https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAskReddit/comments/1iwuweo/does_time_really_exist/
created by pro_nait on 24/02/2025 at 05:42 UTC
2 upvotes, 11 top-level comments (showing 11)
Have you ever experienced a state where time doesn’t seem to exist? A long period can feel short, while a single year can feel like several because of how saturated life is. And then comes the realization that the past is just memories, only shaping who you are now, while the future is an illusion. You dream about something now, but when you get it, the feeling will be different because you’re getting it in the present, not in some distant future—meaning the future doesn’t truly exist. That’s why they say to live in the present. This thought helps me let go of the past and my mistakes, and it also makes the future seem less daunting. What do you think?
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1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
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Comment by wally659 at 24/02/2025 at 05:58 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Serious answer - if you can't tell, does it matter? Time is a really useful model for explaining things about the world around us. If you use it as intended, within the scope where it works well, it will always be right. Does that mean it "exists"? It doesn't really matter. It's value doesn't come from whether or not it exists. It's value is that it works for what we use it for.
A philosophical discussion about it's nature can be interesting but there's no right answer. You might get some people who misinterpret things like General Relativity or theories on entropy as explicitly suggesting time exists as a component of reality, but they do not do that. You can also argue that it's clearly something we "just came up with". That's kinda true but it doesn't exclude time from also being some fundamentally true aspect of existence that we figured out instead of making it up.
Comment by michaelrowaved at 24/02/2025 at 11:49 UTC
4 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Time isn’t real. I have been thinking about this exact thing a long time. Physics tells us time doesn’t work the way we think it does. Events happen in different sequences depending on your position and perspective in space. Cause and effect happen in two directions in time. I think time is something we made up to explain the way we experience space given our limited perspective. Time is basically the same as god. Most people consider it to be a fundamental truth, but it isn’t. It is just something else we invented to explain what we don’t really understand.
Comment by Britannkic_ at 24/02/2025 at 06:39 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Its a truism that your perception of time changes as you grow older, time appears to move faster than when you were a kid
As a 50+ year old a year comes and goes quite quickly whereas as a kid a summer felt like an age
I've come to the conclusion that this is, as you put it, down to how we saturate our time with activity
As a kid I'd happily spend hours running around with friends with a stick that was in fact a sword and defeating dragons and building dens and and and
As an adult I spend all my time trying to get past everything so I an sit and relax and then the time is gone
Adopting a kids mindset, hobbies, living in the moment, abandoning time management, rushing, planning ahead etc is the way forward
Comment by dazb84 at 24/02/2025 at 11:48 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It depends how you define time. What you’re talking about is perception of time which is different to time itself.
If you define time as changes in entropy, which is completely valid, then yes time does exist objectively.
Comment by allenrabinovich at 24/02/2025 at 06:17 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Existence of anything, including time, is entirely predicated on your perception. Do you perceive time? Then it exists. What it actually **is** is a different story: our perception of it is likely highly limited. Great authors have speculated about the nature of time for many years. One of my favorite stories about time is “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang — the movie “Arrival” is based on it, but the story is better. I highly recommend it. That book brought me a great deal of peace of mind.
Scientists think about the nature of time as well, of course. For a popularly accessible overview of what science currently understands about time, check out Sean Carroll’s “From Eternity to Here”.
I often think of time as “already” existing in its entirety — just like space. We are just traveling through it and observing, but all that happened, happening, and will happen is already in place — for us to leave behind, stumble upon, or look forward to. It helps me to think of myself as an intrepid explorer — even if I don’t have much choice about going along with the current :)
Does any of that help answer your question? :)
Comment by Serpardum at 24/02/2025 at 07:38 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yes. It's called cause and affect. There was a time before the cause, a time during the cause, and a time after the cause when the affect occurs.
This is time.
Comment by Btankersly66 at 24/02/2025 at 06:36 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Our perception of time is influenced by how our brain processes and stores information. New experiences feel longer because they require more short-term memory processing, while repetitive tasks seem to pass quickly since they rely on long-term memory. Over time, the brain purges unreinforced long-term memories through dreams. If a task is performed infrequently without reinforcement, it takes longer to complete, making time feel slower when engaging in it.
Comment by Robotic_space_camel at 24/02/2025 at 08:16 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Does it exist? Yes, factually so. If you were to drop a stone it will accelerate at a certain rate, and acceleration doesn’t really exist without the existence of time. It’s more or less baked in as a facet of physical existence.
Does it exist strictly in the way you and I experience it? Not necessarily. I kind of like the idea of time existing as its own dimension just like any other, meaning there’s no real reason it needs to trickle forward at a constant rate, flow in the same direction, or even be real only at the specific point you’re experiencing. Really, to me, it makes more sense as a dimension if none of those rules apply. If physical objects can move about in three spatial dimensions in whatever way they might, and the entirety of the space is “real space” even if it’s not occupied by a given object at any specific point, then it might make more sense to assume that our world might “exist” in multiple states of time continuously, and it’s just a matter of coincidence that our perception moves forward in time the way it does at the rate it does. Similar to how a rock fired from a cannon into space might only ever head in one direction at a constant speed ever, it doesn’t mean that that direction is the only one that exists, just that, for that rock, it’s the only one that’s relevant.
Comment by BonzoTheBoss at 24/02/2025 at 10:18 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
The fallability of human perception is well documented.
Yes, time exists in the sense that in physics there is an upper limit to the speed at which events can influence other events. Event A occurs, and a minimum increment of time must elapse before Observer B can perceive it.
This upper limit is the speed of light.
Comment by NEURALINK_ME_ITCHING at 24/02/2025 at 14:01 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Absolutely, it's just a sampling bias.
You also can't accurately gauge how high, left, or back you are without a point of reference, why is it surprising you can't gauge the other observable axis accurately?