That question is actually difficult to answer considering time does not exist. Got your attention? Good. Think I’m kidding? You’re wrong. If you try to explain time, it’s not as easy as you might think. It’s a system of measurement to keep track of the passing of events. The smallest common units are seconds; 60 seconds is one minute; 60 minutes are in one hour. Hours get a little more tricky…there are 24 in one day, but the devices used to measure them count only to 12. Then you have to repeat from the beginning, with a different designation: am or pm. When it’s actually 12:00, then it’s especially confusing, because 12 am is at night, but 12 pm is in the middle of the day, which is the opposite of what you’d expect it to be.

Most people don’t think about time a whole lot on a regular basis other than checking the clock to see how much longer they have to be in math class. The concept of time is a construct of human perception used to micromanage the universe. Time does not exist to other animals, and does not generally matter to the universe in general unless you’re using it as a variable in physics. There is no concreteness to time, and no standard to describe its passing other than the hands on a clock.

Clocks can stop ticking though. Would time exist without a device to measure its passing? Well that depends. Events would still occur, and would still progress in a linear fashion one after the other. There would be no meetings at 4:00, though, or schedules where every minute of the day was planned out. Can you imagine such a world? No, you probably can’t, because we would be incapable of living in such a world. Without time, our society would fall apart. Everything we do is centered around time, though everyone takes its existence and accuracy for granted. Sports, school, television, food preparation, sleep – all of these activities are a function of time in our everyday lives.

Still having trouble agreeing with me? Think of it this way. The last time a clock ran out of batteries and the hands stopped moving, or the power went out and your alarm didn’t go off, for a brief period of time in whatever setting that occurred, time ceased to exist. Life still went on, though, even if it was interrupted for awhile. If that had continued for any prolonged period, things would’ve gotten chaotic. Humans need to feel like they are in control, and so they created this system to feel like the universe was more manageable; to make sense of the fact that they couldn’t just redo something and have it be changed. Humans have double standards for their system, though; time zones undermine our own presumptions of the absolute nature of time.

There’s also the distortion of time based on mood or environment. “Time flies when you’re having fun” has some truth to it. Time speeds up as you get older. Zeno’s Paradox illustrates this concept clearly, though in a different context. Basically, to get anywhere ,you must get half-way before you can go the whole way. The first time you cut the distance in half, it’s a large portion of the distance. The second time, it’s half as large, then a fourth, etc. When you’re a year old, you’ve survived half of two years. but when you survive two years, it’s half of four, and so on. Time speeds up as you get older. Time also speeds up during good times, or slows down during intense moments. Slow-motion scenes in movies do their best to illustrate the feeling, and I’m sure everyone reading this has a moment they can look back on to understand the concept.

There is no concreteness to time. Even if it can be measured, our perception of it varies depending on our emotions and the setting we’re in and the people around us. We need time for our society to function, but often we assume its a solid thing when really it’s an abstract idea that we made up for our own benefit. The universe could function without time. It exists only as a system that is used by us for the purpose of communication and the illusion that humans can control the planet we live on.

Videos of the week:

•  Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Zenosyne
• Time: An Entertaining Explanation

The world is a very strange place to be. Nothing is everything and everything is nothing and after awhile it all just turns into a black hole that swallows up what is real and what you’ve dreamed and what you’ve only thought about. Sound familiar? If you’ve ever experienced this or something like it, this one’s for you.

