Time is supposed to be the most reliable thing in our lives, ticking forward at a steady pace while everything else changes. Yet for many people, the last few years have shattered that illusion, leaving days that blur together, years that vanish, and memories that feel unmoored from any clear “before” or “after.” The problem is not just that time feels strange, it is that our society still runs on the assumption that it is simple, objective and shared.
When the clocks, calendars and deadlines that structure modern life collide with a deeply subjective sense of duration, people are left feeling disoriented and, often, at fault. I see that mismatch everywhere: in physics debates about whether time even exists, in psychology labs studying why it speeds up with age, and in online forums where people confess they “have no sense of time” and wonder if they are broken. The science suggests they are not, but it also shows why our old story about time no longer works.
The everyday crisis of “time feels wrong”
Across age groups and backgrounds, people are reporting that their internal clock no longer lines up with the schedule on their phones. In one widely shared thread, a user described how their perception of the past few years had become “really messed up,” with long stretches that felt both endless and impossible to recall, and others chimed in with advice to Practice mindfulness, stay present and calm their nervous system. That mix of distress and self-help is telling: people sense that something is off in how they experience time, but the only tools they are offered are individual coping strategies.
In communities where neurodivergent people gather, the language is even more direct. One person with attention issues wrote that they “have no sense of time,” explaining that they had struggled with lateness their whole life until they realized that this was a recognized pattern and that they functioned “much better with a planner,” a story echoed in a separate Jan post. Another described a “strange sense of time” for distant events, only later connecting it to an ADHD diagnosis in a discussion whose Comments Section was full of similar realizations. These are not abstract philosophical puzzles, they are people trying to live in a world that assumes time is obvious when, for them, it is anything but.
Why the brain’s clock rarely matches the wall clock
Neuroscientists have been quietly dismantling the idea that there is a single, accurate “time sense” in the brain. One line of research argues that the mind and brain act as an imperfect clock that “coarse-grains” the physical passage of time along a world line, detecting only changes that matter for survival and behavior rather than tracking every tick of a second hand. In this view, the internal timeline is not linearly related to physical time in general, which means that what feels like a minute or an hour can stretch or compress depending on context, as described in work on Physical Time and Human Time.
Other researchers have gone deeper into the body, asking whether the heartbeat itself shapes our sense of duration. One cognitive neuroscientist, speaking in Jan remarks, described trying to understand how we perceive time and how that perception arises from brain and bodily signals. The emerging picture is that timing is not a single module but a distributed process that integrates sensory input, emotional state and physiological rhythms. When those systems are under stress, disrupted by illness or simply overloaded by information, the subjective flow of time can warp dramatically, even while the clock on the wall keeps perfect time.
Time speeds up, slows down, and sometimes disappears
Psychologists have long known that time seems to fly when we are engaged and drag when we are bored, but newer work suggests that the effect is more systematic than a cliché. One analysis argues that Our experience of time is highly flexible and subjective, and that one major factor is information processing. As we age, we tend to encounter fewer novel stimuli, so the brain compresses routine days into a smaller mental footprint, which makes years feel shorter in retrospect. That helps explain why childhood summers feel endless while midlife years vanish in a blur.
Other studies focus on how specific activities distort duration. Experimental work on exercise has shown that Human perception of time rarely aligns perfectly with clock time, and that everyday experiences like waiting in line or running can influence these distortions. In one set of findings, people overestimated how long they had been running, suggesting that bodily effort and attention to discomfort stretch perceived duration. On the other side, research on memorable experiences indicates that When we see things that are more important or relevant, we dilate our sense of time to capture more detail. The same day can feel long while it is happening and strangely short in memory, depending on how the brain encodes it.
ADHD, time blindness and the limits of personal willpower
For people with ADHD, the gap between social time and inner time is not just a curiosity, it is a daily obstacle. Clinicians describe “time blindness” in adult ADHD as the inability to sense how much time has passed and to estimate the time needed to get something done, a pattern that can derail work, relationships and self-esteem. One educational resource on What Is Time Blindness invites readers to imagine boiling a pot of water and then getting so absorbed in another task that they have no idea whether five minutes or half an hour has gone by. That is not laziness, it is a neurological difference in how time is tracked and prioritized.
Medical writers note that Most individuals with typical neurology possess an internal “clock” that generally gauges how much time has passed, but that this mechanism can be disrupted in ADHD and related conditions, leading to what is often referred to as “time blindness.” In more severe cases, neuropsychologists speak of “time agnosia,” defined as an inability to perceive the passage of time, usually due to a disorder involving the temporal area of the brain, where Individuals retain the concept of time’s existence but cannot feel it moving. When people in ADHD forums say they “have no sense of time,” they are, in effect, describing a milder version of a recognized neurological condition, not a moral failing that can be fixed by another productivity hack.
Children, aging and the uneven texture of a lifetime
Age shapes time perception in ways that are both intuitive and surprisingly precise. Developmental research suggests that Children may perceive time as it is happening more slowly than adults, possibly because each moment is packed with new information that the brain must process in detail. As routines solidify and novelty declines, the brain can afford to compress similar experiences, which makes later years feel subjectively shorter even if the clock records the same number of hours.
