For What It's Worth

(Image by Freepik)

A New Perspective

(10 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Time may be less a force acting on us and more a conceptual framework we use to structure reality. It helps us interpret memory, change, and expectation.
• If time is a tool rather than an enemy, our relationship to it shifts. We move from being ruled by it to consciously participating in how we understand and use it.

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.

–Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born, 1926

I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.

––Albert Einstein, The Saturday Evening Post, 1929

A Slightly Deeper Dive

The reason this essay exists comes from an email exchange with a former student who has long since graduated and is now a colleague. One day, I received an update that ended with: Boy, time management is wild …I’m not perfect, but I’m striving to be better…

Most of us have experienced that feeling of time looming.

My friend and I have a lot in common. At this point in our lives, though, we stand at opposite ends of our careers. I am heading into retirement; they are only just beginning theirs. I think about all the energy it would take, at my age, to launch a new venture like they are. Then I take a nap.

Just as my friend is now embarking, I too was once young, unsure, with little or no support—only an internal drive, a vague conviction that there was something out there. But it was their offhand reference to time management that stood out.

The pressure we put on ourselves about time can be astounding, considering that there is no such thing as time in the way we usually talk about it. We’re short on time, we have no time, time is up, it flies, we do things in the nick of, we’re pressed for it, kill it, we’re behind in it, we race against it, it’s wild, and of course, only it will tell.

What we call time is a framework we use to define experiences and coordinate actions. It’s not a moral force, not an enemy, neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. As a tool, it can feel scarce or abundant, but as a concept it is both nothing in itself and, in principle, it is infinite.

I don’t know if many philosophers would agree 100% with that quick sketch, but underneath the clumsy language is a simple claim: time, by itself, does nothing to us. What matters is how we understand it and what we choose to do within the structure it provides.

Time management, in that light, is not about controlling time itself—because we can’t—but about controlling attention and intention within a shared framework. Starting out, I, too, made it a daily practice: calendars, lists, schedules, all the familiar tools. Years later, habits took root, and muscle memory began to take over. What looked like managing time eventually became the practiced art of prioritizing and deciding, over and over, what deserved to happen next.

Time is money is a familiar business axiom, and from a certain angle it’s understandable. In sales, for example, an hour spent planning and making calls can plausibly be translated into revenue, while an hour frittered away on distractions can be translated into loss. Framed that way, time appears as a kind of currency: we spend it, we waste it, we invest it.

However, time is not money—at least not in any literal sense. Money is a tool we’ve developed: it can be saved, spent, transferred, and measured. Time is different. Time is the ongoing condition that makes any saving, spending, transferring, or measuring possible in the first place. We don’t have to be ruled by either one. But when we treat time as if it were just another form of currency, we risk becoming controlled by both.

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Depending on whom we ask, time means something different. To most of us, it’s what clocks measure—seconds, minutes, deadlines. Ask someone on the street and they’ll likely point to a wristwatch or a phone. Time appears obvious.

But the obvious can be deceptive. A clock does not explain time; it measures motion. It tracks change. It does not tell us what time is.

Philosophers and physicists have long debated whether time is fundamental or constructed—whether it exists independently or emerges from the way we experience change. Theorists argue that time may be less a substance and more a framework: a conceptual tool we use to organize events.

And yet, regardless of its metaphysical status, time governs our lives. We schedule by it, age by it, fear it, waste it, cherish it.

So what exactly are we obeying? We are rational animals, Aristotle reminds us. We make meaning. We impose structure. We narrate beginnings and endings.

If time is, at least in part, a human construct, then the sense that it is an enemy pressing against us may say more about our interpretation than about time itself. It is a lens through which we define movement, memory, and anticipation. The clock does not command us; it merely counts.

Perhaps time is not something that happens to us, but something we participate in.

As Time Goes By

What if time isn’t some force acting on us at all, but simply the framework we use to make sense of reality?

If that’s true, the implications are huge. Maybe what we’re really afraid of isn’t time itself, but our own limits — not the ticking clock, but what we think that ticking means. Physics can describe time as a dimension woven into spacetime, but that doesn’t give it moral authority over us. The pressure we feel may not come from the universe at all — it may come from the simple fact that we’re conscious beings aware of our limits.

Testing those limits can be life changing. To say that Einstein was a rather smart individual would be an understatement. Through his Special and General Theories of Relativity he revolutionized the way we think about time; that it is not universal but a flexible dimension that changes based on speed, proximity to gravity, and frame of reference.

