---
title: 'Illusions of Time'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E'
video_id: 'zHL9GP_B30E'
date: 2026-05-26
duration_sec: 1868
---

# Illusions of Time

> Source: [Illusions of Time](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E)

## Summary

This video explores various illusions of time perception, including the holiday paradox, chronological illusions, chronostatic illusions, and chronocentric illusions. It explains how our minds distort time through memory, attention, and conceptual frameworks, and discusses the impact of technology and acceleration on our experience of time.

### Key Points

- **The Holiday Paradox** [02:39] — Empty activities (monotonous, unstimulating) feel long in the moment but short in retrospect; full activities (novel, significant) feel short in the moment but long in retrospect.
- **Time Speeding with Age** [04:19] — The proportion theory (each year becomes a smaller percentage of life) has little evidence for weeks/months, but decades do seem to speed up until age 50, then plateau. A leading explanation is that fewer new experiences lead to fewer distinct memories, making periods seem shorter.
- **Chronological Illusions** [06:46] — We impose concepts on continuous time (e.g., decades, eras). The similarity of elements in our conceptions of events affects perceived temporal distance. Examples: T-Rex and Stegosaurus were separated by 80 million years; Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II were born the same year.
- **Construal Level Heuristic** [11:00] — Abstract thinking makes events feel more distant; concrete thinking makes them feel closer. This can cause events to seem further or nearer in time than they actually are.
- **Chronostatic Illusion** [12:32] — The belief that your place in time is stable. Examples: Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and The Lion King were all released closer to the moon landing than today. The music from your youth remains tethered to 'new' in your mind.
- **Chronocentric Illusion** [14:34] — The belief that your own time is the best or only frame of reference. Overcoming it involves realizing that people in the past were fully fleshed-out protagonists (sonder).
- **Demotic Evidence Collapses Chronocentric Divide** [18:38] — Ordinary, personal, candid recordings (like 1987 7-Eleven footage) make the past feel more relatable. High-definition footage from 1993 also creates a sense of closeness.
- **Pre-Modern vs. Modern View of Time** [22:18] — Before the 18th century, people saw the present as a continuation of the past; changes were temporary disturbances. Modernity views the past as essentially different, leading to acceleration and fear of being left behind.
- **The TV Paradox (Short-Short Pattern)** [27:34] — Rapid, stimulating streams of experience (like TV or doomscrolling) make time feel short both during and after. This pattern is not found when people engage with active connections (e.g., memorabilia, conventions).

### Conclusion

Our perception of time is deeply subjective and shaped by memory, attention, and conceptual frameworks. To reclaim time, we must sometimes allow ourselves to be bored, miss out, and feel time passing.