• What the hell is an existential crisis?
  • A very good question in deed. It can take on many forms and have many different effects on each individual. One of the easiest explanations is to say that it is the result of thinking about things too much. It can take the form of an overwhelming sense of the fact that you are a person on the planet who has a life and is part of a community and everything else that goes with that including your inevitable death – I’ll call this an external existential crisis. Then there’s the opposite; the idea that you may not exist at all, that nothing is real and it’s either a figment of your imagination or someone else’s, but it can’t be real. We’ll call this an internal existential crisis. Some can be simple moments of thought, or they can last some period of time. It depends on the situation and the individual.
• Signs
  • Questioning the world
  • Feeling detached or hypersensitive to things that are usually normal to you
  • Second-guessing things you’re not sure you even had a guess about in the first place
  • Overthinking everything. Every. Single. Thing. Like…all of it. And then some.
  • Sudden moments of unexplainable emotion
  • Realizing that you will never have enough time to do most of the things you want in life
  • Being unable to function due to the sheer meaninglessness of everything around you
• Know what I’m talking about?
  • No? Okay, see you next week.
  • Yes? You are not alone my friend. Existential crises are real and often frightening for the person experiencing it. They are not a condition or a disease, but they can plague none the less. Think about it: if nothing is real or life is pointless or you’re just going to die anyways, why bother existing as a normal, functional person? Well, as someone who has grappled with these questions before, lets look at some reasons.
• Reasons You Should Try To Look Past It:
  • You have people who care about you somewhere in the world – even if you haven’t met them yet.
  • If the world doesn’t exist, you can do whatever you want with your life and it’ll be okay – there’s no such thing as failure if there are no standards.
  • It’s really not fun. There are much better ways of spending your time.
  • You really don’t have a choice unless you want to end up regretting you entire life because you were thinking about how short and meaningless it was instead of making it mean something in the time you have.
• Treatments
  • Okay so I’m not a therapist, take these suggestion with a grain of salt, but they work for me.
    • Find something to binge watch on Netflix, or read a book. It gets you wrapped up in a whole different universe that doesn’t really exist so you can stop focusing on the one you’re actually in.
    • Listen to music. This is essentially the cure-all for our generation anyways, I’m sure it applies here too.
    • Find someone to talk to. Do you have any idea how many other people out there have gone through something similar? Probably all of them at one time or another to some degree. And if they never thought about it before, they have now – perhaps you bringing it up will cause them to experience your struggle first hand. Talk together about the lack of substance to the universe, or make up your own universe together. It’s probably the most helpful experience you could have – it can makes things feel real again.
    • Go outside. Unless its winter. Then change your computer background to the beach and make lemonade and cookies or something else warm and happy.
    • Eat your sorrows? It may help or make things worse. Or both. Be careful with this one – the universe may not exist, but stomachaches do.
    • Google “existential crisis” and be amazed at all the things that exist about them. They’re real, you aren’t alone. Well yes you are, but you know what I mean in this case.
    • Enjoy this fun video I found when I went exploring the first time.

So this can be kind of an intense thing. But it can also be an extremely interesting experience.It adds a layer to life once you come out the other side of it. If you don’t believe that you’ve experienced anything like this ever in your life, think about the last time you said a word one too many times and it didn’t sound like a word anymore and prove yourself wrong. The truth is that the universe is one big enigma that we can study or try to avoid thinking about entirely, but we all have to deal with at some point.

I bet you assumed this post would be about assumptions after reading the title. Well, while is is generally frowned upon to assume (you know what they say) in this case you would be correct. I’m not going to be talking about mindless, commonplace assumptions however; rather I am going to hopefully cause you to question some of the things you assume everyday. Whether you actually question or not, I’d like you to at least take the time to think about what some of your own assumptions are through this next week, and perhaps drop a comment with one of your own.

The next part of this post is going to be a little exercise with assumptions. It’s simple and often got a good laugh out of some friends of mine at the lunch table. For lack of a more creative name, we’ll call it the Assumption Game. Here’s how you play: state something that is assumed. It doesn’t have to be a logical; in fact the more illogical, the more entertaining. If you’d prefer to be logical, that’s okay too. Either one will satisfy the goal of the game: to think about the things we take for granted, and to outline the very specific set of conditions we are used to functioning in – once you get a hang of the game, you’ll be able to come up with a lot more ways the world doesn’t work than the ways it does.