Psychologists who study lifespan perception argue that this compression is not inevitable, it is tied to how much newness and emotional salience we allow into our days. One analysis of aging and time notes that One major factor in the sense that time speeds up as we get older is the rate at which we process and store information. When life becomes a loop of familiar commutes, meetings and screens, the brain records fewer distinct “time stamps,” so months collapse into a single impression. That is why some researchers and therapists now encourage older adults to deliberately seek out novel experiences, not just for enjoyment but as a way to thicken the felt texture of their remaining years.
Physics keeps asking whether time exists at all
While psychologists document how elastic time feels, some physicists are questioning whether time, as we usually imagine it, exists in the first place. In one discussion of quantum gravity and cosmology, theorists argue that the concept of time is fundamental in the formulation of the laws of physics, yet this intuitive notion is often contradicted by more formal definitions that treat the universe as a static configuration of events. That tension is laid out in work on A Universe that Does Not Know the Time, which suggests that the cosmos might not “know” the time in the way human observers do.
Other philosophers of physics have gone further, arguing that Modern physics suggests time may be an illusion. They point to Einstein’s theory of relativity, which treats the universe as a four dimensional block where all events, past and future, coexist, and where what is the past to one observer can be the future to another. Historical essays recall that Einstein in 1905 proved that time, as it had been understood by physicist and plain man alike, was a fiction, undermining the idea of a single universal clock ticking the same for everyone. In online debates, physicists respond to questions about what it means for time to have no meaning by pointing out that Your question supposes an observer, and that Time may not be fundamental in regions of the universe where there are no particles. The more precisely scientists describe the universe, the less it resembles the flowing timeline we feel from the inside.
Popular culture is already living in a post-time universe
These abstract debates have seeped into popular culture, where podcasts, videos and social media posts treat the unreality of time as both a mind-bending idea and a kind of comfort. In one widely shared Instagram reel, a host recounts listening to an “awesome video podcast” with Brian Green and a physicist named Julian Barber, marveling at the suggestion that time might not actually exist. On YouTube, explainer videos with titles like “Time Is an Illusion” summarize recent scientific discussions that suggest time might not be the fundamental backbone of reality we once thought, instead presenting it as an emergent property of deeper laws, as in one Jan overview.
At the same time, cognitive scientists are using accessible talks to show how fragile our sense of duration really is. In one presentation, a researcher named Ruth Ogden walks viewers through why time flies when we are having fun and slows to a crawl when we are not, asking why that is and what it reveals about attention and memory in a Ruth Ogden lecture. Another speaker opens with “i am a cognitive neuroscientist” and explains that she is trying to understand how we perceive time and how that perception arises from brain processes, as in the earlier Jan talk. The combined effect is that ordinary viewers are being told, on the one hand, that time might not exist and, on the other, that their own sense of it is unreliable. No wonder so many people feel unmoored.
Productivity culture keeps pretending time is simple
Despite all this complexity, the culture of work and self improvement still treats time as a neutral resource that can be managed with enough discipline. In one popular productivity podcast, a host notes that “I don’t have time” is one of the most common struggles people report, then invites Productivity experts to confess the mistakes they still make in episode 43 of TPP. Their stories are familiar: carefully planned days ruined by endless distractions, underestimated tasks, and the sense that time slipped away. The advice that follows usually focuses on better planning, stricter boundaries and smarter tools.
There is nothing wrong with calendars and to do lists, but they assume that everyone experiences an hour in roughly the same way. Psychological guides on What causes poor time perception point out that While there is no wrong way to perceive time, heightened emotions and a lack of novel experiences can lead to confusion, frustration or disconnection. Yet workplace expectations rarely account for those distortions. When someone with ADHD misses a deadline because their internal clock failed them, or when a burned out employee finds that a day of meetings leaves no trace in memory, the default response is to blame their character rather than question the model of time that underpins their job description.
Living with a concept of time that does not quite work
The deeper problem is that we are trying to live by two incompatible stories at once. On one side is the industrial model of time as a uniform commodity, measured in billable hours and fifteen minute slots, which assumes that everyone can and should align their inner sense of duration with the external schedule. On the other is a growing body of evidence that subjective time is elastic, that the concept of time in physics may not match our intuition, and that some brains simply do not track passing minutes in the expected way. When those stories collide, individuals are left feeling like the problem is personal rather than structural.
Some people respond by trying to hack their own perception, using mindfulness, novelty and body awareness to stretch or compress their days. Others lean on external scaffolding, from paper planners to smartphone timers, to compensate for unreliable inner clocks, much like the person who found they were “much better with a planner” in the Jan account. Those strategies can help, but they do not resolve the underlying contradiction. Until institutions, workplaces and even families accept that time is not a single shared experience but a negotiated one, people will keep feeling as if they are failing at something that, in reality, has never made straightforward sense.
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