Time Wrapped in Events: From the Migrant Experience to Feynman’s View of Time

Recently, I have heard, one after another, of the deaths of several well-known figures from an older generation in China. Only when I read their biographies did I notice that some of them were already in their nineties. This is perfectly normal as a matter of arithmetic, yet in my memory they seem to have remained in their sixties or seventies. How can someone who, in my impression, was sixty or seventy not long ago suddenly become a person in their nineties, followed soon afterwards by news of their death? At times this sense of time carries a touch of the absurd, even the comical. What is absurd, of course, is neither their age nor their death, but the fact that my memory did not grow old continuously alongside them. Their lives continued normally, day after day, and more than twenty years did indeed pass one day at a time. It is simply that most of this process never entered my field of view. In my experience, the image of someone in their sixties or seventies is joined almost directly to news of that person in their nineties. The intervening two decades seem to have been removed, leaving only two widely separated points in time.

I left China in my forties and am now in my sixties. Since leaving, I have continued to encounter news and information from China, but much less frequently. Actors, writers, scholars and public figures I once knew well often remain in my memory as they appeared around the time I left. Chinese society did not stop changing, and they did not stop ageing. What changed was the way I received those changes: continuous observation became sampling at long intervals.

People who live in the same place for a long time see subtle changes in those around them every day. Hair gradually turns grey, movements slowly become less agile, and faces alter little by little. Because there are so many intermediate states, no single change stands out, and more than a decade is spread across the continuous detail of everyday life. After one leaves, many of those intermediate states are missing. Memory preserves a face from more than twenty years ago, while a chance encounter shows the person as they are today. When the two images sit directly beside each other, ageing no longer resembles a continuous process; it looks like a sudden leap. I have a similar feeling whenever I return to China. The streets, language and ways of life are still familiar, yet the people and surroundings have changed greatly. The world in my memory overlaps with the world before my eyes: the two resemble each other, but they are plainly no longer the same. Time passed continuously, but because the information I received was discrete, it took on a compressed form in experience. Twenty years that never entered my field of view suddenly reveal themselves all at once through a few faces, several pieces of news and a handful of returns to familiar places.

This feeling has become more pronounced as I have grown older. When I now happen to hear news of public figures I once knew, it is often that they have aged, become ill, developed cognitive impairment or died. Part of this genuinely reflects the objective changes brought by age: the generation once familiar to me is collectively entering old age. Another part comes from the selection of information. A person's ordinary daily life seldom becomes news, whereas illness and death are more readily reported. I did not continuously watch them live and gradually grow old; I heard about them again only when something significant changed. Unwelcome news therefore appears unusually concentrated in my experience. Time has not suddenly accelerated in one place. My position of observation and my sources of information have changed.

It was not only now, through these experiences, that I began to think about the relationship between time and motion. I have long been accustomed to understanding time in terms of motion and change. The feelings that took shape after I left China merely added concrete life experience to this longstanding understanding. Time can be measured by clocks, but it can also assume different forms in human memory according to the way change enters consciousness.

I have always believed that the nature of time cannot be understood apart from motion. Here, motion means not only changes in an object's position, but also living activity, human growth and ageing, changes in social relations, the formation of thought and the transmission of information. More precisely, time is the relational structure through which changes can be ordered, compared and preserved. Without change, time has no identifiable content; and if change is neither perceived nor retained by a subject, elapsed time will leave a blank in experience. In this sense, the elasticity of time can be understood as the density of motion or change. In lived experience, it is chiefly the density with which change is distributed among points of observation and memory. When one lives in the same environment for a long time, there are many intermediate images, and change is dispersed across continuous experience. After one leaves, the points of observation become fewer, and the same amount of change is concentrated into a small number of renewed encounters. The first kind of time feels smooth; the second feels discontinuous and compressed.

This difference does not occur only in the experience of migration.

