Transcripts:
Since 2020, many of us have felt like time has been broken. Days pass too quickly, years seem to shrink, and the changing of the calendar no longer brings a tangible sense of change. Is time actually speeding up, or has it stopped altogether while we are the ones changing? If time remains the same for the universe, why does our experience of it feel increasingly hollow, compressed, and indistinguishable? Perhaps the problem isn't with our lives, but with our understanding of time itself.
Intuitively, we can recognize the illusion of the CO 19 pandemic as a profound influence on this distorted sense of time. It fundamentally altered human existence. creating a global disruption that was prolonged, perhaps even unprecedented in our lifetime. Lockdowns, social distancing, and the abrupt transition to remote work brought our collective routines to a screeching halt.
Society, without exception, entered a phase of suspension. We were forced to confront the silence and monotony of our daily existence. And in this state, time seemed to lose its form. Days bled into one another without clear boundaries. 2020 became a singularity of rising stress and anxiety. The fear of disease and mortality, global uncertainty and isolation forged a deep emotional memory.
It birthed a new temporal divide in our vernacular. the world before the pandemic and the world after. Psychologically, intense emotion plays a pivotal role in cementing memory. When we endure events that trigger profound fear or anxiety, as we did during CO 19 with its global tension, the looming threat of infection, the constant barrage of death tolls, and the uncertainty of the future, our brains naturally encode these experiences with heightened clarity.
They become powerful temporal markers. This is likely why 2020 feels so distinct, so heavy compared to the years that fade into the background. When the body exists in a state of stress, high levels of cortisol are released as a response to perceived threats. This impacts not only our physiological functions, but the very way our brain perceives time.
Dr. Howard Iikenbalam in nature reviews neuroscience demonstrated that the hippocampus the region responsible for memory and highly sensitive to novel experiences can be disrupted when cortisol levels are elevated as they were during the co 19 era. This disruption causes time to feel agonizingly slow during stress.
Yet paradoxically it feels accelerated when the tension is absent. Simultaneously, the amygdala, which processes emotion, becomes more dominant, fueling the distortion of time perception. Furthermore, the default mode network is a brain system naturally active when we are at rest, dreaming, or unfocused on external tasks.
It governs internal processing, self-reflection, memory exploration and imagination. When daily activity becomes monotonous, the dominance of this network increases as external stimuli diminish. Consequently, our subjective experience feels as though it passes without control, like lost time. The consequence is that after 2020 as life slowly drifted toward a semblance of normaly though never fully restoring events lack the same crushing emotional weight. Reality felt flat.
It simply passed by. Perhaps this is why the years since 2021 do not feel strongly codified in our memory, making them feel as though they vanished in an instant. Our accelerated reliance on the digital sphere during the crisis, social media, endless streaming, gaming operates entirely outside natural temporal boundaries.
This exacerbates the condition. In the digital realm, morning and night cease to exist. Everything is immediate, instant. The natural architecture that once governed human activity has eroded. This phenomenon pulverizes the rhythms of work, rest, and social connection. As Wong demonstrated in computers and human behavior, technology usage during the crisis dismantled structured time perception, causing everything to melt into a state of ambiguity.
The greater issue is that the footprint of the pandemic remains. Habits calcified during the crisis. Remote work, virtual interaction, the instinct to socially distance have become a permanent legacy. Society settled into the comfort of hybrid patterns, avoiding crowds, preferring the safety of the digital void over direct human contact.
The routines of the pre2020 world have been supplanted by a nebulous temporal structure, devoid of any distinct rhythm. Spontaneous human connection usually provides the emotional context that anchors our memory to specific days. Yet, as interaction migrated to screens, becoming scripted and recursive, the grip of temporal compression tightened.
Existence became too still, devoid of sparks, devoid of ripples, merging into a vast, indistinguishable stagnation. Days saturated with anxiety regarding health, the economy, and the future felt agonizingly slow in the moment. But after the emotional singularity of 2020, the subsequent years feel as though theyevaporated in hindsight.
Perhaps starved of novelty data to process, the brain causes the temporal structure to contract when viewed in the rear view mirror. Repetitive cycles working from the same room. Isolation the eternal glow of the screen makes it feel as though we are not just passing time but killing it. This leads us to a deeper dissection of how the brain actually constructs time.
Why does it have a duration mathematically identical feel so subjective depending on our internal state? One prominent concept in psychology is the hypothesis of proportional time. It suggests that our perception warps with age determined by the ratio of a specific interval, say 1 year, against the total sum of our existence.