As revolutionary as his theories were it turns out he had some doubts about them. The first quote above came from a letter Einstein had written to one of his closest and lifelong friends, Max Born, a German mathematician and physicist. Building on Einstein’s theories, Born had developed mathematical formulas advancing and establishing the science of quantum mechanics (see Born’s Rule).

With these new formulas, Born was proving Einstein’s theories were true. Yet, Einstein writes his dear friend that he had doubts about his own theory because of one thing, his worldview.

Einstein’s theories originally included the idea that the universe was either expanding or collapsing, but he pulled back on that idea because it was hard for him to imagine a random universe. He believed that the universe as unchanging and finite; ordered and static.

While he often described his own personal wonder of the cosmos, the He that Einstein is referring to in the quote was not a traditional God. He had long disavowed such a notion of a supreme being believing that it was a naïve human construction.

Like Einstein, Born also rejected traditional and dogmatic religions but thought differently about the universe and often described it as having an inherent chaotic core. Born believed the universe was random and ever expanding.

In 1929, American astronomer, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the farther a galaxy was from the Earth, the faster it appeared to be moving away, suggesting an expansion. But like Einstein, Hubble was also hesitant to fully commit to his own theory.

It wasn’t until Einstein pieced together Hubble’s work and the mathematical proof of expansion formulated in 1927 by Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître that he finally abandoned his belief in a static model of the universe. He called his adherence to that model his biggest blunder.

Damn! If Einstein’s worldview got in the way of him seeing the bigger picture, what chance have we got?

But that’s the beauty of the story, making his second quote above that much more meaningful. We always have feelings about being right, but shouldn’t be fooled by them. Einstein eventually left room for his beliefs to expand (pun intended dad joke) if further evidence ever became available.

We may be knowledgeable about some things, but we can’t know everything. None of us really know everything. We are finite beings. The lesson is not to overcommit; leave wiggle room for change just in case we missed something in our original thought process.

The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Let’s end with a simple thought experiment. Using what psychologist Endel Tulving called episodic memory—later described as mental time travel—we can mentally move backward (memory) and forward (imagining).

Most of us can look back over our lives almost in a straight line, pointing to milestones that led to who we are today.

• A victory by completing a number of educational courses that led to a degree
• An aunt that said a kind word and helped us get past some awkward teenage moments
• The love of animals from a young age that helped us to decide veterinary school later in life

It seems easy, doesn’t it? Looking back our past simply arranges itself into a mosaic that somehow makes sense.

Looking forward is different. Using the same mental tools to project into the future is harder—as it should be. No one can see everything that will happen. Still, it’s fun to imagine, and Hollywood has made a fortune entertaining us with such possibilities.

So there remains this cavernous gap between who we are now and who we eventually want to become and it can be so wide that it can make us feel like we’ll never get there.

Boy, time management is wild …I’m not perfect, but I’m striving to be better…

Yet that cavern shrinks with a simple realization: past, present, and future are just linguistic ways of carving up time. Is it too much to suggest that whoever I am about to become, I potentially already am?

This isn’t mysticism. Aristotle addressed it long ago with his ideas of actuality and potentiality: a thing has the potential to become something else. An acorn is potentially an oak. A caterpillar is potentially a butterfly. A young child is potentially a doctor, an artist, or a leader.

A farmer looks at a block of granite as the start of a foundation. A stone carver looks at the same block and sees a sculpture. Each sees different possibilities. The potential is there for both, but not yet realized. It becomes something else only through a dynamic force—pushing it into place or striking it with hammer and chisel. The tension sits between what it is and what it will become.

So it is with us. Physically, emotionally, intellectually, we will become something different from what we are now. We can’t fill in the gaps with future events the way we can with memories, and we may not see our future as clearly as the stone cutter sees the figure in the rock. Yet whatever our outcome, we are already it—potentially, but not quite yet.

We don’t have to strain or obsess over becoming our ideal self. Yes, there are goals; yes, I want to improve. I’ve made it this far. It stands to reason that I’ll eventually arrive where I’m headed. In a sense, I’m already there—but not quite yet.

Stop trying to be something and just be it, is the essence of what Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix.

Thought in this light, time itself is only a tool. It isn’t our enemy. It’s not good or bad. It’s neutral—both nothing and infinite. Einstein suggested the universe doesn’t owe us a thing. But we can still spend our days exploring its many wonders.

That is, if we have the time.