## Transcript

michael here when something becomes part of the past of the past can it ever truly be experienced again obviously my beard will grow back but it won't be the same beard and it
won't be on the same person it will be on a slightly different michael but of course the bearded michael of the past isn't completely gone no he still exists in our minds as a
memory and in the form of records of the past and in the form of records of the past like images and video michael you heard about i am 130 days older than that guy
wow 130 days you know it really doesn't seem like it was that long ago just as an optical illusion is a distortion of our sense of sight a temporal illusion is a distortion of our sense of time
our sense of time some seem small like how a minute spent waiting in line can seem to take forever but an entire day with friends can just fly by some seem deeper like the uncanny feeling we
from long ago seem more real than usual or the strange time seems to sneak by for example the songs i liked as a kid
wannabe m-bop semi-charmed life are as old to kids born today as the literal old to kids born today as the literal oldies were when i was born old now i mean i shouldn't be surprised i know
how time works but yet i don't far from being just mistakes these illusions are the edges of another dimension of space-time not one given to us by physics not one given at all but one
given at all but one made by our minds let's begin feel time actually sitting down and tuning into the passage of time as it happens is called feeling time
prospectively you can't do that to time that's already happened except you can if i were to ask you without looking to guess how long you watching this video you'd probably be able to come up with a guess
you were reasonably confident in well you arrived at that guess by feeling time retrospectively by measuring it as it appears in your now with that in mind we are ready to approach our first illusion
the holiday paradox a four hour delay at the airport before your holiday can feel unbearably long while it's happening but an exciting day at your destination can seem to fly by
timing a week later retrospectively the delay often feels like a blip in your mind and the day of sightseeing feels like a much longer bigger part of your life these are the
long short and short long patterns of felt time what you are doing is empty or full an empty activity is monotonous unstimulating unimportant to you whereas a full
is packed with sensations novelty significance context change and challenge now i experienced this during my three days in isolation during my three days in isolation while i was there time dragged very
very slowly a fear i have right now is that it's just friday that it's just friday and there's still a lot of time left but now years later it's hard to believe that i spent
three full days in that room jeez seems like something i barely did well feels fast when an activity is full because you're not busy thinking about time if you're not attending to it
you're busy with something else well you won't notice how much time has passed but to understand retrospective illusions let's ask a different question of you may feel the same way looking back my
childhood feels like it lasted so long but my 20s went by faster and my 30s are going by even faster than that a popular explanation is the proportion
it suggests that time seems to speed up as we age because each new unit of time that we live is smaller before the year you lived as a nine-year-old
was 10 of your entire existence up to that point but when you're 30 another year is just 3 percent more life studies have found little evidence that weeks months or even
years are retrospectively remembered as passing faster by those who are passing faster by those who are older but decades yes and while it's true that the older we get the faster we tend to think the last
that only appears to be the case until about the age of 50. after that the speed of decades appears to plateau a leading explanation is that how long a
feels depends on how many things in it can be recalled in my normal life lots of different things happen every three days but during the three days i was in isolation so little happened that i have
few distinct memories from it my mind sees that emptiness and perceives that it was brief so perhaps a decline in new experiences and rapid novelty as we age means fewer events our brains
decide to commit to memory so then looking back because there are decades we assume they were shorter you know reflecting on moments are forgettable john koenig the author
of the dictionary of obscure sorrows calls the awareness of how few days are memorable olika over time our specific daily perceptions of what happened conglomerate into generalized ideas
about how things were themes moods the big picture what was perceptual becomes conceptual and concepts are good they lower cognitive load by wringing out details leaving us with the broader
lighter just but they can also obscure reality which brings us to our second distortion chronological chronological illusions the world of our experience
is not made of distinct entities it's a continuity of fuzzy overlapping blobs and we impose concepts on it for example is a hot dog a sandwich is cereal soup how many holes does a
straw have those aren't questions about reality there are questions about words we made up periodization is the chopping up of time into contrived pieces like the stone age the renaissance the 80s
the 90s but here's the thing when did the 80s or 90s really happen i mean they refer to years that have eights or nines in the tens place
but conceptually well it's not like on january 1st whoa whoa guys it's the 80s quick everyone change your clothes concepts say too much and too little
facts that expose their imperfections are perennial favorites on social media i made an entire video about them in fact but what hasn't been discussed yet to do their dirty work let's dig in and see what we