To a child, a single year represents a massive fraction of existence. For a 5-year-old, it is 20% of their conscious reality. For a 50year-old, it is a mere 2%. This mathematical relativity is what warps the sensation of identical duration based on where we stand in the timeline. Dao Dryma in why life speeds up as you get older reinforces this phenomenon.
He explains that childhood is saturated with novelty stretching the subjective feeling of time. Adults conversely are often entrapped in routine devoid of the new. This aligns with the function of the hippocampus the architect of episodic memory. When processing novel experiences, it labors intensely, effectively slowing our perception of the clock.
Digging deeper, we find that time is not absolute. It is a purely subjective experience. Under stress or heightened emotion, time dilates, slowing down as the brain hyperfocuses on minute details to heighten survival awareness, an evolutionary mechanism rooted in danger response. Conversely, in states of joy, time accelerates.
This entire process is orchestrated by the brain's lyic system, particularly the amygdala. Attention plays a similar trick. When we are deeply engaged, time accelerates compared to moments of fractured focus. But memory works in reverse regarding retrospect. Periods dense with experience feel expansive in memory.
Whereas monotonous routines compress into nothingness, biologically, we are beholdened to the circadian rhythm, our internal clock, as well as the chemical tides of neurotransmitters and neural activity that dictate how we perceive duration. Dixs and Cesler elucidate that our alertness peaks during the day, fading into the night.
Yet when we engage in high dopamine activities, the subjective experience of time accelerates. Research confirms that the preffrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum are the architects of temporal management. Disruptions in these regions manifesting in conditions like Parkinson's or ADHD shatter the consistency of time perception.
Chemical intervention, caffeine, alcohol, psychedelics violently manipulates this perception, hijacking the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that govern subjective duration. Caffeine accelerates the internal clock. Alcohol drags it down. Psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin can dilate time to the point of absurdity, making it crawl or cease to exist entirely.
Then there's the void, the absolute loss of temporal perception during sleep. We remain oblivious to the hours that vanish in slumber because activity in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of consciousness, plummets. The brain severs its connection to external stimuli, light, sound, chaos. Without these references, it cannot construct the architecture of time.
We can see the terrifying proof of this biological disconnect in the experiments of Michelle Seiff. In 1962, this French geologist isolated himself in a subterranean glacier 375 ft below the surface without sunlight, without clocks, without calendars. He intended to study the earth, but instead he discovered the darkness within the human mind.
Cut off from the external cues of day and night, his internal clock began to drift. When he emerged, he believed it was mid August. In reality, it was midepptember. He had lost an entire month of his existence. His brain, deprived of anchors, simply stopped recording the empty intervals. This mirrors our collective experience during the lockdowns.
When we live in the cave of our rooms, illuminated only by the artificial blue light of screens, we are all Michelle Caffra. We are losing months, not because time is faster, but because there is nothing to mark its passing. From this dissection, we are forced to accept that the perception of time is a subjective illusion, a construct of the brain itself.
This compels us to confront a profound inquiry. If the experience of time is inherently subjective, who defines its existence within the universe? Is time physically real? A fundamental dimension governing reality? Or is it merely a scaffold of human experience? If our perceptions are fractured and unique, why do we insist on treating time as a constant, a fixed, absolute truth of the cosmos? These questions feel alien.
Intuitively,we are conditioned to believe that time is universal, consistent for everyone, and that only our perception is flawed. The ticking clock serves as our proof, a machine that marches forward with indifference, regardless of our internal state. Yet, does this year truly feel distinct from the years that preceded it? What validates it as a new year? If January first feels indistinguishable from any other arbitrary date in the past, the days bleed together.
The only difference is a changing integer on a calendar. Who dictates the genesis in the terminus of a year? If the answer lies in the Earth's orbit around the sun, does this not prove that time is merely a human construct? The universe does not display time. Humans impose time upon the universe to perceive it. So, does time truly exist? Or is it merely a comforting illusion we crafted simply to cope with the chaos of existence? Our ancestors were bound to the rhythm of the cosmos.
They observed the natural cycles, the oscillation between day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the shifting seasons. They identified patterns in this chaos. Because in that era, recognizing these rhythms was not a matter of curiosity, but of survival essential for agriculture and migration. These patterns were memorized, studied, and passed down.
By 1500 BC, the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia utilized sun dials to track the solar trajectory, carving the daylight into hours dictated by the length of shadows. Egypt and Sumeriia were also the architects of the calendar, basing their systems on lunar phases and solar movements, eventually introducing the solar year of 365 days, the very structure we adhere to today.
