About Time: What Makes Time Such A Valuable Resource

We’ve all heard of the phrases “time flies” and “time heals all wounds,” but what really is time, and how does it impact our lives? 

The concept of time may be even more powerful than we think, especially when it comes to the money we save and spend.

The following is an excerpt from The Natural Order of Money by Roy Sebag. It has been adapted for the web.

The natural order, money, and time are intrinsically bound together, such that no part of this triad can truly be comprehended in the absence of the others. We will begin this chapter by meditating upon the third aspect of this tripartite dynamic: time.

Time is the condition in which we find ourselves situated. For this reason, it is the very essence of our shared human experience in the world. Temporality is the ontological medium in which we live, act and die; it is the medium in which the natural world grows, bears fruit and decays, in which flowers blossom, mothers age, and the sun sets. As we transition from the fleeting days of our youth to the mature years of adulthood, we learn that time is precious, that it “flies by”, and so we ought to spend it wisely. In the words of Walt Whitman, echoing the eternal analogy of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, “the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.”1 In the context of the natural order, the “powerful play” is the omnipresent force of time, and the “verse” is our individual life, manifest in our inward experience and our external actions.

Time: What Really Is It?

But what is time? Put simply, time is the master to which the whole of existence is subservient. It is the fundamental, superseding law of nature, according to which human life and the natural world together unfold. We exist in time, such that we are unable to escape its unceasing, forward pace. Neither are we able to control nor predict the strange and unknown course which the passage of time will follow. Because of its universality and ineffability, the nature of time has persisted as a compelling subject of poetical reflection and philosophical inquiry since antiquity. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, it is written that God has “put a sense of past and future into their minds”.2 Here the author indicates the intimate sense of the passage of time that we all experience by virtue of being human. We know time flown by to reside in the bygone past; the time in which we live and act is present; and the time that will soon arrive lies beyond in the future.3 The present is that which is immediately available to my sense-perception; I can immediately engage with or act upon it. The future is that which I anticipate or expect in light of the imminent flight of the present. Finally, the past is that which is no longer alive but remains partially available to me through the dynamic of recollection or remembrance. The individual always lacks the power to change the past, the power to know the future, and the power to, in any way, pause or measure the present as time flows onwards.

There are two basic facts or qualities about the nature of time which therefore appear immediately to us: (1) time moves forward; and (2) time is irreversible. No human effort can possibly change the directionality of time’s movement, just as no human effort can succeed in arresting time or physically returning to an episode of its flow which has already passed. In light of this basic philosophical exploration, we can formulate a definition of time which will serve us throughout this inquiry.

Definition I. Time. Time is the ultimate law of nature which saturates all things. It is universal, personal and qualitative, and it is forward-flowing and irreversible.

Understanding Time: Recognizing Reality

This understanding of time is self-evident by way of common sense reasoning about ordinary life. Simply put, one’s individual actions are beholden to the requirements of the present: if you are hungry, you must find food to eat; if you are cold, you must find a source of heat; if you are walking across a busy street, you must avoid the cars in the way. While the daydreaming recluse can sit alone and indulge in his fond memories all day, at some point he must recoil to the present in order to answer its given circumstances with the reply of perfunctory action. The moment that the daydreamer needs to eat, he will be pulled away from his subjective idealizations into the hard reality of perception and action, whereupon he must get up, move about, locate some food, and refuel his body.

We begin by recognizing this ontological reality because all cooperation, life and activity take place within time. Contemporary economics tends to ignore the condition of our temporality by transforming economic activity into measurable and quantitative data which appear simultaneous and thus essentially predictable. Our method, by contrast, is the temporal method. When thinking about the economic system in the unavoidable context of time, we look more to temporal dependency, to antecedents and consequents, rather than to abstracted simultaneities. Before looking to what motivates an action within the cooperative system, we have to first look at what allows that action to occur in the first place. In other words, both the natural world and human action are subordinate to this reality of time. This understanding of our temporal condition will lead us to a greater comprehension of both the natural requirements and the generated products of human cooperation.

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