the answer would not be very obvious – it is defined in the International System of Units as 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation associated with the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom. This duration is a fundamental property of nature and agrees with the Earth’s rotation. Along with the great physicist Isaac Newton’s comments that “time in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly,” we are commonly fooled into a misconception that physical time, the time that clocks measure detached from our individual experiences, is an absolute progression shared by all.

Enter Einstein and his special theory of relativity. In 1905, the German physicist wrote a revolutionary paper that suggested exactly the opposite: time is relative and not an absolute. Observers in a reference frame traveling near the speed of light experience time dilation – time goes by more slowly for them relative to those at rest. The quirky theory has given rise to countless supposed paradoxes and theories. An example is the twin paradox, in which one of two twins travels to outer space and returns to find the other twin to have aged more. Yet, such contradictions are perfectly explained in Einstein’s theories. It has indeed been found that astronauts age slightly more slowly than we Earthlings do!

Aside from disproving the absolution of time, modern physics provides other unique insights. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy, or the measure of disorder in a system, can never decrease in a closed system. In other words, the Universe is becoming more and more chaotic as physical systems acquire greater potential for diversity and change. At every moment, an infinite number of possibilities are available to us human beings, and the potentials we choose to actualize write the pages of history. Though entropy is still a contentious issue in physics, many argue that the increase in entropy requires an a priori definition of the flow of time and therefore sets its arrow as going forward, not backward.

So, we have three disconcerting conclusions from physical time. It is not as uniform and objective as we perceive it to be and seems to entail an inevitable increase in chaos. In light of this natural propensity towards disorder, chaos is the norm, and order is the exception. Finally, our temporal location within a 13.8-billion-year-old Universe shows us how truly insignificant we are within the grand scheme of things, but our conscious role as proactive agents cannot be denied.

The insights of physics, though valuable, have little bearing on how we actually “feel” time. For instance, fifteen minutes hungrily waiting in line at the cafeteria feels like an eternity, but an entire day spent happily with friends flies by in a minute. Yet, when you look back on that ‘long wait’ a month later, it is a mere trifle and that ‘quick escape’ constitutes a core memory full of joyful moments. American educator and philosopher Michael Stevens outlines such and other temporal distortions in a video on his YouTube channel “Vsauce.”

He claims that prospective time, feeling time in the moment, feels long for empty activities (such as waiting in line) and short for full activities (such as a fun day with friends). On the other hand, retrospective time, feeling time while reflecting on the past, feels long for full activities and short for empty activities.

Other illusions are more significant and shape the way we live every day. We are all prey to a chronocentric illusion: we hold the belief that our frame of reference of time is the best and most natural one. For instance, when our grandparents tell us of times before television, we gawk at them in disbelief – we say it is something that’s always “been there” and fail to understand that for them, it was a new additional luxury. The same holds true for social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – we gradually grew accustomed to them in our teens, but most children cannot envision a world without them.

Our one-sided view of the world is compounded by protagonist syndrome – a ubiquitous belief that we are the main characters of the universe and everyone else is an extra in our special ‘movie’ – a movie that started when we were born, with everything before a backstory, and everything after – a sequel. We therefore err in attributing our own mistakes to complex, nuanced reasons shaped by our interaction with the world, and others’ to one-dimensional character faults. Our protagonist syndrome makes us selfish and see other humans as beneath ourselves, perhaps even contributing to our apathy to hurt others, wage war, and commit murder.

For a more “civilized” view of philosophical time and our place within it, we can resort to two critical realizations. The first is German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness”: we have no control over when and where we are born, for we are simply thrown into our own reality with a proffered set of social norms and prejudices. We must remember that our inability to decide the time and place of our birth and the impending reality of death forces us to conduct ourselves within our own civilization and context.

The second is the feeling of sonder – a term coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Sonder is “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness.” We need to remind ourselves that we are not, in fact, the main characters of the universe, and that everyone we know – from our supermarket cashier to our university professors – has a story, and is in turn connected to thousands of other people whose lives and stories we will never know existed. Along with the existential realization that most people do not actually care about us, our mistakes, failures, and awkwardness, look small, even absurd.

Our overview of physical and philosophical time inevitably leads us to a paradox: we are insignificant compared to the sheer enormity and age of the Universe and are faced with the ominous possibility of increasingly complex and chaotic times. On the other hand, time is not an absolute but a relative entity in our hands. We have a proactive role as conscious agents to lead as main characters in our own lives, make the best out of the limited time we are thrown into the world with, and strive to correct our mistakes and failures. The inevitable continuity of time is at once the greatest blessing and curse to us all, and in its wake, we must remember to occasionally feel “sonder” – that time, that elusive and indefinable being, goes on in complicated and different paths, forever, and always, for us all.