Do you feel that the days are flying by? Weeks and months are passing so quickly that we are losing track of what day of the week it is or what month it is. However, the year 2020 seems to be stuck and it feels as if we have been living in this pandemic world for ages, forever.
Time and duration are scientific concepts that can be precisely measured. Each ticking moment signifies the passage of time in a single direction, the future. We push every moment from the future to the past by living through it. The same applies to the time duration between two events. It is a quantifiable property. We can exactly measure the amount of time packed between two events in terms of how many hours, minutes, and seconds.
However, the perception of time in our minds does not reflect the scientific, measurable property of time. In our minds, time seems to be elastic, stretched at certain times. An event from the past sometimes seems to be far far away; and certain events from the distant past seem like just happened yesterday. This is a very common observation and we all have felt it more often than we talk about it.
This year, the weirdness around time is elevated and exaggerated. Most of us feel — March was 30 years long, and April was 30 minutes long, and May, June, July, and so on seem to be even shorter. The year has gone by so fast, yet we feel that pandemic has been there forever. Time seems to be disoriented and inconsistent, more so due to the pandemic, quarantine, and lockdowns.
I came across an interesting article by Emily VanDerWerff, where she interviews a time philosopher who eludes on the reasons for this disorienting sense that time is malleable and inconsistent. I have quoted from this article to illustrate the discrepancy around time and would like to give all credits to the author of the article.
We all have an internal clock, but there is no single biological clock that subjectively measures the time for us. Interpretation of time is a complex phenomenon where different internal clocks are constantly working together, synchronizing multiple sensor and auditory information, switching and regulating our attention, and compiling and recording the memories. With all this, we create a sense of the history of our life. More often than not, our internal clocks are confused, giving us a disappropriate interpretation of the passage of time. Dr. Adrian Bardon, the time philosopher explains time perception and how it relates to our day to day activity — “Subjective time perception mainly has to do with the combination of emotion and attention. The type of emotion that we experience affects the type of attention that we have to pay, in combination with our external circumstances. When we’re relaxed and engaging in some kind of routine or productive activity, we’re experiencing what psychologists call flow. Flow is this relaxed, outward-directed attention, and it can be pleasant and calming. That’s exactly when you say that you lose yourself. Flow can result from different activities for different people. It could be knitting or carpentry or playing an instrument or golfing or yoga.”
When you have more outward-directed attention, then you are in a flow, enjoying every bit of the time, and the time seems to go fast enough. While engrossed in a book, or playing a video game, or talking to your best friend over the phone, you suddenly realize that an hour has gone by whereas you thought it was just 10 mins. Clearly, you were in a flow, a happy and relaxed state enjoying what you were doing, and time just flew by.
The opposite of flow is negative, inward-directed attention when you are under a lot of cognitive loads. Dr. Adrian explains, “the psychological opposite of flow is called rumination. That’s repetitive, obsessive, negative thoughts about the situation and tasks you’re engaged in. So this state of rumination is closely associated with subjective reports of time slowing down and dragging by.”
The combination of negative emotion and inward-directed attention makes your moment-to-moment life seem intolerable and burdensome. You are ruminating, and nothing seems like an accomplishment and time seems like dragging.
Another interesting aspect is how we interpret our emotions and activities with respect to time. We are constantly passing judgment on every moment as it passes by. Surprisingly, in our retrospective judgment of the passage of time, if we feel that we did not accomplish anything, then we feel as if time just flew by. We often say, “Where did the day go? Nothing got done.” Or we look at the month, and we say, “Where did Oct go? It’s Nov already?”
Again quoting Dr. Adrian — “So the order of the day is all about this internal confusion and our feelings of the duration of the day and our rapid retrospective judgments to the passage of time are getting pushed and pulled in multiple ways all at once. We’re experiencing negative emotions, time slows down. We are burdened by complex processing tasks, time speeds up. But if a lot of the complex processing is inward-directed, time slows down; not much gets accomplished in a satisfactory way, then time speeds up. We’re experiencing all these factors at the same time. It’s a big, massive, internal confusion.”
In short, the paradoxy around time is real and complex — time sometimes is dragging, and at other times just flying by!
