Absolutely, and there’s actually been a substantial amount of research on the subject as well. The way we perceive time is a product of our emotional state, and the environment.
The perception of time can feel different from person to person and emotional state to emotional state.
A microwave minute is 10 normal minutes.
Terry Pratchett posited that the shortest measurable amount of time is the New York second - the time between the traffic light turning green and the car behind you honking.
A washing machine minute is 20 normal minutes
Don’t even get me started on planking.
If you really want to experience time, stare at an analog clock without a seconds hand, for 5 excruciating minutes.
As a football ⚽ fan, I can confirm that time moves excruciatingly slowly when defending a 1 goal lead, and absurdly quickly when a goal behind.
Man I remember as a kid, Christmas week felt like it took forever. The anxiety and excitement kept me up all night. That all died out as I got older though.
Same with school. The dread of school made it seem like I spent ages at school. I remember dreaming of the day I would turn 18 and be done with school. That felt so, so far away.
These days time flies so damned fast, I can hardly remember my 20s and my 30s are just a blur.
I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis lately with how fast time seems to be passing.
I just turned 20 last week (I just remembered it was actually 2 weeks ago but this kinda illustrates my point) and the days and weeks leading up to my birthday went by just as fast as every other day because birthdays just aren’t that special anymore (I now have money to just buy myself the stuff I want, after all). As a kid, it felt like an eternity waiting for my birthday. I woke up everday counting how often I’ll have to sleep/go to school until my birthday finally comes. Now I look at my phone and I’m like “Oh, my birthday’s tomorrow already. Totally forgot about it.”
When you’re stressed out or in a panic situation your brain will start to lay down more than one memory track at a time, this will cause time to feel slower when you think back on it. And because the “present” is constantly moving moment in time thinking back only 10 seconds can feel like 30 seconds, making time feel like it’s crawling along. If you spend 8 hours at work stressed out, at the end of the day it can feel like you’ve spent 16-20 hours there.
On the plus side, it feels like I sleep forever when I’m dreading the next day. I’ll wake up worried my alarm is about to go off and realize I still have 3 more hours.
Sure, yeah.
20:30 December 24 as a kid through 05:30-ish? Until I actually fell asleep anyway it felt eternal. Like the second hand on the clock fucking with you by sticking but still ticking. Which that shit did back then but always sprung back to barely-any-time-passed.
I had a long career with plenty of digg/reddit time that made a nine hour day feel like a pleasant nine, but still nine. Too bad they also made the rest of the 15 feel like shit.
I answered tier one tech calls from collection agents. Eight hours was eternal. Worse than Christmas, soul crushing, can’t make a joke about it. Left.
Now I have a job that I love that is 12 to 15 if OT. Breezes by.
Human nature I think.
If you meant on a larger timescale then - yes also, but nobody needs dreadful anecdotes.
Your perception of time even changes based on your body temperature. When you’re hot time runs quicker for you, meaning stuff takes longer.
Life is taking fucking forever. Decades of rent payments and wage slaving await. Ultragigadepresso
Hmmm, if you’re asking if the external flow of what we perceive as time would shift according to an observer’s state of mind, that’s doubtful.
But our perception of time isn’t the same thing as the flow of time. Our temporal sense is definitely subjective, and there’s been some research into that (though damned if I can recall the details without looking it up, and I’m getting a bit brain fried tired, so not up to doing so).
Anticipation, be it fearful or happy, definitely shifts how we perceive time.
Time absolutely dilates on anaesthetics. I dont just mean the general perception, it can slow down audio recognition, and also your subjective sense of it as measured by checking your time source and realizing it feels like hours since you’ve been this way and its been a significantly shorter time period than estimated and continually reevaluated
Absolutely it does.
The problem is thinking of time as a unidimensional directed flow that we are pushed along by, rather than a multidimensional manifold that we traverse.
Think of even a flat graph. If two agents start at (0,0) and both travel to when x=4, the agent that went from (0, 0) to (4, 0) had a trip of length 4. The agent that went from (0, 0) to (4, 3) had a trip of length 5.
