Chapter 2: The Two Clocks

Here's something I didn't know until I started digging: there are two completely different ways that time disappears. They feel similar. They produce the same vague dread. But they run on different machinery, and the things that fix one don't necessarily fix the other.

The first is what researchers call prospective time. This is time as you experience it in the moment. It's the clock you're watching while you're living. When a Wednesday afternoon at your desk feels like it's lasted about forty-five minutes and you look up to find it's nearly six, that's your prospective clock running fast. When a meeting drags and every minute feels like five, that's it running slow. This clock is governed mostly by attention. The more attention you give to time itself, the slower it goes. The less you notice it, the faster it vanishes.

The second is retrospective time. This is time as you reconstruct it from memory. It's the clock you consult when you look back at a month, a year, a decade, and judge how long it felt. This is the clock that tells you five years with someone you love felt like eighteen months. It's governed not by attention but by memory. Specifically, by how many distinct, retrievable memories you formed during the period.

These two clocks often run in opposite directions. And that's where it gets interesting.

Think about a holiday. A really good one. You're in a new place, everything is unfamiliar, you're not checking emails, the food is different, the light is different. While you're there, the days seem to fly. You look up and it's Thursday already. Your prospective clock is running fast because you're not monitoring time. You're absorbed.

But then you come home. And when you think back on that week, it feels long. Dense. Full of distinct images and moments you can actually recall. Your retrospective clock says that week was substantial, because your brain formed a rich collection of separate memories during it.

Now think about a normal week at work. Same commute. Same desk. Same meetings. Same lunch spot. While you're living it, the days can feel slow. You're checking the clock. You're aware of time passing because nothing is pulling you fully in. Your prospective clock might actually be running slower than on holiday.

But at the end of that week? It's gone. You can barely distinguish it from the week before. Your retrospective clock says almost nothing happened, because your brain didn't bother encoding separate memories for events it had already filed a thousand times. Monday's meeting looks exactly like last Monday's meeting in your memory, so it gets compressed. Stacked. Discarded.

This is called the holiday paradox, and it's one of the most useful concepts in time perception research. Claudia Hammond, a BBC broadcaster and psychologist, named it in her book Time Warped, and it explains a contradiction almost everyone has felt but few have understood.

The reason is structural. Your brain is an efficiency machine. It doesn't waste resources encoding things it already knows. When you walk the same route to work for the eight hundredth time, your brain doesn't create a fresh memory of the walk. It files it under "commute" and moves on. When you attend the same weekly standup, your brain doesn't carefully encode the details. It already has a template. It just notes that it happened and discards the specifics.

This is brilliant for operating efficiently. It's terrible for feeling like you've lived.

Because when you sit down in December and try to feel the weight of the past year, what you're really doing is scanning your memory for distinct chapters. Retrievable moments. Things that stood out. If your year was full of routine, your brain returns a sparse result. Not because the year was empty of events, but because the events were too similar to be stored separately. The year compresses. It feels thin. You know things happened. You just can't feel that they did.

I recognise this in myself so clearly it's almost uncomfortable. I can list things that happened during my thirties. I can tell you about the trips, the product launches, the cities. But they blur. They lack individual weight. I know I was in Singapore, but was that 2016 or 2018? Did that client meeting happen before or after we moved house? The events exist in memory like items on a spreadsheet. Present, accounted for, and entirely without texture.

French researcher Sylvie Droit-Volet, at the Université Clermont Auvergne, has taken this further. Her work shows that the subjective feeling of time passing and the actual perception of duration are processed by separate systems in the brain. You can feel like time is crawling while simultaneously underestimating how long something took. They're different cognitive operations, running on different neural circuits.

This matters because it means "time flies" isn't one problem. It's at least two. And the interventions are different.

If your days are vanishing while you live them, the issue is attention. You're either too distracted to notice time passing, or too stressed to be present within it. The fix lives in your relationship with attention: what you focus on, how deeply, and how often you're interrupted.

If your years are vanishing when you look back, the issue is memory. You're not forming enough distinct, retrievable chapters. The fix lives in your relationship with novelty, with structure, and with how you design the rhythm of your life.

Most people I've talked to about this, people my age, have both problems running simultaneously. Their days feel thin and rushed. Their years feel compressed and blurry. It's a one-two punch. And every piece of advice they've received treats it as a single problem. Slow down. Be present. Meditate.

But you can't fix a memory problem with an attention tool alone. And you can't fix an attention problem with a novelty tool alone. You need to know which clock is broken before you can repair it.

I wish someone had told me that ten years ago.