See? Told you you wouldn't accept it.
I'm asking you to explain so that I understand what you mean - then I can decide whether I accept it.
How does it matter what the experience of a thing is, as to the reality or the substance of what the thing is?
It matters because we define things according to our experience of them. For example, how we experience the world is very much scale-dependent - we experience the arrow of time and causality, just as we experience temperature, pressure, and the wetness of water, as emergent properties at macro scales, but they don't exist/have meaning at micro scales.
In the Einsteinian block universe, time itself is, as Einstein said, an illusion. But if each moment along the time axis is equally real, why do you experience the passage of time? I find it helps to use a simple analogy - a flipbook, where each moment is represented by a 2D image on a page. When you flip through the flipbook, the images appear to move.
In the block universe, the images are 3D 'snapshots' of the world and the trace your existence makes through these snapshots is your 'worldline'. But there's a significant difference between the flipbook analogy and the block universe - the flipbook consists of 2D slices ordered in space (the thickness of the flipbook), so someone has to flip through it to make it active, and then we only see a single start-to-end sequence of action, where each page appears once. But the 3D snapshots of the block universe are ordered in
time itself, so it is, in a sense, 'self-flipping'. So every moment along your worldline is a
now for the you at that point in time, and who you were and what you did ten years ago is just as real as who you'll be and what you'll do ten years from now (if your worldine extends that far!).
The "follow" no more proves time passage than our experience does.
I'm not saying it proves anything - it's an expression of our perception of the temporal sequence of events. As Einstein suggested, it may well be that, "
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".