Words are a means of communication with one another or even oneself. The fact that many words have a definition but still get used loosely does not seem to get much notice. Obviously, this makes sense, if we had a specific word for everything our vocabularies would be very large. To effectively convey our message, we need to be able to pass it on as efficiently as possible. At the same time, we need to guarantee that as many people as possible will understand what I am saying. We use many words in a wide array of context and various degrees of freedom and expect others to understand what we mean. Most of the time this works because we all share the same basic idea about those words. But trying to figure out an exact meaning to some of these words can be quite tricky and could end up in an endless debate.
The thing with forever
How long is forever? Depending on what you are doing in your life currently this can vary from the end of the commercial break during your favourite tv show, the delivery of a highly anticipated parcel or your retirement 20 years in the future. Regardless of the timespan involved we generally resort to saying “this will take forever” despite it only being around 5 minutes to the end of the commercial or a day for a delivery. This is quite obviously not even close to how long forever could be considering how long homo sapiens have been.
Our concept and understanding of time is limited to what we see on our phones, watches or even maybe a sundial if you still use one. Time does not seem to flow linear for us and we have a distorted view of how long a specific given stretch of time is. Meeting up with friends for a few hours can fly by in a manner of seconds while my workday before coffee seems to stretch out until, well… forever. Most people can relate to that. So how does forever work then if we cannot even grasp the length of time in “normal times”?
The natural cycle of the world revolves around the sun, literally. The sun comes up: daybreak, the sun goes down: end of the day. Everyone agrees with this. When the sun is at its highest, we can also all agree that it is roughly midday, give or take. Even our bodies have a natural clock, with which it regulates our body. We have a rough sleep/wake cycle prewired into ourselves if we stick to a regular schedule. Our body tells us we are hungry around the same time every day because it is expecting to receive an energy boost around 7am before work or 12pm for lunch. With the advent of electricity and electric light we have been able to conquer the night. We have introduced a 24-hour society where before the darkness was our natural marker for going to bed.
A year is based on an entire lap of the sun and a month is roughly a whole moon cycle. We used to measure time in moon cycles too and not too long ago either. So how can it be that we have lost our understanding of time and need to use a clock all the time? In the grand scheme of things forever is just a never ending something and yet we use it in everyday communication.
Ask a child how long until his next Birthday and they will generally reply something along the lines of forever. Ask me now and I would rather not talk about the fact that I will have completed another lap of the sun so soon. When I started my bachelor’s degree (which takes 3 years) I could not believe how long that was and thought it will take, well… again: forever. That was far from the truth, now in my last term it feels as if time has slipped through my fingers extremely fast and the end is rushing up towards me. So, if forever is so ambiguous does it hold any sort of intrinsic value? In a way it does, it defines something we consider taking a long time, or forever. And there you have it, it is so easy to use in any circumstance regardless of whether or not we know the exact length of time.
If one thinks about forever enough you might decide it is sometime in the future. In my case I would say forever is when I am old and near my end. But forever is not bound by any timely constraints. It will run on way beyond our lifespan and out into eternity. Despite that, eternity and forever are not synonyms. The official definition of forever is as follows “for all future time; for always”. Even though this is the correct definition of the word, we seem to use it in a very different way. Our definition can vary from “for always” by almost “for always”.
Where does leave us with forever then. Strictly speaking there are no rules to follow regarding the use of the word. Everyone understands when I say forever, I mean a long time but whether or not they see 3 years of studying as forever or maybe the 3 months until their next leave depends on how they define time in that moment. So really it comes down to our distorted understanding of time which does not follow the regular increase of the second counter. So at least for the near future or maybe forever we will be left with a word which can mean many different things for almost everyone on this planet.
