When the Clock Lies: On Time, Perception, and Why Nothing's Really Happening in Order

The thing about time is that we're all absolutely convinced it's real. Proper, linear, ticking forward like a metronome. You wake up, have breakfast, go through your day, and then sleep. Tomorrow follows today follows yesterday, neat as you like. Except... what if that's bollocks?

I'm writing this at 00:15, and my brain is absolutely convinced it's the middle of the afternoon. Not tired, not particularly wired – just existing in this space where the clock insists it's deep night but my consciousness disagrees entirely. The disconnect between what time it "should" feel like and what it actually feels like is doing my head in, which is probably why I'm writing about temporal perception instead of sleeping like a reasonable person.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately (probably more than is strictly healthy), and the more I examine it, the more convinced I become that time isn't the universal constant we've all agreed to pretend it is. It's a construction. A very convincing one, granted, but a construction nonetheless – something our brains have cobbled together to make sense of existence because the alternative is just too much to process.

The Subjective Nature of Now

Let's start with something we've all experienced: time moving at different speeds. Remember being a kid and summer holidays stretching out like an endless landscape of possibility? Six weeks felt like half a year. Now, as an adult, entire months disappear like they were never there. September arrives and suddenly it's Christmas and you're left wondering where the hell the time went.

That's not just nostalgia talking – it's your brain demonstrating exactly how flexible time actually is. When you're young, everything's novel. Your brain's processing new information constantly, forming memories, making connections. Each day is packed with firsts: first time riding a bike, first day at school, first proper argument with a friend. Your brain encodes all of this, and when you look back, it feels like a long time because there's so much data stored there.

As you age, though, routines settle in. You've ridden bikes thousands of times. Work becomes familiar. The commute you take every day stops registering as individual events and blurs into one continuous "commuting" experience. Your brain, efficient thing that it is, stops bothering to record every detail. It knows what a Tuesday morning looks like – no need to file this particular Tuesday as distinct from the last fifty Tuesdays. Result? Time speeds up because you're creating fewer distinct memories.

And then COVID happened, and suddenly time just... broke.

I'm 20 now, which means I've lived through 2020 to 2025 – five years by any objective measure. Except it doesn't feel like five years. It feels like three, maybe. The lockdowns, the isolation, the endless sameness of days bleeding into each other – my brain just didn't encode most of it properly. There were no distinct events to anchor memories to, no novel experiences to mark time passing. Just weeks and months of nearly identical days, each one indistinguishable from the last.

My perception of time hasn't been the same since. It's like COVID recalibrated something fundamental about how I process temporal flow, and I can't quite get it back to how it was before. 2020 feels both incredibly recent (surely that was just last year?) and impossibly distant (has it really only been five years?). The pre-COVID world feels like a different lifetime, separated by this weird compressed void where time stopped behaving predictably.

But here's what really gets me: if time were truly objective, truly universal, it wouldn't be subject to these variations in perception. It would tick along at exactly the same rate regardless of how old you are or how engaged you feel. The fact that it doesn't – that it can stretch and compress based purely on your mental state – suggests something fundamental about its nature.

The Eternal Present Moment

There's this idea in physics (Einstein's block universe theory, if we're being technical about it, though I'm decidedly not a physicist) that suggests all moments exist simultaneously. Past, present, future – they're all just different locations in spacetime, equally real, equally existent. We experience them sequentially because our consciousness moves through spacetime in a particular direction, but that movement, that experience of "now" progressing into "later," might be entirely subjective.

Think about it like this: imagine a film reel. Every frame exists simultaneously on that reel. The projecter (your consciousness) moves through the frames, creating the illusion of movement and progression. But the frames themselves? They're all there, always have been, always will be. Past frames don't cease to exist once the projecter has moved beyond them. Future frames aren't waiting to be created – they're already there, just not illuminated yet from your particular vantage point.

This has some properly odd implications if you sit with it for a while (which I have, possibly too long, possibly while staring at the moon wondering if the lunar cycle is as arbitrary as everything else we measure). If all moments exist simultaneously, then in a very real sense, nothing is actually happening. It's all just... there. The progression we experience, this feeling of time flowing forward, is generated entirely by our perception moving through stationary moments.

Your breakfast this morning? Still happening. Still exists in that particular slice of spacetime. The heat death of the universe? Already happened, already exists, you just haven't reached that frame yet. It's enough to make your head spin.

Memory as Time's Architecture

But let's bring this back from the cosmological to the personal for a moment, because I think that's where this gets really interesting. If time is an illusion of perception, then memory becomes absolutely crucial to how we construct that illusion. We don't experience time directly – we experience the memory of what just happened, layered with the anticipation of what might happen next, with a thin sliver of "now" sandwiched between them.

Except "now" is trickier than it appears. By the time your brain has processed sensory input, formed a thought about it, and become conscious of that thought, the moment you're experiencing is already in the past. There's a measurable lag between reality hitting your sensory organs and your consciousness becoming aware of it. You're always experiencing the past, mistaking it for the present.

And the future? The future's just a story you're telling yourself based on pattern recognition from past experiences. When you plan your day tomorrow, you're not accessing some objective timeline of events-to-come – you're projecting patterns from your stored memories onto an imagined sequence. "Tomorrow morning I'll have coffee" isn't a prediction about the future; it's a story constructed from hundreds of past mornings where you had coffee, extrapolated forward into a moment that doesn't exist yet (and might never exist, depending on whether you remember to buy milk).

So what you're left with is this: the past is a story you tell yourself based on incomplete and unreliable memories. The future is a story you tell yourself based on pattern recognition and hope. The present is a neurological lag where you experience something that technically already happened. Where's the objective time in all of that? It's all narrative, all construction, all perception.

