We quantize time, to us it exists as specific segments. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. We even count centuries and millennia although only rarely does a person experience the first and if someone lives the duration of the latter then there's definitely something strange going on. Why do we live by such acutely defined periods? Our main aim with time is to synchronize ourselves with each other, so we can all simultaneously experience existence. We need this to make our lives more real, we can ratify events - they did REALLY happen. Of course the trade off is we have to live by the laws of time which we lay down. We set an alarm to wake us up, sprint through breakfast to make sure we leave on time because if we don't then we'll never get there before the start of.......something really important you'd expect but for majority of life it's work. The daily grind. We panic and stress about ensuring that we can attend boredom on time. Some of us love our jobs so we actually enjoy the experience but very few of us would choose their job over a day off given the chance. Of course, with our days off we get 'free time' which some of us use to pay back seconds into the vault of knowledge, while others use it to numb the memories of working.

Our experience of specific memorable events is much more fluid, and is split into good times and bad times. Seconds disappear, the laws of cause and effect take over and then one thing leads to another. We follow the string of the event to it's conclusion like reading a sentence. Then the next sentence begins and we learn a new piece of information. This information, coupled with the information learned in the first sentence gives us an idea of where the paragraph is going. Unfortunately, the concept of time from the first paragraph interjects and suddenly you have to be somewhere.

Learn more about this author, Angus Macdonald.
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