Time

I think a lot about time. How we consume it, save it, enjoy it, spend it. How it can be interminably slow or rush by before you know it.

Our language subtly instructs us about our concept of time: We are urged to “savor the moment”; we want to “be present.” Even store clerks bid us to “have a good day”, as if you control whether this 24-hour period will be good or not. You can, of course, try your best to have a good day, and sometimes succeed – unless the universe has other plans for you.1

I’ve always been fascinated by time; maybe that’s why I was so intrigued by watches as a kid. A few recent events have me thinking about time more than usual: a big birthday, a loss, other events …

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Age

 I never had a midlife crisis. Perhaps it was too cliché. Big round birthdays and aging never bothered me. The only experience I had relative to age was waking up on the morning of my 60th birthday and immediately thinking, “Start of the fourth quarter, down by 7 – you’re still in this thing, but lots to do. Get busy!”

The result was a new book, some personal projects, financial and estate planning, and less procrastination on major purchases, travel, and activities I had been putting off for no good reason. As an immortal, I would get around to them eventually. Once the 19-year-old in me admitted immortality was no longer operative, I suddenly felt an urgency to check off some boxes. No, not a bucket list, just a short inventory of unfulfilled desires I suddenly felt the urge to make happen.

Hey, wait a second…

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Impermanence

Our house developed an exterior leak that dripped into the basement. To prep for the contractors, we cleared out a lot of accumulated junk. The big surprise: 6 MacBooks dating back to the 2000s.

Six! Each one was a thing: expensive, useful, important, yet oh so temporary. We were warned: “Don’t throw away old laptops unless you removed the hard drives!” Looking at these old, battered MacBooks, I remember the excitement of buying them: Faster, better, improved! When we buy something new, we forget it will eventually wear out, get damaged, become less useful, get replaced or discarded. Everything!  

The second law of thermodynamics is a bitch.

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Illusion

Here’s something you might not have considered: Time, at least as an objective concept outside human consciousness, doesn’t exist. It’s (mostly) a human creation; no chrono particles, no celestial timekeeper, no physical mechanism governs time’s passage. Our experience is an illusion, a function of our sensory inputs colliding with our consciousness…

Physics recognizes Time is a useful construct, a handy artifice for comparing forces relative to one another. “T” in equations is time as a dimension between other vectors. You use it to measure speed or distance, but mostly relative to each other. Every measure of time seems to quantify only an object’s motion, whether it’s the vibration of a Cesium atom or the hands on a clock.2

I wonder: Does Time exist independently of us, conscious beings? Without us, does the relative motion of objects in 3-dimensional space include time – or is that simply a convenient human assumption? 3

The flow of time seems especially illusory: The sense of RIGHT HERE AND NOW, the intersection of THIS instant (T) and THIS location (X, Y, & Z), is moving forward, a present “now” that advances tick by tick, second by second, and millennia by millennia. I struggle to believe this is anything other than the human mind trying to make sense of the experiential universe…

Our experience of Time, which changes so radically over our lives, is an illusion.

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Money is Time

I contributed a chapter to the new book “How I Invest My Money Volume Two,” which was published this week.

Excellent financial advice needs specific personalization; I wanted to write something universal. My chapter, titled “Money Is Time,” is a tight 860 words, but has three concepts worth sharing:

First, Money is society’s measure of the economic contributions you make with your time (including effort, expertise, insight, skill, etc., which are themselves functions of time).

Second, we all get precisely 24 hours a day. Each of us is born wealthy in time, with endless, infinite hours, days, weeks, months, and years, which we fritter away when young. Later in life, we learn that time is our stock in trade.

And third, Money IS Time. Every purchase you make is an investment of your insultingly limited time. The days may be long, but the decades are short. Keep this front of mind as you spend your finite supply of time.

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Time Travel

As a sci-fi fan, I’ve sat through more than my fair share of time-travel flicks. Screenwriters and novelists seem to ignore two issues.

The first is Location: When you travel back in time, the planet you’re standing on will have moved – millions or billions of miles away. The Earth orbits the Sun at 66,600 mph; the Sun makes a 260-million-year route around the Milky Way at 515,000 mph; even the Earth’s rotation is 1,040 mph. You must surmise your position relative to the galactic expansion at 515,000 mph, despite its occasional changes in acceleration. 4

In total, we are moving at 828,000 mph. Time travel for a century, and you space travel 725 billion miles (best of luck calculating that precisely). Off by a trillionth of a %, e.g., ~three-quarters of a mile, you materialize inside Earth’s crust (deadly) or nearly 4,000 feet in the air before gravity ends you. Greater errors deliver you into the vacuum of space.

My second issue is the Arrow of Time. It annoys me to send people into a nondeterministic future that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t buy the thesis of a Universe as a block of past, present, and future all occurring at once – it lacks causality.5

In my version of time travel, you can go into the past, but only to return to the point from which you departed. But you cannot visit the Restaurant at the End of the Universe because it hasn’t happened yet. Between now and then, many things will shape what actually happens. But until then, the future doesn’t exist.6

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Dog Time

People often think of their lives in terms of blocks of time: You lived in this house or apartment; you worked at this job or that one; you dated or married this person. These blocks make up the eras of your life.

I sometimes think of my life in terms of dogs: Erev was a Labrador retriever I had as a kid; Killer was the stray I adopted in college (and my dad fell in love with); when we moved out of the city, we rescued Max, a shepherd-bearded mutt puppy; Jackson was a Labradoodle who kept Max young until he was 17. Lexi (died young of encephalitis), then Kodie (who is 5), followed Jack. Teddy, a Portuguese Water Dog, followed Max.  We had to say goodbye to him last week, and even though I knew it was coming, the grief still shocked me.

Dogs gauge time by how your scent slowly fades since you left the house. If you return at the ~same time every day, they approximate that by how your scent declines over the day. They know when you are returning by that marker.

We all lose friends and family; our relationships are complicated, filled with joy, angst, baggage, walls, and emotions. None of that complexity exists with dogs – they are pure, unconditional love; when they depart, the wound finds you naked and defenseless…

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Optionality

As you get older, you begin to realize you kinda know how the movie ends: what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve earned, the people you affected, and who affected you. Not a full accounting, but a modest recognition of who you have become.

It begins to set: You realize what is increasingly unlikely to occur. Projects that might take 5, 10, or 20 years to reach fruition, learning a new language, starting a business, learning to read music, seem difficult to impossible.

That is the biggest disillusionment about aging: What you gain in agency, you lose in optionality.

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1. Classic Yiddish expression: “Man plans, and God laughs…”

2. To be precise: One second is officially defined as “the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a Cesium-133 atom.”

So, not really a thing on its own; if something only exists relative to an actual thing’s motion, does it really exist at all?

3. Einstein would argue that Relativity treats spacetime as a geometric object with four dimensions – X, Y, Z, and T. That distinction is probably the closest thing to Time as an objective entity independent of us, as anything else in physics.

I’m not sure how persuasive that is to me. Also, attempts to quantize gravity, such as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, has no T. Time vanishes from the equations entirely

4. Best current estimates are that the expansion rate, the Hubble parameter H(t), was falling for the first 8ish billion years after the Big Bang. Then around 5ish billion years ago, the expansion diluted matter enough to allow dark energy to take over – and the expansion of the universe began accelerating. It’s an adequate Nobel Prize-winning theory, at least until a better one comes along.

5. Alternative timelines will resolve the grandfather (or any other) paradox, but do not explain where a new universe of matter and energy came from.

6. At least, in the universe I inhabit…

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