Later in Greece and Rome, the Klepsyra or water clock emerged, measuring time through the consistent steady flow of water. In the Middle Ages, the demand for temporal precision was not scientific but divine. Both the Islamic civilizations of the Middle East and the monastic orders of Europe required exactitude for prayer and ritual.
This necessity drove the innovation of the mechanical clock driven by gears and weights, offering a consistency that sun and water could never achieve. Enter the 17th century, the dawn of the enlightenment. Galileo's studies on the pendulum laid the groundwork for accurate timekeeping. This culminated in Christian Hygens creating the first pendulum clock in 1656, revolutionizing precision.
Simultaneously, Isaac Newton codified the concept of time as something constant and universal, an absolute time that flows independently of any event, immutable and unyielding. Entering the 19th century, the industrial expansion of railways and the sprawling web of global trade created an urgent demand for synchronization.
This necessity birthed the standard time zone system, first implemented in England, then codified globally at the international meridian conference. Greenwich was crowned the prime meridian, establishing GMT, a system that still governs our clocks today. Yet this rigid structure was shattered when Einstein's theory of relativity revolutionized the very concept of time.
He revealed that time is not absolute. It is malleable, relative, dependent entirely on velocity and gravity. The concept of time dilation emerged, proving that time does not flow uniformly for all observers, especially at high speeds or within crushing gravitational fields. Time was no longer a solitary line, but woven into space itself, a four-dimensional continuum.
Consequently, the midentieth century saw the birth of the atomic clock, measuring time based on the vibration of atoms like cesium. It achieved precision down to the billionth of a second, becoming the foundation of coordinated universal time, or UTC. The GPS system stands as tangible proof of relativity.
Satellites orbiting Earth at high velocities positioned in weaker gravitational fields experience time dilation. Without relativistic corrections, the location data would degrade into inaccuracy. We see this phenomenon echoed in muon particles moving near light speed in the atmosphere. For them, time slows down relative to an observer on Earth.
Since relativity, space and time are no longer viewed as separate entities. They are fused into the fabric of spacetime, interconnected and warped by mass, energy, and gravity. But there is a deeper, colder law that governs the flow of time. Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe inevitably moves from order to disorder.
You can break an egg, but you cannot unbreak it. The shattered pieces will never spontaneously reassemble. This irreversibility creates what physicist Arthur Eddington called the arrow of time. Time is simply the measure of decay. It is the universe slowly unraveling toward a state of equilibrium, a heat death where no energy remains.
In this sense, time is not a creative force. It is a destructive one. We perceive time flowing forward because we are biological machines consumingenergy to resist this decay temporarily holding back the chaos until inevitably we too succumb to the disorder. From this the concept of cosmological time emerges calculated not by ticks of a clock but by the expansion of the universe itself.
George Late first proposed that the cosmos is expanding from a primordial state, the singularity we now call the big bang. This theory was cemented by Edwin Hubble's discovery that galaxies are receding at velocities proportional to their distance and further validated in 1964 by the detection of cosmic background radiation.
The big bang became the definitive cosmological model. In this framework, time is no longer understood as a universal flow. Instead, it becomes a parameter, a metric describing the change in scale of cosmic space. Time becomes relative to position, velocity, and the gravitational condition of the observer.
In fact, if the universe were not expanding, time in the cosmological sense would be rendered irrelevant. shift to the perspective of quantum physics and time begins to dissolve. It may not exist at all, but rather appears as an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction of quantum particles. In theories like loop quantum gravity, spacetime is viewed as a network of discrete relations, meaning time is only relevant on a macroscopic scale.
The Wheeler Dwit equation, which attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity, notably excludes the time variable entirely, whispering the unsettling truth that time is not a fundamental element of reality. Furthermore, in quantum mechanics, time is tethered to observation. A particle in superp position does not experience time until the moment it is observed.
The concept of entropy which binds time to increasing disorder applies primarily to the macroscopic world. At the quantum level, the laws of physics are indifferent to the direction of time. Phenomena like time dilation and relativity where time slows and crushing gravity or the quantum dependence on observation reinforce that time is merely a method to measure relative change against a reference point.
This implies that time like language like mathematics is a mental tool a powerful narrative constructed by humans to comprehend a complex world. It allows us to remember the past, to engineer the future, and to exist within a linear structure, even if the universe itself simply does not care. If we pause to reflect, this realization becomes a painful indictment of our existence.
If time does not exist, then life is not a journey. the duration of our survival, the sum of our achievements, the sand remaining in the hourglass, none of it matters. We cannot even be certain if now is real or if we are merely drifting through the constructs of our own minds. If time exists simultaneously as proposed in the block universe model, then free will appears to be a ghost.