dirty work let's dig in and see what we can find of a windowless clockless room and get up after you thought a minute had passed you'd probably do a pretty good job but
thought 10 years had passed that'd be hard we lack an ability to sense and grasp long periods of time also we can't
remember everything that happens so instead of comprehending history's correct scale and structure i believe that our minds often just use how we think about past events to place them relative
to each other in time one way we do this is through heuristic a technique whereby we use the similarity of elements in our conceptions of things
their temporal distance if our concepts of two things suggest wildly different times it's natural to assume of things happened between them and if a
large alternatively if our concepts aren't too the time between them must be bearer of events and so it feels brief it's not a bad strategy but tyrannosaurus died out 66 million years
and when t-rexes began roaming the earth stegosaurus had already been extinct for more than 80 million years to a t-rex the stegosaurus was even more ancient than we think
t-rexes are here's another example when we think of marilyn monroe we think of a old hollywood mid-century glamour americana black and white think of an old woman in color in england and news headlines
because those conceptions are quite different we mentally place each woman in a different time so it can come as a surprise to learn that they were both born in the same year similarly it can be
surprising to learn that anne frank and martin luther king jr were also born and if they were alive today they would both be younger than the queen of england when harriet tubman was born
thomas jefferson was alive and when she died ronald reagan was alive this is surprising to many of us because our concepts of these people are anchored to them as adults but harriet tubman
was a four-year-old when thomas jefferson died and when she died ronald reagan was a two-year-old far from just being amusing chronological illusions can often have teeth america can feel like an idea
fixed long before any of us by the overwhelming bulk of events that came before but barbara walters has been alive for more than a third of america's entire history
and if you were 25 you have already lived through and been a part of more than 10 of america's history chronological also be caused by what i call the construal
level heuristic a technique whereby we place things in time based on whether we construe them concretely or abstractly in social psychology construal level theory describes how
abstract and concrete thinking relate to psychological distance that is how distant something seems as opposed to how distant it actually is now unsurprisingly it's been found that people tend to think about things
that are psychologically distant more abstractly but studies have also found that if people are asked to think about an event abstractly they'll consider it more distant than if asked to construe it concretely
this may explain why things can turn out to be longer ago or more recent than we thought if an event recedes especially quickly from is suddenly replaced in our daily thoughts by other more
urgent events unconnected to it our minds may shift its construal to a feel further back in time than it really is conversely if attending to the low level details of an event continues to be
will make it feel closer in time than it really is our fact that time is always moving forward
because of that the psychological distances we feel towards things should also always be changing but not all of them do the belief that your place in time is stable is what i call
in time is stable is what i call the chronostatic illusion tim urban pointed out that it is now the case that jurassic park forest gump the lion king were all released closer to the moon
landing than today as a person who remembers the lion king being brand new and remembers feeling at that time that the moon landing was old this is all very weird the lion king
seems so much more recent than the moon landing ever did to me the conceptual comparison heuristic places them far apart my concept of the 90s will probably always stray from my concept of the
a little less than it should because the 90s and now have something in common will me also my construal level of the lion
because the lion king continues to evolve and happen the mechanisms i use to place things in time have sunk of chronostatic cling that fools me into
the music that was new when i was young has also been tethered in my mind to the idea of new stuff only us kids get even as it actually been drifting away as far away as the stuff
i used to think was far a chronostatic illusion is spectacularly broken when you realize that you have become as old as your parents were when you were born it doesn't always seem quite right they
came first and as such should always be older but suddenly you're aware of a way in which they aren't your age gap with people in the past is not static your parents keep getting
right along with you but the people they were realizations they weren't any wiser or more folded into the world then than you are now considering the
temporal perspectives of other people leads us to a fourth distortion the chronocentric illusion the belief that our own time is the best or only frame of reference
real than any other my grandparents used to tell me about how when they were kids they didn't have television and i always thought that sounded so weird i mean obviously i knew it was true but like
free time it wasn't relatable at all people back then must have been so different not real in the same way i was but i remember a time before the
wasn't that weird the internet and cell phones are still in my mind an additional thing we now have but for my daughter they will be what we've always had
one had the internet and didn't even know they needed it it will likely sound to her just like the old stories i heard about growing up with no tv and that's bizarre my grandparents childhood
was weird it was the olden days mine was totally normal you are the main character of the universe
