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Time Is Event-Based

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Time Is Event Based

Author: Unknown (crypto/trading Substack; HFT background) Type: Essay — personal + quantitative

Core Insight

Time is better measured in events than in objective clock-time. This "truth fractal" shows up at three scales: individual trading, a human lifetime, and all of human history.

Scale 1: Trading

At a high-frequency trading firm, the basic unit of time was the microsecond. Benchmarking performance using clock-time didn't work across different stocks — NVDA might have thousands of trades in the time a low-liquidity stock updates its price once.

Solution: event-based benchmarks. Count order-book events (trades, cancellations, price updates) instead of seconds. This normalized performance across all stock types and generalized strategies more effectively.

In crypto (24/7 markets), event-based thinking meant identifying "hot zones" — the few hours per day where real information was moving — and being awake for those rather than attempting continuous vigilance:

  • 7–11am ET (US open), 3–4pm (US close), 7–8pm (quant rebalance at 0 UTC), etc.

"Those three years felt like the longest stretch I've ever lived." — While friends said the same years "flashed by."

Scale 2: A Human Lifetime

Paul Janet's ratio-of-life idea: At age 10, a year is 1/10th of your entire memory bank. By 50, it's 2%. By 22, you've already "spent" roughly half your subjective lifetime.

Implication: unless you cram life with fresh events, each calendar year subjectively shrinks. Time contraction is an inevitable form of personal decay — alongside wealth erosion from inflation and physical deterioration from aging.

Scale 3: Human History

Mapping human history in event-based vector space (1 event = 1 "life-year" = one person alive for one year):

Total accumulated human experience: ~1.6 trillion life-years

  • 50% of all lived human experience occurs after 1500 CE
  • 25% after 1945 CE
  • 10% after 2003 CE
  • Each calendar year today accounts for ~0.5% of all human experience ever

While individuals experience time on a log scale (each year shrinks relatively), the collective has experienced time on an exponential scale. The individual and the collective are moving in opposite directions.

The Fractal

The same principle — time is better counted in events than clock-time — appears at every level of resolution:

  • In HFT: normalize by market events, not seconds
  • In a life: pack it with novel events to stretch subjective time
  • In history: the exponential population growth compressed millennia of experience into decades

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