You Are the God of Time

I believe that fundamentally, procrastination comes from the fear of sleep, which itself comes from the belief that all time is objective in passing.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Some of us say that we do not fear death, that we do not think about death all the time. Yet at the same time some of us compare ourselves to others. We compare our status in society to others at points in time. Who has the better job, the better impact on society.

Yet if we were beings that could live forever, no one would have any right to judge how we would spend our time. We compare ourselves to others because we believe time to be objectively equal for everyone, that the march of time is relentless.

Yet consider this claim: time isn’t objective. Take sleep, for example. During sleep, time passes in the blink of an eye. We posit that 8 objective hours passes in the real world, but subjectively that time passes in an instant. If time was objective, that is, equal for everyone, then our 16 objective waking hours would also pass in an instant amount of time x 2, which is still an instant amount of time. But we know that it doesn’t. It’s only as we perceive the flow of time while we’re conscious, that time becomes meaningful for us.

In reality, Objective time is the flow of time that the world imposes on us. Consider another thought experiment, where we’re born floating, into an infinite void of darkness. (And pretend this void is at the right temperature, it has breathable oxygen, and we don’t implode). In this void, we wouldn’t be able to see, hear, smell, or feel anything except for our own body. The only sense of time we would have then, would be our own heartbeat, and the sense of hunger and thirst, and other aspects of our metabolism. Let’s ignore hunger and thirst for the moment, and assume we survive in this void somehow without nourishment. Consider our heartbeat only. It’s safe to say that the only way to keep track of time would be to count our heartbeat. If our counted number of heartbeats is greater than the number of heartbeats at a previous point in time, then we would know that time is moving forward. But what if we lose count of our heartbeat at some point in time, or never start counting our heartbeat at all? Then, without an objective anchor in time, we would find ourselves completely lost. We would not know if one observed point in time is actually greater than another point in time, much less the distance between two points in time. It would seem to us as if time did not exist.

I pose this thought experiment as evidence that space anchors our perception of time, but in itself time is subjective. As such, we are the gods of time.

One could argue that this is like making the argument that if you don’t see something happening, it doesn’t happen. But that’s exactly the argument I’m making.

In the digital age, space is irrelevant. Time, on the other hand, is dictated to us, if not by clocks, then through the objective measures of the length of videos and news. In this way, the internet controls us, because it destroys our perception of space and tells us what time is passing and where. And yet we put our trust and ethos as a society in the clock. We find safety and solace in placing objective value on time. And that’s the exact reason why we come to fear sleep. Because sleep is when our subjective perception of time is at a minimum, yet our objective measure of our time tells us it’s a third of an entire day, we come to see sleep in our minds as a time-devouring monster.

And because we fear sleep, but trust in objectivity, we find ways to minmax our usage of time. To maximize the number of YouTube videos as we can fit in an hour, by adding and subtracting. To minimize the amount of time we spend on the things we hate or find difficult. And thus we procrastinate. Because we trust not that we are the gods of time, but trust in society instead.

We should not feel pressured by time, because we are the ones that place value on time as we perceive it. You are the god of time. No one can say what you should do with your time but you yourself alone. When you align your time with that of society, it is because you choose to do so yourself. And as the god of time, why should you fear time? For time is your servant, a part of your namesake.