The Two Most Persistent Myths of Time: Time as Stage and Time as Change

Most debates about time don’t fail because people lack intelligence. They fail because the word “time” quietly changes meaning mid-sentence.

Two myths do most of the damage:

One says time is a stage—a giant container the universe “sits inside.”

The other says time is change—that time and change are literally the same thing.

Individually, each myth bends our thinking.

Together, they collide, contradict, and generate a surprising amount of “mystery” that isn’t really there.


Myth 1: Time Is a Stage

This is the picture where time is an arena.

Events “happen in” time the way actors perform on a stage. Even if nothing happened, the stage would still be there—empty time, waiting.

It’s an intuitive idea because our language nudges us toward it.

We say “in 1997,” “throughout history,” “over time,” as if time were a place you could walk into.

But the stage picture brings a strange cost.

If time is a thing that exists on its own, then it seems to do something: it passes.

And the moment you take “passage” literally, you hit a wall.

How fast does time pass? “One second per second” isn’t an explanation—it’s a restatement.

If you try to give a real rate, you secretly introduce another time for time to flow within. That’s the classic “meta-time” trap.

A second puzzle follows right behind.

If time is a stage, then “the present” looks like a spotlight moving along the stage. But moving relative to what?

Again: either metaphor, or regress.

The stage myth turns a useful way of organizing events into an extra ingredient of reality. It reifies the gridlines on the map as if they were painted onto the land.


Myth 2: Time Is Change

The second myth makes the opposite move.

Instead of treating time as something independent, it identifies time with change itself.

Time = aging, motion, entropy, seasons, evolution.

This idea also feels obvious. Look around: everything changes. So it’s easy to think: if change is real, time must be real.

And if time is an illusion, then change must be an illusion too—cue the “frozen block universe” conclusion.

But “time = change” has problems of its own.

First, it creates too many times.

Which change is time? A pendulum? Earth’s rotation? Atomic transitions? Heartbeat rhythms?

These can drift, slow, speed up, get disrupted, or fall out of sync. So if time were simply “change,” we’d have a swarm of incompatible “times.”

To fix this, we smuggle in something else: a standard.

But that standard is already a bookkeeping move, not a metaphysical substance.

Second, the identity claim blurs two different questions:

Change answers the first. Timekeeping answers the second. When we collapse them, we confuse the ledger with what the ledger records.


Why These Two Myths Clash

If time is a stage, then time is independent of change. Change happens in time. So time could (at least in principle) exist even if nothing changed.

But if time is change, then time is not independent of change. No change would mean no time. So time could not exist without change.

You can’t consistently hold both.

The first says: time is a container that can exist empty.

The second says: time is identical to what fills the container.

That’s like saying money is (1) an abstract accounting system that can exist even if nobody buys anything, and (2) identical to the transactions themselves.

You can talk that way casually. But metaphysically, it’s unstable. And yet many people do hold both at once. 

They treat time as a stage and as change. Then they wonder why time feels “mysterious.”


The Classic Talking-Past-Each-Other Move

This clash explains a familiar argument pattern.

One side says: “Time is an illusion.”

Often, what they mean is: there is no extra cosmic ingredient called passage—no moving spotlight, no universal “now” sliding forward.

The other side replies: “Time obviously exists—look, things change.”

But that response assumes the second myth: time = change.

So both sides end up making the same hidden move.

They equate time with change. They just give opposite verdicts. That’s why “timeless” is so often taken to mean “changeless.”

It’s not a discovery. It’s an assumption.


A Cleaner Picture: Change Is Real; Time Is Bookkeeping

Changism starts with a simple distinction.

Change is what actually happens: processes, interactions, differences being made.

Time is how we keep track of those changes: a standardized accounting system. 

We didn’t discover time the way we discovered a new particle. We built timekeeping by noticing repeatable patterns in nature.

Day/night cycles. Lunar cycles. Seasons. Then better oscillators. Then clocks. Then increasingly stable, precise standards.

A clock doesn’t “measure a flowing substance.” It counts regular cycles and lets us compare rates of change.

It tells you how many standardized ticks occurred while some other process unfolded. That’s not nothing—it’s powerful.

But it’s not the same as adding a new dimension-stuff called Time™ to reality.

Even if no one had ever invented clocks, change would still happen. And even if “objective passage” is an illusion, the world doesn’t freeze.

Processes still unfold. Differences still occur. Causation still links states and events.

What disappears is the extra metaphysical layer: time as a thing that flows.


So What Would “Timeless” Mean?

Once you separate change from timekeeping, “timeless” becomes less dramatic.

It doesn’t have to mean “nothing happens.”

It can mean: no fundamental ingredient of flow is required.

The world can have structure, ordering, and dynamics without an extra moving “now” on top.

“Changeless,” by contrast, is a much stronger claim.

It says there are no processes, no transitions, no differences being produced at all.

That’s not what most serious “time is an illusion” arguments actually need. They usually aim at the stage myth, not at change itself.


The Takeaway

Time becomes mysterious when we ask it to do jobs it cannot coherently do.

The stage myth makes time an invisible container that somehow moves.

The time=change myth makes time identical to the very processes we use time to compare.

Both myths blur categories. Both turn a practical tool into a metaphysical puzzle.

Change is the world’s activity.

Time is a human (and physical) standard for coordinating that activity.

Stop conflating the ledger with what the ledger records, and half the “mysteries of time” evaporate.

The rest, as it turns out, were built on the stage.