Time is the biggest scam we’ve ever bought into.
Not money. Not politics. Not religion. Time.
We treat it like a god, something sacred and untouchable, when it’s really just a human-made tool we’ve forgotten how to hold. Think about it. If all the clocks stopped tomorrow, if calendars vanished, what would actually change? Would the sun forget to rise? Would your body stop aging? Or would life… just go on? From the moment we’re born, we’re told we’ve begun. But begun what, exactly?
We say life is measured in years, 75 if we’re lucky, 80 if we behave. But who decided that? Who turned living into a countdown? Time was meant to be a tool, a way to mark seasons, not to be the cage we grow old inside. We made the clock, but now we bow to it. We check it constantly. Wake up by it. Work by it. Sleep by it. And in between, we panic about running out of it. Isn’t it strange? We built this thing to organize our days… and then gave it permission to define our worth.
At 30, you’re supposed to have something to show. At 40, you’re supposed to be established. By 60, you should be winding down. Says who? Time isn’t life, it’s just a shadow we drag behind us. And yet we act like we owe it something.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity changed how we think about time. According to it, time isn’t a fixed thing, it bends and stretches depending on how fast you’re moving and how strong gravity is around you. For example, if you stood near a black hole, time would pass slower for you compared to someone far away. Your watch would tick like normal to you, but to others, it would seem like your time is crawling. This means time isn’t some universal truth, it’s relative, shaped by motion and gravity.
Now, I don’t want to turn this into a boring physics lesson. But I do want to tell you about something that genuinely shook me up. It’s called the Andromeda Paradox, and once I understood it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how fragile our whole idea of time really is.
Here’s the simple version. Imagine I’m standing still, looking toward the Andromeda galaxy. Someone else is running toward me, and right as we pass each other, we both glance at the galaxy. According to the Andromeda Paradox, because of the way motion affects time in Einstein’s theory, that person might technically be seeing events happening two days ahead of what I see, even though we’re both looking at the same place in the sky, at the same moment. We’re side by side, yet our “present moments” are not the same. That floored me.
It’s not about what we see with our eyes, but about how the universe slices time differently depending on how we’re moving. And if something that strange and profound can be true, maybe it’s time to stop obsessing over deadlines and to-do lists. Maybe it’s time to start asking what actually matters while we’re here.
Now, I’m not saying time is useless. Of course not. It helps us plan, organize, and make sense of the chaos. But let’s not make the mistake of treating it like it’s more real than life itself. Time is a measurement, not a master. You wouldn’t clock in for an entire week and expect your paycheck in inches or gallons. That would be nonsense. So why let time alone decide the worth of your life, your memories, or your growth? That would be absurd. So why do we measure a full life by years lived instead of moments felt, love shared, or lessons learned?
This is where thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard hit the nail on the head. He said, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” And yet here we are, racing to beat our neighbors to some invisible finish line, as if arriving first makes us more fulfilled. It doesn’t. Meaning isn’t tied to how fast you get there, it’s rooted in the depth of the journey. So maybe the goal isn’t to beat the clock, but to stop and ask why we’re even running. Because in the end, it won’t matter when you got there, it’ll matter how you lived getting there.
Albert Einstein once received a letter from the wife of a close friend who had just died. She was grieving and overwhelmed by the finality of it all. Einstein wrote back with something quietly profound. He said, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Now my first impression when reading this was, who the hell tells a grieving widow that? Einstein’s friend had just died, and this was his reply. Not a heartfelt condolence. Not a comforting memory. Instead, he basically said, “Don’t worry, time’s not real.”
But maybe that’s what made it powerful in its own way. Einstein wasn’t trying to comfort, he was trying to be honest. Brutally so. He believed that time wasn’t some divine law but a human lens. To him, death wasn’t the end of a person, just the end of our ability to experience them in the present. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re grieving. But it’s also a sharp reminder that if time is an illusion, then what really matters is how present we are when we still have the chance.
To be honest, I used to think like most people; that after 59, you’re basically in your sunset years. Time to slow down, make peace with the past, and stay out of the way.
Then I saw Trump run for president in his 70s. Then Biden, even older, stepped up to take on the weight of the world. And after all that, Trump ran again.That stopped me in my tracks. If these men were choosing more pressure, more responsibility, more stress, at an age we’re told to start winding down, maybe we’ve been looking at this whole thing wrong. It made me question everything I believed about aging. About time. And I realized the older you get, the more you have to offer, not less.
Especially now, as I watch my own parents grow older. I would never want them to adopt that mindset, that their best years are behind them. Because I still look to them for wisdom, for strength, for presence. Sure, life can end without warning, but while I’m still here, I won’t let time tell me I’m done.