The Cultural Relativity of Time

Here's another thing that demonstrates how subjective time actually is: different cultures experience it completely differently. Western industrial society is obsessed with clock time – minutes, hours, deadlines, schedules. We've carved up the day into precise segments and then filled those segments with obligations. Time becomes a commodity, something you can waste or save or spend.

But that's not universal. Plenty of cultures operate on what anthropologists call "event time" rather than clock time. Things happen when they're ready to happen, when the conditions are right, not because a clock says it's 15:00. Meetings start when everyone's arrived and properly greeted each other, not at some arbitrary pre-designated moment. Meals happen when people are hungry and food's ready, not because it's "dinner time."

Neither system is more correct than the other, which is sort of my point. If time were truly objective, there'd be one correct way to measure and experience it. The fact that we've invented multiple systems that work perfectly well for the people using them suggests that time is less a feature of the universe and more a feature of how we've chosen to organise our experience of the universe.

And let's not even get started on how time behaves at relativistic speeds or in strong gravitational fields (though, briefly: time genuinely passes slower the faster you move or the closer you are to a massive object, which according to Einstein is not just perception but actual measurable difference in the rate of time passing, which sort of undermines the whole "universal constant" thing rather dramatically).

The Practical Implications of Temporal Flexibility

So if time's not what we think it is – if it's more like a story we tell ourselves than an objective feature of reality – what does that mean for how we actually live?

Well, for one thing, it might explain why depression and anxiety have such a distinctive temporal quality. Depression traps you in the past, ruminating on what went wrong, replaying failures, convinced that what happened will continue happening forever. Anxiety launches you into an imagined future, catastrophising about things that haven't happened yet and might never happen. Both conditions involve a disruption in how you process time, how your consciousness moves through these constructed moments.

Being "present" (or "mindful," if you want to use the terminology that's been thoroughly commercialised by wellness culture) might be less about achieving some sort of spiritual state and more about recognising that past and future are narratives you're creating, and the only thing that actually exists is this thin slice of sensory input you're processing right now. Which is still technically in the past by the time you're conscious of it, but we're working with limited equipment here.

It might also explain why flow states feel so different from normal consciousness. When you're properly absorbed in something – writing, creating, playing music, whatever – time becomes elastic in a different way. Hours pass in what feels like minutes because you've stopped constructing that narrative of time passing. You're not checking the clock, not comparing this moment to past moments or anticipating future moments. You're just... doing. And the temporal illusion collapses a bit, revealing itself for what it is.

The Moon Doesn't Care What Time It Is

I track lunar phases (perhaps obsessively, perhaps not, depending on who you ask), and there's something rather comforting about the moon's complete indifference to our temporal constructions. It waxes and wanes on its own schedule, governed by orbital mechanics and gravitational pulls, utterly unmoved by our clocks and calendars.

We've tried to impose our sense of time onto it, of course – lunar calendars, month names derived from moon phases, harvest moons and hunter moons and all the rest. But the moon itself? It's just doing what orbital mechanics dictates, existing in its own frame of reference, which from its perspective is completely static. It's not "moving through time" any more than we are – it's just existing in spacetime, and we're the ones creating the illusion of movement and progression.

There's something oddly freeing about that realisation. All these deadlines and schedules and time pressures we've constructed – they're real in the sense that they have real consequences if we ignore them, but they're not real real. They're not features of the universe. They're features of the stories we tell ourselves about the universe.

Living With the Illusion

None of this means you should stop showing up to work on time or that deadlines don't matter (I've got enough experience with academic deadlines to know they do matter, even if they're arbitrary). The social construction of time has real power because we've collectively agreed to act as if it's real. Breaking that agreement has consequences.

But there's something valuable in recognising it as a construction. When time feels like it's moving too fast or too slow, when you're overwhelmed by the past or anxious about the future, remembering that you're the one constructing that temporal experience can create a bit of breathing room. The clock might say it's Tuesday at 15:00, but "Tuesday" and "15:00" are just labels we've agreed on. They don't have any inherent reality beyond that agreement.

The universe doesn't care what time it is. Reality isn't happening in any particular order, really – it's all just happening, or rather, has already happened, or rather, is eternally happening, depending on which framework you're using to think about it. And we're moving through it (or it's moving through us, or we're stationary and experiencing different slices of it sequentially, or however you want to conceptualise this absolute mind-bender).

A Final Thought (Or Is It?)

The weirdest part of writing about how time isn't real is that the act of writing necessarily involves time. I started this piece before I finish it. You're reading these words sequentially. The whole enterprise depends on the temporal illusion holding together long enough for ideas to be transmitted from one consciousness to another.

And maybe that's the point, really. Time might be an illusion, but it's a useful illusion. It lets us organise experience, communicate with each other, build things, learn things, exist as conscious beings capable of reflecting on our own existence. Without it, we'd just be... what? Eternal moments without sequence, without causation, without narrative?

So perhaps the answer isn't to reject time entirely but to hold it lightly. To recognise it as the construction it is while still participating in the collective agreement that makes organised society possible. To know that when the clock says it's time to sleep or time to wake or time to do whatever needs doing, that "time" is simultaneously completely arbitrary and absolutely real.

The clock lies, but maybe we need it to. Maybe the lie is what makes everything else possible.

Though I still can't shake the feeling that somewhere, somehow, I'm having breakfast eternally, and it's always September, and the moon is always full, and none of this is happening in order at all.

Which is fine, really. I've made my peace with the temporal confusion. Time isn't real, except when it is, except when it isn't, and I've been thinking about this for hours except I haven't been thinking about it for any time at all because time is – well, you know.

Pass the tea. Or don't. Temporally speaking, you already have.