I think there is a somewhat more abstract aspect that gets overlooked.

Motion/interaction, creates events. So as the physical properties creating this activity proceed onto other events, once the events are created, they then recede into the past.

Think in terms of a factory; The product goes from start to finish, from being in the future, to being in the past. Meanwhile the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product, away from past products, toward future ones.

As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

A big part of our myopia on the subject of time is that as mobile organisms, our experience of our situation is this sentient interface between our body and its environment functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. Consequently our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. As narrative, it's the basis of human culture and physics codifies it as measures of duration.

Yet what motions does, is turn future into past. Potential>actual>residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, which are as foundational to our bodily functions and emotions, as sequence is to thought, but we don't think of them as mathematical extensions of space.

So energy, as present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Which is why we tend to focus on the patterns, from galaxies to quanta, rather than the processes generating them.