Even when people live in the same city, or travel along the same road every day, the worlds and times they actually experience are not identical. Some walk, some cycle, some take public transport and some drive. A clock may show that they passed the same place on the same morning, but the content and density of the information they received were different. A person on foot may notice shops, plants, pedestrians' expressions and surrounding sounds. A cyclist covers more ground and pays greater attention to the road surface, speed and vehicles. A public-transport passenger is surrounded by the carriage, fellow passengers, stops and scenery moving past the window. A driver sees traffic lights, flows of vehicles, road directions and the judgements required for driving. We cannot simply say which mode provides more information. We can only say that different forms of movement select different information.

Even two people walking side by side along the same road will not see exactly the same world. One may notice buildings and the other pedestrians; one may be thinking about work while the other worries about something at home. The external environment offers a vast number of events that might enter experience, but only a small fraction actually enters consciousness and remains in memory. Physical condition, the direction of attention, knowledge, emotion and past experience all participate in the selection.

In practice, every person lives wrapped in a particular set of events.

This wrapping is not a sealed physical shell, but a continually changing combination of events. Family, friends, work, place of residence, daily routes, reading, bodily sensations and chance occurrences together constitute the world a person actually inhabits. We live in the same physical universe, but not entirely in the same event-world. These events each have their own rhythm. A person caring for a child may experience time through meals, sleep and stages of growth; an investor may organise time around market openings and price movements; a programmer around development cycles and software versions; and a musician around beats, phrases and progress in practice. One minute on the clock is the same, yet its content differs within different structures of activity. People do not directly experience an empty, abstract time; they experience time through the events in which they participate.

Repetition also changes the sense of time. If we follow the same road every day, see similar scenes and do much the same things, the brain need not preserve many separate details for each day. Looking back after several months, we may find that only a few points of memory remain, so the period seems to have passed quickly. In an unfamiliar place, a great deal of information must be identified anew and more points of memory are formed. The same single day may therefore seem longer in retrospect. Our sense of time in the moment may also be the reverse of our sense of it afterwards. While waiting or feeling bored, every minute seems slow; in retrospect, because little distinctive content was retained, the entire period seems short. During a journey or an engrossing musical performance, time may seem to pass quickly, yet afterwards the experience feels substantial because many specific memories were preserved. Psychological time is formed through the way attention, change and memory combine.

The modern internet has added another space: an information space. Different people use different platforms, follow different accounts and receive different recommendations, eventually forming their own information bubbles. Some encounter international politics every day; some see mainly entertainment news; some follow artificial intelligence, philosophy or music; and others encounter little beyond family and the local community. Everyone lives through the same calendar year, yet may form an entirely different understanding of it.

Information bubbles influence not only opinions but also the sense of time. Someone who follows an issue continuously sees its small daily changes and experiences the process as long and complex. Someone who hears only the outcome much later compresses the entire process into a single report. For the former, the event has a beginning, development, reversals and an ending; for the latter, all the intermediate stages disappear and only the final result remains. They may know about the same event, yet live in different informational times. Algorithmic recommendation further entrenches this difference. Platforms use past clicks and viewing time to continue serving similar material, making the combination of events around each person increasingly stable. We imagine that we are observing the whole world, when in fact we encounter only a small portion of it, filtered many times over by social relations, media systems, platform algorithms and personal interests. The more fixed a person's information space becomes, the more likely their sense of social processes is to diverge from that of others.

Migration adds another layer of temporal difference. For a child born and raised in Australia, the past twenty years have been organised almost entirely by Australian events. Stories about family and friends, school life, changes in the community, television programs, news events, sporting contests, celebrities, works of art and popular music have accompanied the child's growth and become internal coordinates for recognising time. A song, a film, a public event or a period at school will correspond to a particular stage of life. This event-wrapped world constitutes the child's conception of time and determines its density. Australia is not a living environment entered later, but the background against which all early memories were formed. There is no need to connect its people, language and social events to another temporal structure that already exists, because this structure was Australian from the beginning.

My situation is different. I came to Australia after middle age, by which time my basic understanding of people, society, culture and history had already taken shape in China. I did not enter a new country as a blank slate. I arrived carrying a temporal structure that had already been operating for decades. Familiar people, songs, books, films, social events and life experiences retained their old associations. After coming to Australia, I had gradually to learn about its people and history, allowing new events to enter an already formed system of memory.

