time is a force
Have you ever heard that time is a currency? That it's a finite resource and you spend time. If you want to go on a walk, it will cost you thirty minutes, or a wrong career path might cost you a few years.
There's utility to this mental model, but I want to consider another option - that time is a force.
Time is the force that changes this moment into the next. If time were to stop, how would you boil water? You could not transfer heat, because transferring heat "takes time", as I would traditionally frame it.
But rather, time transfers heat. Time is a force acting upon the world in it's current form & changing it into it's next form.
In video games, we have frames. A game's logic is executed during frames. If you have 120 FPS, then you have 120 executions of the game's logic per second. Time, in this sense, is the changing from THIS frame to the NEXT frame. Without that change of frames, nothing happens in the game.
So, time is a constant force acting upon the world.
And in this, I've also reconsidered what "I" am. And perhaps, I too, am a force - though not constant like time.
If two reactive chemicals are in proximity to eachother, time will change them from one state (unbonded, near eachother) into another state (bonded, different chemical compound).
A chemist might add heat to hasten the chemical reaction (or sometimes cause a different reaction? Idk). Time is the force driving the reaction, and heat is another force that can modify the interaction.
I am the heat. A force that can be applied, that can affect the changing-of-states. But without time driving the change-of-states, heat cannot apply.
Time is a constant force. My body and brain are matter - they are the state. And I am a non-constant force, at times modifying the changing-of-states that is driven by time.
Time does not belong to you. It is not something you have that you can spend, because it is not yours. That framing is an ego-centric one. And I'm believing less-and-less in an ego-centric view of reality. Time is a constant force, and it acts upon the state of the world, and I can add inputs to that interaction.
I'm still processing this new to me idea, so I don't know if I believe it, persay. But I'm very interested in it.