Time

 What is time? Sure, people say it's precious and you shouldn't waste it and blah blah blah... But what is it? How do we experience time? And what does it mean for us as humans?

As per a quick google search, you get the definition of time: the indefinite continued process of existence and events in the past, present and future regarded as a whole. Does that mean that time is dependent on us? Well, kind of. Read the definition again, and you'll see that some sort of change is required for time to have some meaning. Let's conduct a thought experiment: imagine a universe where there is nothing; no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no aliens or us. Not a very bright thought, eh? Well, a universe without anything would be dark! Get it? Anyways, let's continue. So you have an eventless, changeless universe. You have a timer in your hand. You start the timer. 3...2...1...Go!! What do you observe? That's right. Absolutely nothing. Na-da. Zilch. You'll only waste your time doing such an experiment (another bad joke, sorry). Whether you stop your timer after five seconds or an hour or a trillion years, it wouldn't make any difference, since nothing ever happened in any of those periods. They would all feel the same. Whew, so that's one thing out of the way.

How do we experience the wonder that is time? We experience time by simply existing. That's all. Lie down on your bed, and do absolutely nothing. There you go, you are contributing to the flow of time. Here's a cookie 🥠. You might be lying down, but there are still a thousand different processes going on in that bag of organs you call your body. When we say we experience time, what we really mean are the changes we experience around us as time goes by. It's because of those changes we say that some amount of time has passed.

Finally, what does time mean for us as humans? When someone says you are wasting time, what are they implying? Like time isn't something physical like money or food or other materials you can obtain and then dispose of, waste? What this overused phrase actually means is that time will go on as always, because the rest of the universe is not stagnant, but all the changes YOU could have done with that time. Wasting time means all the changes you could have made within that time, but didn't, because someone said that "you can lie down on your bed and do absolutely nothing and still not waste time." Sounds funny, right? You can utilize your time by researching it. There's tons of research on time, such as time dilation, time travel, and time perception. Well, those are topics for another time (hehe).

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