I call this established and continuing way of organising time “temporal inertia”. It is not inertia in the physical sense, but the continuing operation of event associations formed over a long life.

The language, people and culture of a place constitute not only knowledge; they also participate in constituting time. Even after a person has left, that temporal structure continues through memory, judgement and emotion. On entering a new society, a new life must accumulate gradually before it can form a stable density of events.

Migration is not merely movement from one space to another; it is also a transition between two temporal structures.

The formerly continuous Chinese time begins to grow sparse, while a new Australian time gradually develops from unfamiliarity into density. For a considerable period, the two coexist. A person's body may already be living in Australia, while many judgements and memories remain organised according to a Chinese time formed in the past. Only as Australian family and friends, places and public events continue to enter life does time here slowly change from an external background into the content of one's own life.

Twenty years has the same length on a clock for everyone, yet it occupies entirely different positions in different lives. For a twenty-year-old, those years constitute almost an entire life and the whole memorable world. For someone in their sixties, they form an additional period built upon more than forty previous years. The proportion of life they occupy, and the way they enter memory, are different.

The baby born in Australia twenty years ago is now an adult. From my perspective, I have seen the complete transformation of a person from infancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood, so the span of twenty years is especially visible. In that person's own experience, everything happened from day to day. They do not feel that they suddenly changed from a baby into an adult. Nor is the person they see when they look at me the same person I see when I look at myself. I was already an adult when they first knew me. Within their temporal structure, I may always have been a relatively stable adult figure who simply grew older. They cannot directly remember, as I can, the more than forty years I lived before arriving in Australia. To me, that portion of life is time composed of countless concrete events; to them, it consists mainly of stories heard later.

Across the same twenty years together, I have seen almost their entire life unfold, while they have seen only a later part of mine. Their twenty years contain the immense change from infant to adult; mine contain the continuing life, migration and ageing of a person already formed. We share the same calendar time, but we have not lived in exactly the same experiential time.

Time is not only a feeling within an individual. It also exists in the relationships through which people observe one another. The same person may occupy different ages and possess different continuities in different people's memories. In a parent's eyes, a child often retains the trace of childhood forever, while in a child's eyes the parent seems to have been an adult from the beginning. Each person organises the time of others from their own position in life. When people meet, different temporal structures meet as well.

These differences do not make the shared world disappear. Different people's event-worlds continually intersect. Shared cities, institutions, public events, languages and records that can be repeatedly checked allow local experiences to connect. A shared world does not require everyone to see exactly the same content; it requires stable correspondences to be established among different experiences. By comparing observations, exchanging memories and correcting judgements, people form relatively reliable public knowledge from multiple limited perspectives.

Feynman's understanding of time allows these lived experiences to be viewed against a larger physical background.

He did not construct a separate metaphysics of time, but approached it through physical measurement and relations among events. A clock is itself a stable, repetitive physical change. We use one form of change as a standard against which to compare other changes. In physics, time cannot be taken out and observed on its own; it is measured through motion, oscillation, decay and changes of state.

Relativity further transformed the traditional understanding of time. There is no absolute “now” shared by every place in the universe. The physical world consists of events, and each object moves along its own worldline. Observers in different states of motion may judge differently whether distant events occur simultaneously, yet they can still agree about spacetime intervals and causal order.

The speed of light sets the maximum speed at which information and causal influence can propagate. A light cone therefore determines which events can affect a local observer and which future events that observer can affect. Everything distant that we see is a past state delivered after light has travelled for a period of time. Observing from Earth a star four light-years away, we see it as it was four years ago. To ask what is happening there “now”, we must first specify a frame of reference. The “now” of a distant world has no absolute definition independent of a reference frame.

This reveals not merely a limitation of human senses, but a structural constraint faced by every local entity. Replace the human being with a detector, a robot or any other physical system, and it can still access only the signals that actually reach it. No subject situated at a particular location in spacetime can simultaneously survey every event from a position beyond the universe.