I’ll start:

• We assume that the sun will keep burning and providing warmth and light for us throughout our lifetime.
• We assume that the computers we’re all staring at won’t suddenly burst into flame or start singing opera.
• We assume that the pens we write with in class won’t start crying because they failed the test, even when we do.
• We assume the food we eat won’t morph itself into a baby panda in our stomachs who decides to crawl out of our mouths the next day.
• We assume that the water we drink is fact water, and not cytoplasm wrung out of the plants that live underground and control us like robot toys children get for Christmas.
• We assume that the paper we write on won’t burst into flame due to the tiny dragons flying around our heads that we had assumed to be insects.
• We assume that the light bulbs that light our homes and dorm rooms aren’t spying on us, sending tiny Morse code messages to our alien overlords out right before they die – hence the flickering.

I think you get the point. I could go on for hours just listing things that are increasingly random and illogical, but in the context of this game, they become the truths of the universe and the actual truths become the falsities. It’s an interesting thought exercise, and one of the easiest ways to “deconstruct the universe.” It also causes you to think about the simple things you take to be true without ever really thinking about them. So whether due to active or passive deconstruction, it starts to peel away the glazed-over way we blindly accept the commonplaces of we’re presented with. It causes us to analyze the everyday, and in a lot of cases that’s one of the most exciting ways to experience the world: open your eyes and see what’s already there that you’ve never looked at before. If you’re having a hard time figuring out where to start or what that means, try the Assumption Game.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of people reading this may have never heard the word solipsism. It is a concept in philosophy that is hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines solipsism as “the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.” This basically means that as a solipsist, nothing is real beyond what I can perceive through my own senses. If I can not experience it, I can not be positive that it exists. In short, perception is reality.

To those who have ever heard of such a concept, this idea may seem laughable. How could someone believe in this day and age that the world is a figment of imagination? The answer isn’t simple, and is far from concrete. You have to think of the world from an objective point of view. Remove yourself from it, and examine it: you will quickly realize that you can’t really remove yourself from it at all. There may be one planet all humans live on; but there are over 7 billion different worlds they live in. This is because your views of the world are shaped by your own context. There is not now, nor will there ever be someone who lives your life other than you. This is an argument for uniqueness, of course, but it is also an argument for solipsism. You are unique, yes; but because of that you experience the world in a way no one else ever can. You can articulate your experiences, and share about them as much as you like, but that will not change the fact that no one else will ever live them. Other people may have similar experiences, but they will never see them from your point of view with your repertoire of previous experiences to analyze and interpret every new one that comes about.

Think of this as an example, albeit a rather extreme one. I have never been to Australia. I can not prove that Australia empirically exists at this moment, though I can look at pictures online and meet people who say they are from there. Does that mean that Australia does not exist at all? Well, I can not prove its existence. In the context of me being a socially functioning individual, I’m not going to run around proclaiming that Australia does not exist simply because I have never been there. But removing myself from the equation, if someone else told me they had never been to Australia, I could logically ask them how they knew it existed. They would have to respond that they read about it, or heard about it, or experienced it through some other medium. In the end, though, they would be forced to reach the same conclusion: they had never been there, so they can not know for sure. What they choose to believe is out of anyone’s control but their own.

At this point I’d like to think that if you’re still reading, perhaps you’re considering some of the things I’ve said. If you haven’t guessed by now, I subscribe to a moderate version of solipsism. The “perception is reality” line from the first paragraph is my life motto. I have never been to Australia, but I don’t discount its existence either. I simply view the Earth as a combination of 7 billion different worlds all running parallel to the rest at this point in time. Every person has their own thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories of their own lives. I will never be able to experience those; and I’m not meant to. Can I prove that they exist? It all depends on your definition of “proof.”

Welcome! This blog is going to be a mishmash of philosophical discussion and some of my views on how the world works. Occasionally I may use it to ramble or jot down new ideas on things as well. I’m going to also drop the disclaimer here that most of what I’ll be posting is opinion-based! So if you don’t understand or agree, either ask about it or ignore it. Chances are you won’t change my opinion, but I’m willing to discuss just about anything.