Every action, every moment is already fossilized within the fabric of spacetime. If time is absent, our purpose and hope merely delusions. Without time, the very concepts of progression and evolution lose their relevance. All human striving becomes meaningless if the past, the present, and the future are indistinguishable.
If time exists only within the mind, is death simply the sessation of subjective experience? Does the universe remain eternal without beginning without end? This perspective echoes the most famous postulate of Emanuel Ka. He argued that time and even space are not aspects of objective reality but rather innate frameworks, filters hardwired into the human consciousness to comprehend the world.
To Kant, these are merely categories of understanding used to organize experience. Yet inadvertently this philosophy degrades the value of that very experience. We may arrive at a truth closer to the world's objectivity. That time is a void. But in doing so, the human experience of time is rendered insignificant.
A hollow echo compared to the true timeless reality. Nichza, though deeply influenced by Kant, rejected this premise entirely. in how the true world finally became a fable. He dismantled the idea that a true world exists above the world of appearance. He categorized this distinction as a fundamental error. He understood the seduction of this belief but argued that such a view ultimately degrades life itself.
In beyond good and evil, he went further, asserting that appearance is not the antithesis of essence. Appearance is alive, effective. It is not a mask to be peeled away from reality. The world of appearance, our direct human experience, is the only reality. The concept of a true world along with naturalistic claims of a higher reality are the actual illusions.
Nze pushed this confrontation with time to its terrifying limit with his concept of eternal recurrence. He posed a question that haunts the modern soul. What if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness and said to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live oncemore and innumerable times more.
Every pain, every joy, every thought, every sigh, and every unutterably small or great thing in your life will have to return to you all in the same succession and sequence. Would you throw yourself down and nash your teeth? Or would you crave this eternal repetition? If time is a circle as some ancient philosophy suggests, then the way you spend this very moment is how you will spend it for eternity.
This thought transforms the weight of time from a fleeting resource into an infinite burden or an infinite opportunity. This perspective was reinforced by Henri Bergson who distinguished between mechanical measurable scientific time known as temps and the time we experience directly duray. He posited that the subjective time of consciousness holds far more value than fragmented mechanical time.
Duray is a continuous flow of consciousness indivisible and unbroken. The time we feel where an hour can expand or contract based on the intensity of experience is the true time. Moments do not stand in isolation. They bleed into one another in an unbroken stream. This stands in stark contrast to mechanical time which reduces the richness of human life, emotion, memory, hope into mere calculation.
This subjectivity was echoed by Haidiger in being in time. In defining dust, human existence, he rejected Kant's dualism. He declared that true reality reveals itself partially within specific moments. Appearance is not an illusion. It is reality itself. According to Haidiger, time is inextricably bound to how we perceive ourselves as beings hurtling toward death.
It is not merely a cold objective marker. It is the lens through which we grasp our own finitude and potential. The catalyst for an authentic existence. The sense of urgency, the reflection on what has passed and the shadow of what is to come. This is the true reality of the human condition. Edmund Huser echoed this sentiment.
To him, time is the very core of human consciousness, structured in three dimensions. Retention, the awareness of the past, pretention, the anticipation of the future, and impression, the visceral experience of the now. This awareness allows us to stitch together fragmented moments into a coherent stream, crafting a sense of continuity in a chaotic life.
Direct contemplation reveals how memory, hope, and the present moment fuses to construct our subjective reality. Thus, the human experience of time, however subjective, is the mechanism by which we manifest the world and inject meaning into our existence. From this entire dissection, we arrive at a singular realization.
Even if time lacks objective existence within the cold vastness of the universe, it retains an irreplaceable significance within the human soul. It is a mental construct, yes, but it is the construct that allows us to comprehend change, to organize the chaos of experience, and to find meaning in the journey itself.
Time is a paradox, simultaneously an illusion and a reality. It is physically non-existent yet absolute in our experience. It is a vessel for reflection, for dreaming, for nostalgia, and for forward motion. By understanding time as the lens through which we experience the world, we can transcend the existential dread of its non-existence.
It is precisely within the finite boundaries of subjective time that human meaning is forged. This year, like the ghosts of years past, will fade. But what grants it weight is not the objective ticking of the clock, but the moments we inhabit, remember, and create. Perhaps if we wish to make the years ahead feel valuable, to slow the blur, we must infuse every moment with intent.
Time may be nothing more than an illusion, but it is the illusion that grants our lives structure, direction, and purpose. And perhaps therein lies its beauty.