Borrowing Kant's terminology, events outside the light cone may seem to possess something of the character of the “thing in itself”. Such an event may exist but cannot, at the present moment, enter this observer's experience. The analogy can go no further, however. In Kant's sense, the thing in itself is not an object that becomes observable in principle if one simply waits long enough. An event outside the light cone, by contrast, may later enter our past light cone through a signal. It is not forever unknowable; it is only temporarily unable to form a causal connection with us here and now. More precisely, what lies beyond the light cone is physical reality that has not yet entered the experiential structure of this local subject.

The social information space is not a genuine physical light cone either. A physical light cone is determined by the speed of light and the structure of spacetime, and cannot be broken through by an act of will. An individual's wrapping of events and information bubble, on the other hand, are jointly formed by a way of life, selective attention, social relationships and algorithms, and are much more changeable. Yet both remind us that no local subject encounters the whole world unconditionally spread out before it. What reaches the subject is the portion of events available under a particular set of constraints.

The elasticity of time in relativity must not be directly conflated with the compression of time in everyday experience. Physical time dilation can be measured in clock experiments. Two clocks travelling along different worldlines may record different amounts of time when they meet again. A state of motion and a gravitational environment affect the proper time accumulated along a worldline. From the perspective of either observer, their own clock, heartbeat and thought continue normally; the difference appears only through comparison.

If we continue to use the idea of a “density of change”, we can say that different worldlines accumulate different quantities of internal change between two shared events. One clock records fewer atomic oscillations, and the living activity travelling with it also undergoes less. But this is a strict physical comparison. The compression of time I experienced after leaving China belongs instead to structures of information, attention and memory; the two mechanisms are different. What they share is that time does not present itself independently of relationships. Physical time requires comparisons among different worldlines, just as experiential time requires comparisons among different events and points of memory.

Thermodynamics explains why time has a distinct direction. Many microscopic laws are time-reversal symmetric under suitable conditions, while macroscopic changes are generally irreversible. People age, buildings deteriorate, memories form and fade, and what has happened does not spontaneously return to its earlier state. Feynman connected the macroscopic direction of time to the statistical behaviour of large numbers of particles and to increasing entropy. Human ageing cannot simply be equated with an increase in entropy, but it does belong to a life process with a clear direction. Our ability to distinguish the past from the future is also related to the asymmetry of memory itself. We retain events that have occurred, but cannot retain events that have not yet happened in the same way. An elderly face in the news produces such a powerful shock precisely because it forms an irreversible contrast with the younger face in memory. Change has not merely occurred; it has left behind a direction that cannot be reversed.

In quantum mechanics, Feynman described how a system moves from one state to another by “summing over all possible paths”. This means that the microscopic world cannot always be pictured as following a single predetermined classical trajectory. It does not mean that every future has already occurred in the ordinary sense. The path integral is a method for calculating quantum probability amplitudes, not proof of a future written in advance. Quantum theory expands our understanding of the ways change can occur, but it cannot directly explain human psychological time.

Viewed across these different levels, time is not something poured uniformly into every person's life. Clocks can establish a common standard, but actual human experience is always organised by the events that enter one's life. We inhabit a shared physical world, yet occupy different paths through life, networks of relationships, information spaces and structures of memory. Each person is wrapped in a particular set of events and thereby forms a particular density of time.

To leave a country is to leave an informational flow that once entered consciousness continuously. To enter another country is gradually to enter a different system of events. Even when people remain in the same city, differences in body, route, occupation, attention and sources of information lead them to live in different experiential times. The world I did not notice never stopped changing; its changes simply did not enter my experience continuously.

So, when I see those familiar faces again, what moves me is not only that they have grown old. It is that more than twenty years of change, which I did not continuously perceive, reveal themselves all at once. What has been compressed is not the physical time of the universe, but the continuity, within my consciousness, of another event-world. Those people have continued to live in their own time, just as I have continued to live in mine. Only when a piece of news, a photograph or a return to a familiar place causes two long-separated timelines to intersect again do I suddenly see how great a distance has accumulated between them.