Managing the Elusive Notion of Time, In Person and Online
*This article was written by Megumi DeMond, as a result of the intellectual rigor of a Junto, with Clark Brimhall, Erik Hansen, Kyle Harrison, and Christina Muhlestein
Sundials. Hourglasses. Watches. Calendars.
What do these all have in common? The answer may seem obvious. Of course, these are all ways to measure time. Yet these tangible devices exist to manage a much more amorphous notion: time itself.
What is time? In fourth grade, I set out to answer this question. Curious about how time works, I began a year-long project for one of my classes. Naturally, with the cognitive abilities of a 10 year-old, I wasn’t sure where to start. So I settled on researching something more concrete and familiar: clocks and calendars. Although I learned many fun facts regarding the historical development of such measurement devices, I was never able to reach the essential answer to my original question.
Fast forward thirteen years and I still have not grasped the essence of time. How do we define time? How do we manage this thing that is so abstract?
Our most recent Junto discussion spotlighted this topic. It was inspired by a piece in the New Yorker by Alan Burdick, called “The Secret Life of Time.” From this article, our group focused on three main ideas.
Awareness of Time
“‘Indeed,’ Augustine wrote, ‘what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future are all immediate in the mind . . .’ There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.”
One’s awareness of time is individual to oneself. Kyle likes to measure it in chunks, each assigned to a specific purpose — whether exercising, working, spending time with children, etc. Clark more often focuses on the present moment, perhaps a more flexible approach.
Some people even quantify the value of their time. Take, for example, a college student whose every minute can be quantified in terms of tuition dollars spent.
Here is a true story: there once was a college student who skipped almost every single class during his freshman year (okay, I know this has happened more than once). Let’s call him Bob. Bob spent his class time playing video games, shooting hoops with friends, what have you — anything but attending class. One day, Bob decided to calculate just how much money he was wasting by skipping class. He discovered that he was throwing thousands of dollars down the drain each week. After quantifying the value of that time, Bob never skipped a minute of class again.
The example above illustrates that time is quantifiable when thought of in discrete segments. Yet dividing time in this way assumes a difference between the past, present, and future. As Augustine states in the above quote, the three tenses of time are all the same. We live in a constant present moment. Is there a trade-off here? Perhaps the only way to manage time is to eschew the present — or at least convince ourselves that we are doing so.
The Infinity of Social Media
“Modern science has abandoned the soul in favor of probing the framework of consciousness . . .Yet we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting awareness of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone, or a deep and common wish that “I” somehow belong to “we,” and that “we” belong to something even larger and less comprehensible . . .”
One very effective way that our society deludes itself of the reality of time is through our online presence. The Internet is a space where time does not exist. It is possible to curate one’s social media profile so that it appears the person is living a constant paradise; nowadays, avid Instagrammers will build up an arsenal of photos from, say, a trip to China, and post them periodically even after they return from the trip! These images make us wonder: is this person always in China? Didn’t I just see her in class a few minutes ago?
Distancing ourselves from the reality of time means straying from honesty. Our social media lacks the truest images of our lives largely because, online, we can evade the ineluctable motion of real time. As our Internet lives take up more of our mental real estate, will this artificial space become our reality?
Our Relation to Time
“But once a new self realizes its continuity it pauses. ‘I will always be me’ — always, how long is that? A self capable of noticing that everything around it expires can’t avoid concluding that it will, too, somehow, sometime.”
As much time as we spend curating our presence in the timeless cyberworld, there is one reality we cannot escape: death (oh, and taxes).
Appropriately, though somewhat depressingly, our Junto discussion ended with a conversation about death. Although time itself is infinite, human time is not. There is perhaps no place where this is more apparent than in nature. In nature, juxtaposed against its vastness, one experiences one’s own limited time in the rawest sense.
So how do we make the most of our finite time on Earth? We considered other ideas as we tried to answer this question. Clark mentioned the point of our conception of time as either a “flowing river” or “frozen river.” Theoretical physicists take the latter stance, which states that we all live in a determined spacetime in which each point of time is discrete (think Interstellar). As Clark put it, “We think we’re living on page 65, while page 67 is already written.”
You could say, then, that our approach to time hinges on the classic question of whether or not we are truly masters of our fate. Until we answer that question, we cannot define the best way to live our lives. Talk about elusive. So as we approached the end of our discussion, the “Therefore what?” regarding this topic of time, we did not reach a definitive answer. The notion of time cannot be defined objectively. Its only certainty is its end, at least for our individual selves.
