The events happen 1 in the future. It doesn’t matter if it’s 50ms or 500ms, what matters are the events and the state changes. These /are/ time. So, one event leading to a state change is time passing by 1. They’re known as Lamport Timestamps [0] and are leveraged in Vector Clocks [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clock