Imagine you are in a windowless room, the walls are painted grey and there is nothing but a clock ticking on the wall. You look at the clock, time passes. But nothing happens. You stand there, observing the room. The wall stays the same, the corners don’t change. The clock hangs there. The room is paralyzed as always. But the clock is ticking, you watch the arrows looping in circles, and you see the hours pass by, but there is no change in the room. You decide to throw away the clock. You go back in the room and stand there. The room is still, deadly quiet. You stand there for a while. And think; how much time has passed by now? It must be about an hour right? You feel your inner clock calculating. You are getting hungry, then it must be somewhere around 6, wow that’s long. Your circadian rhythm is calculating the time for you.

You decide to step outside the room and hang a camera inside the room. Is there time within the room? You watch the video’s and nothing happens. You don’t know whether you are looking at a slow-motion video or a fast forward passing several decennia. Until one day. On that one day,, we see a little flake of paint fluttering down slowly somewhere in the corner of the room. Soon after, more and more flakes follow. Is there time in the rooms? Do things change? But no, it is just the paint interacting with the oxygen in the room. Time didn’t do anything, it was just paint and oxygen interacting with each other on the smallest scale, and we could see the end products; the flakes fluttering down towards the ground. In time, the rest will follow, the concrete will decay, the camera will decay, and the light in the room will break; leaving the room into pitch black darkness.

Everything in our universe decays, albeit very slowly. The insects go fast, the dogs go slower, the human decays even slower, and the universe itself even decays. But we all exist together, today, in different timelines. While dogs live eternally to insects, humans live eternally to dogs, and the universe lasts eternally to humans, but we all live at once decaying in different rates. Yes, we can express decay into time. But there is no time in it self. Time does nothing to us directly. Time does not determine how “old” we feel. We age at our own pace which is guided through our interactions with the world. The sun and the moon are heavily interacting with us, they create our days and nights, our light and darkness, our hot and cold, our awakenings and sleep, our inner rhythms. Therefore, it has become very useful to determine time on their rotations. But we have to remember, it is not time itself that changes us. It is our decay, our change, our movement that changes the universes state. Time does not exist.

Sources and inspiration;

The decay of atoms

Read more on circadian rhythms 

This was an inspiration for the last paragraph on “humans live eternally to dogs”

A post on a philosophy forum asking the same question agreeing with me

Quora question on “Is time an illusion?” agreeing with me, (found this after writing this story)

Another Quora question (where the most upvoted answer agrees with me as well