Current Events > Time is a social construct

(+) Yeah! (+)

Here's the thing about time. Humanity has managed to approximately work out how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun based on the seasons, and from there we've been able to work out age in proximity to how we tell time. Thousands of years and multiple different calendars have worked us into a 12 month cycle of 365 days, give or take a day every 4 years and an occasional "leap minute" or "leap second" on New Year's to make up the difference. People have not measured time in this method since time immemorial.

If it wasn't for Julius and Augustus Caesar adding July and August to the Gregorian calendar, we would have 10 months. If humanity adopted a different calendar, we would be having days with different hours, arranged in different months. If enough things went differently we could have hours that are twice as long as our current hours, and weeks that take twice as long to end. Everything would still revolve around our day/night cycle and our seasonal cycle, and the same amount of time would elapse - but every day would be 12 hours, weeks would last for 14 12-hour days and who the fuck knows if we would even have months. Every other aspect of how we tell time could be different given that it loosely lines up to our days and nights.

We filter our perception of time through a rough human approximation that's become more well-defined over time. Our cycle of 24 hour days, 7 day weeks and 12 month years could have easily been thrown out in favor of a wackier system of telling time, and we would be just as accustomed to that as we are to how we tell time right now. Our method of telling time is not universal, either - what we know as "time" only applies to Earth. Things age, time turns forward, but the method in which we think about time is a human creation that is far from universal.

Everything you know about time is fragile as fuck. You could have been born into a world without a Wednesday and you wouldn't think anything of it. Time itself is a solid construct, we March closer and closer to the end of our life spans every second of our lives. But "Time", how we perceive it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and onwards, and the name itself are all human creations. Someone thought of the 24 hour day. People agreed to judge years by months, and they agreed to add more months to the calendar when pressured by royalty. These concepts are not innate laws of the universe - it's just how we've come to perceive time.

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Tell me you pasted this

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It's actually a relative construct.
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Time theories from people who think they're smart are some of the dumbest crap in existence.

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I can surmise that time measurement is a social construct, but time itself is certainly not.

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Man, wait until you hear about literally every other unit of measurement as well. Or every word and concept in existence. That will blow your mind.

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