Time's Purpose

 To me, time was always just a means of scheduling our lives and simply a measurement. Is there really any proof that we are currently living in the second day of October in 2020? What if it is actually mid April in 2012? Is it really 8am on a rainy, Fall, Friday morning or is it just a rainy Wednesday in Spring at 5pm? Who is out there to prove to us that our months and days and years and weeks and hours and minutes are completely accurate to the legitimate time that the planet we inhabit is actually at? I have always felt that numbers and time go together hand in hand; first we have numbers. Someone one day just said one, two, three, and so on and that was our number system. We determined that in one hour we have sixty minutes due to the fact that we have these numbers, but what is someone said four, nineteen, forty five, and so on and instead we state that four hours has 3 minutes when in reality it was the same amount of time. Same with the earth rotating around its axis as well as revolving around the sun, the numbers 24 hours and 365 days coincide with these events, but what if someone said it was really 32 hours and 500 days, but it's the same exact amount of time? Time goes and goes, but I see its purpose as scheduling and measuring rather than it being something bigger and deeper than that. 

We say it is October 2nd, 2020, because that's what we know it to be, and we have an assignment due this day and we all probably have assignments due next Tuesday and then more next Friday and so on. In this case time is a way of scheduling our days out; we use time to determine when we will hold certain events, when we will hold a holiday, when we have an assignment due, when we have the day off, and so on. We also use time as a measurement. We are given twenty four hours every day, and every year we have 365 days consisting of 24 hours. We measure the rotation of our planet this way and the revolution of our planet this way; inhabitants off in a faraway galaxy probably have a way different interpretation of their own. 

Time goes on no matter what the time consists of; typically in our lives, time holds change, as McTaggart asserted in his article. We grow whether it be physically, mentally, or emotionally everyday and every week and every month and every year. Children grow taller, adults grow wrinkles, we get closer to the end of our physical lives here with time or closer to a fun event with time. It is an aging and growing process, time. Without time, we'd probably be really late to a bunch of events or we would be really early or we wouldn't know there is an event unless someone gave us a phone call and said, "You need to come here now!" We use time to schedule out our days; we know when it is going to get dark outside and when we are going to get tired, and we know when we need to get up and go to work and when it is time to go home because of time. 

McTaggart's article left me quite confused while I felt I also understood him. Time is a very confusing topic because we all have different views on it. McTaggart stated that for time to be real there needs to be change and direction, so time pretty much always exists except for the cases that is does not? McTaggart did not really influence my opinion and thought on time, but he presented quite interesting ideas that have come across my mind before such as the fact that an event goes from future to present to past to an even further past. Time is difficult to understand and explain in my opinion due to the fact that it was really just created with multiple purposes and ideas.