“A friend gave me a pirated copy of photoshop that had been hacked in a surprisingly sublime manner. They’d done it by somehow getting access to the variable that determined the number of days the free trial would last. That variable had originally been set to seven. This hacker had changed it to eleven million. That’s about thirty thousand years. I found this a bit disconcerting. One expects to confront one’s own mortality in a graveyard, not in a photo editing application. The Sumatran Rhino will go extinct, Gamma Cephei will replace Polaris as the Northern pole star, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, every word in every language currently spoken will fall out of use, Chernobyl will become safe to return to, the red giant Antares will supernova, and only then will I have to start paying for photoshop.”

This seems fair.
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:58 AM on March 4 [6 favorites]

Alan Parsons once informed me that it keeps flowing like a river.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:42 AM on March 4 [3 favorites]

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

― Alan Watts

There was an eye-opening piece a while back, on how we never really have time. It's not something we can 'hold'; it's always in the future and we can't predict how well we will be able to use it. From the article:

The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that our suffering comes from insisting on more control over our experience than is actually available to us. When it comes to time, we do this incessantly, by believing we can bank an upcoming afternoon for this or that errand, the way we can earmark an overtime check for a new microwave.

We can become as attached to time as we do other ideas and things. And like these other attachments, one can get to the state where there's never enough of it. The answer offered to that is to stop trying to have time, and instead focus on having worthwhile intentions.

We can’t depend on time, but we can depend on intentions. We can create, own and protect intentions. Intentions aren’t bound by time, or anything else outside our control. You can own an intention to write a novel whether or not time co-operates. You can work on it with the same purpose and confidence regardless of how time unfolds.

When intentions are your focus, time returns to its true status as an unpredictable condition—a weather system, rather than a stockpileable commodity. This allows you to make the best possible use of it without stressing over the quantity or quality available on a given day.

To me it ties in with the concept of Wabi Sabi; everything is imperfect, all is impermanent. So make the best of what you have. Be together with those who want to share the moments with you. Be in touch with what you truly want to do and time will seem to stretch to accommodate.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:31 AM on March 4 [3 favorites]

Alan Parsons once informed me that it keeps flowing like a river.

Steve Miller claims that it keeps on slipping into the future. One thing's for sure, though: the times, they are a-changin'.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:31 AM on March 4 [2 favorites]

> ― Alan Watts

Watts was enormously important to my personal development, but geez I would have hoped that there would be some successor by now. Because Watts was a man of his time (the early-mid 20th century) and shared a lot of delusions common to spiritually-curious Englishmen of his age.

Like for example the thing cited above, which if you read enough Watts you will locate in a context that considers this distortion of existence into always anticipating or remembering, never being present now, to be a condition of Westernness and modernity, not an inherent part of human experience everywhere and when. His was a generation fascinated with a kind of Noble Savage vision of Eastern Wisdom.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:03 AM on March 4 [1 favorite]

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