Time

Time is strange. We measure it in uniform units — seconds, hours, years — but experience it in variable flows. A boring lecture drags. An absorbing conversation evaporates. The same hour can feel like forever or like nothing. Objective time and subjective time differ, and both are real.

Physics treats time as a dimension, another axis like space. Relativity shows it dilates with velocity and gravity. Quantum mechanics suggests it may not be fundamental at all. But we don’t experience time as a dimension. We experience it as passing — present moments becoming past, future becoming present. The arrow of time has a direction that physics struggles to explain.

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Augustine captured the puzzle: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it, I do not know.” We swim in time but can’t point to it. It lacks the tangibility of objects. Yet everything changes, and change implies time.

Cultures organize time differently. Western industrial time is linear, uniform, abstract — the clock divorced from nature, the calendar from seasons. Agricultural time was cyclical, tied to sun and moon and growing season. Religious time had sacred moments: Sabbath, Ramadan, holy days that structured the year qualitatively.

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The body keeps time. Circadian rhythms cycle every 24 hours. Hormones, temperature, alertness follow daily patterns independent of clocks. Jet lag shows what happens when social time and body time diverge. The body has its own clocks, and ignoring them costs.

Aging changes time perception. Years seem shorter as we age. One theory: novel experience creates time-rich memories, and adults have fewer novel experiences. Childhood summers lasted forever because every day contained new things. Adult years compress because they blend together.

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Modern life accelerates. Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration documents how modernity speeds up — technological acceleration (faster communication), social change acceleration (faster turnover of practices), and pace-of-life acceleration (doing more per hour). Whether this makes life richer or more frantic depends on how you experience it.

The contemplative traditions counsel slowing down. Meditation is attention to present experience, pausing the rush toward future goals. But the advice presupposes a problem — that the default speed is too fast, that presence requires practice. In a slower era, presence might have been the default.

Related: [[kairos-chronos]], [[circadian-rhythms]], [[deep-time]], [[tempo]]