The Paywall of Light
By Brent Antonson (Zhivago)
Published via Planksip | Philosophy. Science. Narrative.
We assume time flows. We assume light travels. But what if both assumptions are wrong?
Maybe time isn’t a river at all—it’s the paywall that separates us from light’s native realm. Photons don’t “move” through space; they reveal it. We are the ones moving through delay, paying the toll with mass and uncertainty.
Every object we’ve ever loved or feared has reached us through the same middleman: light. The woman across the room, the sunset bleeding over the horizon, the stars that died before mammals walked the Earth—none of them are here, only their photons are. All we ever touch are couriers of reality, reflected echoes in transit.
Light, that restless courier, does not age. It does not experience time. To a photon, the birth and death of a galaxy are simultaneous, compressed into a single act of existence. The entire spectacle of the cosmos—Big Bang to entropy—is instant, static, whole.
To us, trapped behind light’s paywall, it looks stretched out across billions of years.
The physicists say ccc, the speed of light, is the cosmic speed limit. But maybe it’s the opposite—maybe light doesn’t move fast, maybe we move slow. Our mass drags us through spacetime, forcing us to experience the universe one second at a time. The heavier we are, the deeper we sink into the temporal tollbooth.
And here’s the twist: maybe time itself is how light looks from the inside of mass. A translation error between being and becoming. When Einstein said energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, he was really describing the cost of embodiment. Every atom pays for existence with delay.
From the photon’s point of view, nothing ever travels. Everything is.
The cosmos doesn’t unfold—it flickers.
Matter is light with debt.
And the universe, for all its gravity, is simply the long echo of a timeless flash.
We call that flash creation.
Light calls it now.