A Different Interpretation of Time

A few days ago I was watching a video about Einstein's Block Universe theory. The theory itself is relatively simple to understand, even if the science behind it isn't. The idea is that time may not exist the way we experience it. Instead of the past leading to the present and the present leading to the future, every moment already exists. The past, present and future are all equally real. Time isn't flowing from one moment to the next. We are.

Most people seem to arrive at the same conclusion when they hear this. If the future already exists, then everything must be predetermined. Every choice we make, every success, every failure and every relationship has already been decided. At first, I agreed with that interpretation. It seems like the most obvious conclusion.

The more I thought about it though, the less convinced I became.

Not because I can prove otherwise. I can't. Physics is far outside my area of expertise. The interpretation simply feels incomplete. If everything is predetermined, what exactly is the role of effort? Why do decisions feel consequential? Why does taking one action instead of another often appear to produce completely different outcomes? Maybe that's all an illusion. Maybe every choice we make was always going to happen exactly as it did. But if that's true, then a different question starts to emerge. What exactly is the point of trying?

The opposite interpretation doesn't sit right with me either.

For a long time I believed something much closer to the idea that everything depends on us. Work hard enough and you'll get what you want. Push harder. Sacrifice more. Create your own outcomes. It's an attractive belief because it gives us complete agency over our lives. The problem is that reality doesn't seem to work that way either. Anyone who has pursued something difficult for long enough eventually discovers the same thing. Effort matters, but effort alone doesn't determine outcomes. Two people can work equally hard and end up with completely different results. Timing matters. Circumstances matter. Luck matters.

To believe that we control everything feels just as inaccurate as believing we control nothing.

This is where I started thinking about the theory differently.

The Block Universe, taken on its own, does suggest a single fixed structure. One path. Already written. But the Block Universe doesn't exist in isolation. Once you bring quantum mechanics into the picture — which any complete model of reality seems to require — something changes. In Feynman's path integral formulation, the mathematics accounts for all possible paths a particle can take between two points. Not one path. All of them. Each with a different probability of being the one actually traveled. The theory doesn't say which path will be taken. It says which path is most likely.

That small shift changes how the whole model looks.

The way I eventually visualised it was as a graph. Imagine a four-dimensional graph where time is simply another axis. Somewhere on that graph exists the point where you were born and somewhere else exists the point where you die. Most interpretations seem to assume there is a single path connecting the two. A single route through time that already exists regardless of whether we are aware of it.

But what if there isn't just one path? What if there are thousands?

Imagine every meaningful future you can genuinely see for yourself. The company you want to build. The person you want to become. The relationship you hope to have. The city you may one day live in. The things you want to create. The impact you want to have on the world. In this interpretation, each of those futures exists as a different point somewhere on the graph. Some are close. Some are far away. Some require only a few decisions to reach. Others require years of effort, sacrifice and persistence.

Suddenly the future stops looking like a destination and starts looking more like a landscape.

What interested me most wasn't the idea that these futures might exist. It was what determines whether we arrive at them.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that reaching a particular point on the graph is not really a question of certainty. It's a question of probability.

Take any future you genuinely want. Maybe it's building a successful company. Maybe it's becoming an expert in a particular field. Maybe it's finding a partner. Maybe it's simply becoming a version of yourself that you're proud of. At some point, that future exists only as a possibility. Whether you eventually reach it depends on a combination of effort, decisions and luck.

The luck part is important.

Because this interpretation doesn't eliminate uncertainty. In fact, uncertainty becomes a core part of the model. Two people can move towards the exact same destination and experience completely different outcomes. One may encounter the right opportunity at exactly the right time. Another may not. One may succeed on their tenth attempt. Another may succeed on their hundredth. Another may never succeed at all.

Luck still exists.

What changes is the role of effort.

A person who never moves towards a possibility has almost no chance of reaching it. A person who consistently moves towards it may still fail, but their probability of success becomes significantly higher. They are not guaranteed to reach the point they are aiming for, but they are continuously increasing the odds of arriving there.

I think that's the part that resonates with me the most.

We often think about outcomes as binary. Success or failure. Reached the goal or didn't reach the goal. But life rarely works that way. Most of the things we want sit somewhere on a spectrum of probability. Every decision we make shifts those probabilities, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. We don't control the outcome, but we influence the likelihood of different outcomes becoming reality.

Here is where the model gets harder to apply.

All of this assumes you know which point on the graph you're moving toward. But what if you don't? What if the uncertainty isn't just about whether you'll arrive somewhere, but about which destination is worth moving toward in the first place? Wanting something doesn't automatically tell you whether that's the right thing to want. The habit of questioning — which can be genuinely useful — applies to goals just as easily as it applies to outcomes.

Maybe more easily.

I don't have a clean answer to that.

What I've noticed is that questioning a destination doesn't necessarily mean the destination is wrong. Sometimes it just means the path toward it is unfamiliar enough to make the mind look for reasons to turn back. The two can feel identical from the inside, which makes them difficult to tell apart.

At this point, an obvious question appears. If every possible future already exists, isn't this just another form of determinism?

Maybe.

I've gone back and forth on that question several times.

What interests me, however, is not whether this interpretation is scientifically correct. What interests me is whether it is useful. Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives waiting for certainty. We want guarantees before taking risks. We want proof before making decisions. We want to know that something will work before we commit ourselves to it.

Yet almost nothing meaningful comes with certainty.

No one knows whether a company will succeed.

No one knows whether a relationship will work out.

No one knows where they will be ten years from now.

No one knows which decision will end up changing their life.

Perhaps that's why this interpretation resonates with me. It doesn't require certainty. It only requires possibility.

If there exists a future that we genuinely want, and if there exists a path that could lead us there, then perhaps that alone is reason enough to move towards it. Not because success is guaranteed, but because every step increases the probability, however slightly, of reaching a future that would otherwise remain out of reach.

Whether Einstein's theory is true, I have no idea.

Perhaps the future already exists.

Perhaps it doesn't.

Perhaps every possibility is already waiting somewhere ahead of us.

Or perhaps we create them as we move through time.

I don't know.

What I do know is that I find this interpretation more interesting than either extreme. If everything is predetermined, there is very little left to think about. If everything depends entirely on us, reality quickly proves otherwise. But if life is a landscape of possibilities, where our actions continuously influence the probability of different futures becoming reality, then uncertainty starts to make a little more sense.

Not because it disappears.

But because it finally has a place in the model.