Time Flies
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| Can you believe it? Twenty-five days already! |
So I was originally going to translate the title as 時間が飛びます（じかんがとびます） but “time flies” is an idiom! Originating from the Latin phrase “Tempus fugit”, it’s supposed to mean that time goes by quickly, and idioms don’t translate directly between languages (duh). But there is a similar saying in Japanese: 光陰矢の如し（こういんやのごとし）which translates to “Time flies like an arrow. I just have one question: why does the saying use 光陰 for time instead of 時間, which is so much more commonly used? When would “kouin” EVER refer to “time” over something like 行員 (bank clerk) or 工員 (factory worker)?
It seems like New Year’s Eve was just yesterday, or at most a few days ago. The new year still seems fresh, and the novelty of 2026 still lingers. But I was shocked to see that twenty-five days have already passed since the start of the new year. That’s 6.8 percent! More than one fifteenth! And looking back at 2025 and previous years, events seem to blur together, with some particular memories sticking out among the fog of mundanity. Why does the passage of time feel so strange? Why does it vary, flying faster at some points and slower at others? And why is there a disparity between experiences in the present and memories of the past?
Flux
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” —Heraclitus
I thought questions regarding the passage and perception of time deserve more than the thoughts of a high school student. Humans have had the same problems and afflictions for millennia, and there have been great minds who tried to make sense of the nature of time. The quote above is from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 BCE, and it summarizes one of his main ideas: “panta rhei” (πάντα ῥεῖ), which means “everything flows”. He described the world as constantly changing, and he said that things are in a state of universal flux. He believed that because time flows constantly, nothing is in a static state, and no two moments are identical. Everything is undergoing a process, becoming something else, but never “being” any one thing.
So yes, it’s pretty evident that things change over time (mind-blowing, I know). The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system, of which our universe is an example, increases over time. This results in some processes being irreversible, and thus, it creates a distinction between the present and the past. But Heraclitus’ works don’t give us any ideas on how we perceive the flow of time, and for that, we can look at the works of another philosopher.
Duration
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” —Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson is a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French philosopher who proposed that there are actually two distinct ideas of “time”. The first is “clock time”, which refers to the seconds, the minutes, and the hours measured by clocks. This is the concrete, quantitative idea of time that we’re used to; it treats time as a continuous line, where each point on that line represents an instant state of the universe. And while this kind of time is useful in keeping our society functional, Bergson argues that it’s pointless in measuring our lived experiences and memories.
The second kind of time is referred to, by Bergson, as “duration” (la durée), or “lived time”. This refers to a sense of time that’s much more abstract, qualitative, and immeasurable. Bergson thought that under duration, time seemed to “flow”, and memories melted into one another, creating a heterogeneous, continuous line. Duration is what we feel, what we experience, and thus, it cannot be captured by a clock or by numbers. This helps to explain his quote above (which I believe appeared in Kafka on the Shore). With duration, we cannot measure a single instant like we can with clock time; it is “ungraspable”. Each moment blends with the past and the future. If you hear a D6 note for instance, it makes a huge difference whether you’re hearing the note in isolation or in a song like Fiesta by IZ*ONE (amazing song, you should listen to it if you haven’t already). Our sensation of the present is influenced by our memory, and the moment we experience it, it becomes a memory as well, influencing our sensation of the future.
Bergson argued that our problems come from the confounding of clock time and duration. We cannot measure our lived experiences with the ticking of seconds, and we cannot use our lived experiences to measure the ticking of seconds.
Implication
I feel like, yes, it’s great to know what people thought regarding the nature of time. However, there’s still a gap between what philosophers thought of time and how it relates to our personal experience of it. Duration tells us that some moments can feel longer than others, but it doesn’t tell us why.
I think it’s pretty widely accepted that our perception of time depends on our memories. When our memories for a certain time period are more dense, we perceive that period to be longer. This is why a summer filled with excitement can feel longer than a school year filled with mundanity when looking back. The speed of time also seems to slow down with novelty; sensing or trying something new creates a memory that’s more vivid than something you’ve seen before. This explains why time seems to speed up as we age; many experiences are repeated, and the novelty in our life gradually decreases.
Something that seemed contradictory to me was the experience that, when we’re bored, time seems to pass by more slowly, making an hour feel like two. But when looking back at when we were bored, it feels like a shorter period of time than it actually was. This actually has a name: the “Holiday Paradox”, named that way because holidays tend to feel longer than they actually were, and its inverse: routine life tends to feel shorter than it actually was (I can’t believe it’s Friday already!). I think if we consider our lived experience of time as “flowing” like Heraclitus and Bergson did, we can look at the rate of flow to try to understand the speed at which time passes. When we’re bored, the rate of change of our surroundings is generally small. For every unit of time that passes, the world changes a small amount. The river flows more languidly, so it changes at a slower speed. That rate of flow and the rate of change of the world around us dictate our perception of the passage of time.
Another thing I thought about: what makes a memory, a memory? Yes, it’s a lived experience that gets encoded and stored in our brains. But memories are only possible because there exists a disparity between the past and the present. This ties back to Heraclitus’ idea that the river and the man are constantly changing; they will never be the same as they once were. Theoretically, if you have a memory of the past that was completely identical to the present, then you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two. They would feel the exact same, and you wouldn’t be able to recognize that it’s a memory or that it happened in the past. This obviously isn’t possible due to the thermodynamic and psychological arrows of time, which dictate that time moves forward due to increasing entropy, and the fact that we experience time moving in one direction; we can recall the past but not the future. However, I still think it’s interesting that the differences in our current world and a previous world are what give us a sense of memory. Those differences are what tell us that we’re at time B and not at time A.
Maybe it’s the amount that our experiences and surroundings change that determine our perception of time. If we spend an entire month doing the same thing every day, that month will pass by quickly and we’ll have little recollection of the day-to-day distinctions. If we spend a month on vacation, doing something new every day, we’re going to remember a lot more, since our experiences will vary a lot more. So maybe, if we want to extend our duration in this world, we can try not to live on autopilot, and try to do something new, something exciting. If you spend seventeen days doing the same thing, you’ll only retain the memory of one.
Life Update!
This took a long time to write. Writing this post was one of the first times I voluntarily looked into the ideas of philosophers, and I’m pleasantly pleased! It was exciting and eye-opening, and I really want to read some full works now; I’m considering getting Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson, but I already have barely any free time, so we’ll see if I’m able to make some more time for reading.
Since it’s been almost a month, I thought I’d share a bit about my classes! So far, they’re really easy, but I know that AP Chem and AP Physics C are bound to get harder. AP Micro is a bunch of memorization and looking at graphs and tables, and the math required is not bad at all. AP Physics C and AP Chem are just reviews of earlier classes as of now. I’m still worried about electricity and magnetism because I’ve heard some frankly horrible things about that class, and I’ve also heard pretty negative things about AP Chem Unit 8. But so far, everything is cruising along smoothly.
I think I want to spend more time studying Japanese. I do genuinely enjoy learning vocabulary, partially because many words are similar to their Chinese counterparts, but I also enjoy forming compound sentences to convey my ideas; it’s just really thrilling. Complex sentences are something I can learn later. Right now especially, I have to focus on applying for financial aid and scholarships, partly because of parental pressure, so I really don’t have much free time. The applications never stop.
On the bright side, my wisdom teeth have almost fully healed! I can finally eat what I want again. That’s something worth celebrating.
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