The psychology of time

Why Did Childhood Summers Last Forever?

You’ve lived this paradox a thousand times: the wedding day that felt like minutes, the breakup conversation that stretched like years. The vacation that vanished in a blink, the hospital waiting room where each second was a small eternity. Time, that supposedly constant force, reveals itself to be the most inconsistent companion you’ll ever have.

On the best days, you’re so fully immersed that time becomes irrelevant. You’re not watching the clock because you’re not watching anything except life unfolding in front of you. When you’re truly present—laughing until your stomach hurts, lost in conversation, creating something beautiful—you exist outside time’s tyranny. Minutes dissolve because you’re not counting them.

But on the worst days, you become time’s prisoner. Every minute crawls because you’re hyper-aware of wanting it to end. Pain makes you a reluctant time-keeper, marking each moment that refuses to pass. Waiting for test results, sitting through heartbreak, enduring grief—suddenly you’re counting breaths, watching clocks, bargaining with minutes.

Here’s the cruel mathematics of human experience: happiness makes us time-blind, while suffering makes us time-obsessed. Joy pulls us into the moment so completely that the moment expands to fill everything. Misery pushes us out of the moment so violently that we spend eternity trying to escape it.

The best days pass quickly because you’re not trying to escape them—you’re trying to dive deeper into them. You’re present, engaged, alive. Time isn’t your enemy; it’s invisible. The worst days drag because every fiber of your being is screaming for them to be over. You’re not experiencing the moment; you’re enduring it.

This is why children’s summers felt infinite but adult years vanish—children live in moments, adults live in schedules. A child building a sandcastle exists only in that creation. An adult building a career exists in meetings about next quarter, anxieties about last quarter, everywhere except this quarter.

Your brain conspiracies against you here. In joy, it floods you with chemicals that make you forget everything except the joy itself. In pain, it hyper-focuses on the pain, making it the only reality that exists. Happiness is expansive—it fills all the space. Suffering is contractive—it shrinks the world to the size of your hurt.

The bitter irony: we spend the good times wishing they would last forever, and the bad times praying they’ll end quickly. But our very desire to hold onto happiness makes us step outside it to observe it, which begins its dissolution. Our desperation to escape pain keeps us locked inside it, stretching each agonizing moment.

Ancient mystics understood something we’ve forgotten: time is not a river flowing past you, but an ocean you’re swimming through. When you’re drowning, every stroke feels endless. When you’re floating, you forget you’re in water at all.

Maybe the secret isn’t trying to slow down the good times or speed up the bad ones. Maybe it’s understanding that both are temporary visitors in the house of your life. The wedding day that felt like five minutes? Those minutes were so rich, so dense with meaning, that they contained lifetimes. The heartbreak that lasted months? Each day was teaching you something about your own resilience, even when the lesson felt like torture.

Time isn’t actually moving faster or slower—your relationship with the present moment is shifting. When you’re fully here, time becomes timeless. When you’re trying to be anywhere else, time becomes a prison.

The most beautiful days pass quickly because they’re so full of life that they transcend the need to be measured. The darkest days drag slowly because they’re teaching you something that can only be learned in the slow school of suffering.

Both kinds of days are sacred. Both kinds of days are temporary. Both kinds of days are exactly as long as they need to be.