It's Time!

Here comes Bruce Buffer again:

This time around, let’s talk about time.

We think a lot about how much time we have, but very little about what time actually is. Maybe you’re reading this and assuming you know exactly what time is, and thinking that it’s not really worth wasting any of your time thinking about time today.

If it helps you make a decision about how to spend your precious time today, this will be more of a ditty than a deep dive. I’ve written in some depth about the question of time already, including the more technical definitions from physics and mathematics:

Mathematically speaking, time is just distance traveled divided by velocity. Take how fast something is going and how far it has gone, and you will know how much time has passed.

Well, duh. But what is it, really? What is time?

The first thing to understand about spacetime is that it’s one thing, just like mass and energy are one thing. You can measure the individual components of spacetime as space and time, just as you can measure the length, width, and height of something in space, or the amount of time that has gone by.

However, Einstein showed that if you take away a little space, you gain a little time, and vice versa.

So, spacetime is a thing, and space and time are just ways to measure or describe this fabric and this substance. They’re like the X and Y axis of a graph—they aren’t the graph itself, but instead ways to describe the subject of the graph. Class dismissed!

Still, I can’t personally give up more space in order to get more time. If only!

Instead, I have to deal with a very finite number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years that are available to me to use. This has been central to my life, driving me to reclaim as much of this all-valuable resource by way of being more efficient with the things I do.

At the same time, being cognizant of how much time is passing helps make sure that I don’t waste too much of my day’s most precious resource.

In moments of stress, time perception can do funny things. Something that takes a few seconds can feel like a few minutes, and this very act is your superpower.

Fighting against our body’s natural tendencies to rewire our brains—to truly grasp what the passage of time means—isn’t easy.

The challenge is that your heart is pumping blood through your entire body at breakneck speed, and that includes your brain. Your brain is going, going, going—but it needs slowing, slowing, slowing.

Time dilation doesn’t just take place in physics, but having this variable perception of time doesn’t have to be all bad, either.

How, then, can we take advantage of this knowledge? Personalizing the passage of time is an important step here. Here is how the process works for me:

I can project this same lifespan into the future. I can visualize the next fifty years based on my experiences of the past fifty. It may seem like a vast, unknown frontier, but isn’t that what the past fifty years (I’m ballparking) I’ve lived through have been?

If I stay focused, I can actually envision what 100 years is. It is a personal, relatable amount of time, not some vast, mysterious thing I can never grasp.

100 years is one Goatfury.

Having a personalized unit of time that you can feel can really help put history into perspective. You can track your way back through the past, going all the way back to our earliest human origins.

Even this pales in comparison to the truly deep time it took to cook the Earth and our universe.

Everything we’ve ever done, going as far back as the first shelters we built, to figuring out how to communicate using symbols, to learning how to cook with fire, creating tools, migrating out of Africa and eventually to the rest of the world—all of this—falls short of the time when the dinosaurs dominated by more than 200 times.

Still, feeling the time through my own lens helps a ton, and I hope this idea gives you some food for thought… when you have time to think about it.