Time

Time(noun): the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.¹

 
 
I’ve always been fascinated with time. How it’s measured, how it’s perceived, how it affects literally everything. And while those points alone are enough to make TIme one hell of an interesting thing to study,
 
For something as universally concrete as Time, there sure is a hell of a lot of philosophy and debate surrounding what exactly time is.
 
I like to define time (at least in the universal sense) as the “displacement of space.” A bit more simplistic than the definition offered by Google, but I feel it does a good job of illustrating what time essentially means to us and how it’s linked to space. Paradoxically, space can be defined as the “displacement of time.” One cannot exist without the other.
 
Well over a year ago, I wrote down a thought to sorta illustrate their inter-connectivity.

I always thought freezing time would be a cool power to have. Using it to screw around with people, get some extra sleep, cheat on tests, the like. Well, it would be a cool power if you wouldn’t die instantly upon using it for the first time. See, time can be defined as the displacement of space. We know time is moving forward because the space around us is constantly in motion. More so, temperature is determined by the amount of kinetic energy in the air. Millions of tiny particles smashing against each other, creating friction, creating heat. This constant motion is all around us, invisible bar the atomic level, but it’s what keeps us warm and alive. So if we were to freeze time- stop all motion-, we would literally be freezing space. The temperature would drop to absolute zero, and if your body remained at its normal temperature, it would essentially be like exposing yourself to the vacuum of space. Your oxygen, blood, and other bodily fluids would be sucked out of your orifices. Your brain would swell and explode from the pressure.² And since your body is trapped in an infinitesimally small sliver of time, you would cease to exist in the physical universe. Time would continue to pass normally for other people, but your desiccated, lifeless corpse would forever be stuck in frozen time.

Not so fun now, is it?

This illustrates Time’s physiological effect on the human body. It seems like a simple (and obvious)concept, Time being the medium of change that allows our neurons to fire and connect. For our blood to flow and our cells to age. Consequently, it allows us to exist as we are even as it slowly kills us. You could probably make a few good riddles out of that.
 
The part of the excerpt that read, “And since your body is trapped in an infinitesimally small sliver of time, you would cease to exist in the physical universe” is inspired by an old Twilight Zone episode titled A Kind of Stopwatch.³ In it, a man acquires a stopwatch that has the power to stop and unstop time.
 
Unfortuantely, the man doesn’t explode violently upon freezing time for the first time (which would’ve made for a hilarious, yet, short, gore-filled episode). He uses this power to, of course, play pranks on his boss and coworkers. The next obvious use for this power is robbing a bank, obviously.
 
And all goes well… until the man drops the stopwatch and breaks it. Now he’s stuck in a frozen world. Forever. Alone. Doomed to live out the rest of his life in an infinitesimally small sliver of time, being surrounded by loved ones, but never being able to interact with them every again.
 
See? Gore isn’t always the best option when approaching the horror genre.
 
But I digress. What I was really influenced by in the episode was the implied metaphysics regarding what would happen to man relative to everyone else, and vice versa.
 
This is all hypothetical conjecture, but I’d like to think that in this instant of freezing time, the man didn’t “freeze” the universe’s time so much as his own time “sped up” relative to the rest of the universe. Like, speed of light fast. In this most realistic of unrealistic scenarios, time for the rest of the world would continue on independently from the stopwatch time (or lack thereof). Frozen time can be likened to Limbo from Inception, or an object breaching a black hole’s event horizon. The outside world carries on, but the object has its own little eternity.
 
Reminds me of an old Star Wars book I read where someone gets thrown out of a ship that was in hyperspace. Their body would cease to exist in the material universe as there would be nothing to slow them down back into “realspace.”
 
Perhaps I’m rambling.
 
In short, Time is like a video. Frozen time is like a picture. The individual picture never changes, but the video is always changing, with it being made up of countless, unchanging pictures.
 
That analogy is a whole lot cleaner. I probably should’ve lead with that.⁴

Now there’s one last point I’d like to illustrate on my philosophy of time. While analyzing the physics behind it is fine and dandy and cool, I’ve always been more interested in the psychological side of things. After all, nature can only be viewed and analyzed through the biased lenses of culture.
 
On the macro-level, each culture has different attitudes towards time. India, which has a long and rich history, largely has a past-oriented society. Train delays are common, and people and businesses are more laid-back and unconcerned with being “on-time.”
 
The U.S., on the other extreme, is a very future-oriented society. Always looking forward, striving for that “American Dream.” Timeliness is prioritized in social interactions and businesses do not tolerate tardiness. Slaves to the clock.⁵ Tickety-tock.
 
On the micro-level, individual people have different attitudes towards time, but that’s largely down to personal preference and experience.
 
For an extended Calculus analogy, people can be likened to functions on a graph. Extremely, extremely complicated functions. The x-axis representing time and the y-axis representing their overall emotional well being at that moment in time.
 
Now if there’s one handy dandy thing calculus is good for, it’s derivatives. Derivatives allow mathematicians to measure the rate of change of the function at that instantaneous moment in time.
 
By that extension, we can liken derivatives to what people post online at any one moment in time. The stuff they post reflects back on the kind of person they are behind the keyboard, and since the stuff they post remains online, it is like the instantaneous rate of change of their identity. The next time they post something, their mood could be completely different. Since the stuff they posted last time is no longer current or accurate of their identity, it is merely a capture of their identity at that moment in time.
 
That's how I like to think about it, anyway. We all have, at some point, used the term “past selves” to differentiate ourselves from ourselves. We recognize that the person we were in elementary school is different from who we were in high school, in terms of beliefs, personality, intelligence, and to a lesser degree, I think, physicality. The same applies to any two comparable periods in our lives. There is, in effect, nothing that remains constant throughout our lives, except possibly our names.
 
Change is the only true constant. Time is that change.
 
So when do we become someone different, chronologically speaking? Steins Gate⁶ says two days is the cutoff. Popular time-loop movies like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow seem to imply sleep is the divider and that we wake up as new people everyday. I’d like to think that there is no distinct divider to when we become someone else, rather, it’s all on a spectrum. Think Theseus's Ship or the Sorites Paradox. An artificial separation is needed because there is no real separation, yet, our minds need a way to easily classify this change. Just keep in mind that whatever divider you use, it’s a placeholder, nothing more.
 
Whew. I think I’m done. That’s probably enough philosophy bullshit for a good month or two. I do believe…
 

 
And remember, no matter how simple something looks, there’s always a deeper level.

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1. This is the first definition of time you will get if you google “definition of time,” anyway.
2. Yeah, I know vacuum exposure doesn’t work like that, but it sounded cooler at the moment. Sometimes the facts don’t just conveniently fit with the narrative, but that hasn’t stopped us writers yet.
3. Season 5 Episode 4
4. Since this post was preconstructed beforehand, I easily could’ve edited this analogy in a lot sooner. I didn’t for a reason.
5. Also the title of a forthcoming poem I’m working on.
6. Of course, I had to bring in my absolute favorite anime of all time into this. Watch it.