With enough revolutions around the Sun one forgets that’s how years actually work. They’re revolutions around the Sun. We’re counting how many times we make the trip around the Sun. People may say it casually, but really chew on it.
If the orbit of the Earth around the Sun suddenly changed, or the rotation of the Earth too — what would that mean for .time.? Is it the same if we change the calendar, the seasons, etc.?
It means that Time which is so Rigid is actually relative. It is a social institution that just so happens to have Days and Nights attached. What if we suddenly had 30 hrs of daylight and 30 hrs of night? What would we do then? The clocks would have to be remade! What if we just stopped revolving around the Sun one day?
This social institution is reinforced because things appear to change, such as actual aging. Yet, there’s no good reason why we couldn’t be immortal. Just because you see everyone slowly decaying doesn’t mean you have to.
The way we can look at the world and define it is malleable.
People see time as a linear thing despite its dependencies on its definition; rotation, cycle, orbit - why don’t we see the world as cycles instead? There are 4 seasons. Why have these four seasons labeled? It could be 8 seasons, to capture the nuance between each transition. History always repeats, strangely. Maybe we need a new word to capture the mega season that records all of human history, days turning into millennia.
Whatever model we make, it won’t be all that accurate. Sometimes Summer comes in late, sometimes Winter is just early; isn’t that the strangest thing? To trust so deeply into the Revolutions around the Sun and yet it’s not even accurate to our gut feeling. In the sway of seasons.
The Gregorian Calendar has leap years BECAUSE it’s not entirely accurate! And there have been many calendars too. We could make the current year 12000 something if we look far back enough and set the 0 marker on our oldest dated item of Homo Sapien.
By discarding time models, all one can know is the present. That’s it. And one day the present will stop. When you chew deeply on the relativity of definitions, time is not real. They’re just convenient interfaces to interact with people.