Forward
This post is about time and just how the world works. I think that sometimes humans being three dimensional makes thinking of four or more dimensions quite confusing. Nevertheless people perceive time in two ways, logically speaking. You can either think about time in contextual terms, that is how things are going in general. The examples I’d use for thinking about time this way are
I spent 3 hours playing videogames last night
I drove 30 minutes to get to work today
It took me 4 years to get my bachelor’s degree
These describe how things were in the past. Your past self has had experiences that endure for certain periods of time.
You can’t change what you did in the past. You can’t change how people saw you in the past. Your present self is an instant snapshot of what your self is doing in that moment. Your thoughts, emotions, actions, desires, and everything you are live in the present moment. This leads to two ways people talk about time. Pardon the Boolean logic used to create it:
Time Flow (in motion)
This is usually only seen as a large part of one’s life that has already occurred. You spend anywhere between a quarter to a third of your life sleeping. That’s around 20-30 years! When you start to consider how often you spend on the phone per day though, people may be even more surprised how with frequency, 10% of your days become 10% of your years.
Time Stamps (in place)
Building off of time flows, humans seem to have the uncanny ability to “look out for number one”. Often this is for that person in a specific point in time, or a time in the near future. I’m hungry, im gonna eat a steak because it’s good. Some may say “well I can’t afford to eat steak!” and I pity you. Those people, though bring up the point that they cannot indulge themselves now because if they had a steak dinner they know they cannot pay rent or deal with some other trade-off.
The base of the psychology is the battle between Id, Ego, and Superego.
The Id is the somewhat primal desire to satisfy needs immediately. The Superego is a desire to adhere to learned social values or behaviors. The ego is more or less the compromise you get between these two, and I would say is most present in your present self.
Say what you want about the psychology behind it, I think it’s a good idea to increase the agreement between these desires and communicate with yourself. This is where time comes in.
Instead of being upset that you sat on the couch and watched all eight episodes of The Mandalorian, why dont you tell yourself “OK, I did a lazy thing that I wanted to do, but tomorrow I’m gonna get some work done.”
