The Arvelie time system

I’m currently wrapping my head around the Arvelie time system, which I found here on Devine’s website, (after also having it bent by his time tracking system).

Since writing this post, I decided to try implement Arvelie into my journaling and have written a CLI helper for converting to and from Arvelie for any that are interested.

There are two things I really like about the time system. One, that time ranges are uniform. Each month has 14 days, which creates 26 months. This makes time management feel much more approachable. And two, that time for any project or moment, begins at 0. So Arvelie time is always relative to the artefact which it is logging.

This creates a different relationship between us and time. As we no longer have a positional relationship to the past. That is, the past that came before year “0”.

This is mostly how we measure time anyway. How old are you? How long have you been programming? For people into computers, Unix time follows this same concept.

Typically when conceptualising a date or time, we additionally reference it against “time immortal” (which in some domains has the suffixes ‘BC’ and ‘AD’). This meaning, we’re in the year 2024 now, and can recognise how much things have changed in the last 150 years (even without having been alive then).

But it’s different in Arvelie time. If you’re, 24 now, then what we know as the year 2000, would for you be the year 0. This creates an interesting and alternate feeling about the past. It feels more like each birth (organic, or otherwise - like a project) is its own strand of time, sprouting from the true “time immortal”, which does not have a start date.

While this can sound a bit wishy-washy, I would argue, that this is a lot more accurate given the context in which we live.

Because we actually measure time in the same style as Arvelie - the universe is (by our best measure) about 13.8 billion years old. Meaning, that the big bang was year 0. However, I’m writing this in the year 2024. Or more interestingly, I’m writing this in the year 2024AD.

This is interesting to me, because the BC / AD attribute, directly communicates an understanding that time is infinite (or that it moves more like an oscillation). This is one of the few aspects of religion that I actually like. That infinity is maintained as a truth, rather than a concept.

Although, granted, this has all too often been used as a weapon (heaven and hell for eternity). But we turn all sorts of good things into weapons.