People *really* don't know what they've got until it's gone.
It seems completely unbelievable to the contestants of the Battle for Dream Island now, after well over a *decade* of competition, of pain and misery, of constant worrying over whether or not they'll get to see another day, but there *was*, indeed, a time before any of that ever happened. A time before that speaker box fell out of the sky and declared the start of that circle of suffering. That's just how time works; at least, according to how Golf Ball and her nerd friends would put it. Pretty much nobody ever wants to listen to them, and thus doesn't want to rely on them to know about how the universe works, but every other attempt at pinning down the concept of the passage of time has just left them with a lot of frowns, a lot of longing, and a lot of regret.
According to GB, according to the books she read, according to the great minds of the times before them, there was a time in which there was absolutely nothing whatsoever. Absolutely nothing at all. Them, the planet they resided on, the star that planet orbited around, the galaxy that star lived in, the universe that galaxy... *existed* in, all of it was once... *not* there. But then, all of a sudden, *everything* was there. Well, all the component parts that would eventually be used to create everything, anyway. All these things were once concentrated in a single point in space; a singularity, if you will. Then, all of a sudden, it decided to suddenly expand in all directions, filling the once-empty void and eventually creating the universe as they know it today. Why it decided to do that, how it came to be in the first place, and how things were *before* it existed are still matters of much debate and uncertainty; that was one of 2,763 or so mysteries that they just weren't able to get to.
As a result, there is almost certainly a time before anything, *anything* at all, was created. Their star, their galaxy, the land they stood on, the air they breathed, themselves, their lives, and the competition that they are now fighting in. For years. That sort of time is a lot from where they stand, more than enough to completely and utterly reshape their view of the world, to have it centered around the Battle for Dream Island. But really, if one takes the entire length and breadth of the universe into account, it's *nothing*.
Barely anyone has ever bothered to record how much time has passed since the start of the BFDI; either they didn't want to, or they just couldn't. Golf Ball, being a real stickler for all sorts of boring nerd junk, is one of the exceptional few that decides to devote her time to such nonsense. Her extensive documentation shows that this competition has been running in some capacity for well over a decade now, perhaps even a decade and a half. From when the Announcer appeared to the present moment, that's 15 years. That's quite a lot of years, more than one could count on one hand, or two. But GB also claims that the universe has existed for... well, *longer* than that. Much longer.
It's usually around that point where everyone plugs their ears, and they either run away or do *anything* they can to make her shut up. These sorts of things, these sorts of existential matters, the contestants of the Battle for Dream Island aren't really equipped to handle that sort of thing. All they know is... well, Battling for Dream Island. Again, it's the one thing they've been doing (to some extent) for around 15 years, give or take. To think that the universe has gotten along *just* fine, for *many* years, prior to the way things are now, that was... well, there were a lot of words in the dictionary to describe the sort of feeling that emerges within them the moment they are made aware of this revelation. But nobody ever reads the dictionary; when most people think of dictionaries, they think of a big, boring book full of big, boring things. Book claims to be a dictionary, among other things, but the only person that ever goes through her pages is herself. As such, the vocabulary of the average contestant of the BFDI is quite lacking. When asked to describe what sort of unholy emotion they feel after realizing that the world can make do without their cares and worries, they are often restricted to a rather limiting set of words: scared, frightened, horrified, and the like. Considering the way they act around the matter, perhaps their small repertoire is only partly to blame; even Golf Ball herself agrees that this sort of thinking goes nowhere, that their brain power (what little they have, anyway) could be spent thinking about much more important matters.