recognizing that you aren't is what john koenig famously called saunder the realization that other people never see again have full lives just as important and
consuming to them as yours is to you i'd like to add to protagonist syndrome the concept of above syndrome abovo means from the egg from the very beginning
begins at the start ab ovo as opposed to in the middle in ab ovo syndrome is the belief that the movie of the universe began when you began that the times of your life are
the plot and contain the climax and that everything before you was just backstory everything after merely sequels when you realize that that's not true that you were not born
ab ovo but in medius res that you'll die before the credits and that everyone who has ever lived was a fully fleshed out protagonist in their own minds saunder saunder not just for people over there
but for people over then overcoming the chronocentric isn't always easy it doesn't help that people from the past choices to make
again they're also separated by barriers made of their own evidence the world wasn't actually black suddenly become vertical in the present obviously we all know
technical properties of a times recording media can nonetheless if silent films didn't look so much few decades later would it be nearly as surprising to
learn that charlie chaplin lived long enough to watch star wars when i was in high school i saw 2001's pipe dream for the first time and it blew my mind my friends and i honestly believed that
it was a real thing someone had built but recently this is clearly a computer animation what the heck was wrong with us
and what do you know the top comment was exactly that sentiment evolving as technology does and that's significant we don't just think about the past we
think about the past the material properties of an artifact can influence our relationship with what came before and push it further away faded yellowy color sepia sd pixelated video technological
features can make the past seem like it was never as real as the but some kinds of evidence collapsed that chronocentric divide one way they can do it right now is by being demotic
ordinary personal candid such recordings are much more similar to the media we the present this footage of people goofing around in a 7-eleven in 1987 has more than 6 million views not just
but because it's like visiting past people in their natural habitat at a time zoo this isn't some pageant with timeless ambitions it's a view out the window of a time machine they don't know is there
another way evidence can corrode chronocentric illusions is by containing a convention more normal than we expect people in old photos look like serious robots because back then you had
in the same pose for a long time to get a picture taken but also images up to that point a sign of happiness but of drunkenness or stupidity but
every so often this image pops up online and people vehemently debate whether it's actually old or not sure it's black and white but the expression seems too normal to really be on a person from
it is however actually an honest to gosh picture taken in the early 1900s one of the earliest known photographs of a human smiling in fact the juxtaposition of an expression someone today might make
of the past creates an opportunity for chronosaunder the subject is both dead and undead gone but not as unrelatably far as we may have thought the past was
finally the chronocentric divide can fade when we find the past captured in a that was rare at the time but more common now this is footage taken by an early hd camera of new york city
camera of new york city in 1993. it's pretty cool but there's something almost uncanny about it watching it isn't exactly like time traveling back to 1993 but it looks more like video taken today
than many of us expect it's like peering through a telescope we can see them but they can't see us they appear closer more actual than we lean in to get grasps of what it was like
that's part of the allure of time travel as lp hartley said the past is a foreign country they do things differently there but it hasn't always been that way time travel wasn't a common feature of
fiction until the 19th century not because people hadn't thought of it before they had but the past and future weren't rich with interesting destinations in the same way they are to us now
in the year 1008 it wasn't an insult to call someone call someone 1000 and late one thousand years ago the culture and technology around you was unlikely to be foreign to your
or grandparents or great-grandparents and outside of an act of god or gods you didn't expect them to be foreign to your children or their either one thousand years ago there were no
80s parties because the 980s weren't interestingly different pre-modern societies viewed the present as a continuation of the past changes were interpreted as temporary disturbances of the natural state
something special enough now that we would imagine ourselves quite differently had we been born 10 years earlier or later zachary sarah
we failed to realize that people before the 18th century did not see themselves instead of having a history they regarded themselves as having an unchanging nature or essence whose full realization might
be impeded or impelled but not otherwise shaped by events nostalgia existed but for moments and places gone simply because they were prior to or
here and now not because they were fundamentally different and categorically irretrievable as the discovery of antiquities accelerated as the invention of new technologies and
new ways of recording accelerated the present became less and less like the past reinhardt caselk has argued that between 1750 and 1850 the acceleration of history
static or cyclical views of time had to be replaced with our modern view which understands the past to be essentially different from the present it used to be that things passed now
there is a past as technological and social change accelerate the window trusted to remain stable shrinks in such a world to stand still
is scary hartman rosa observed the pre-modern experience modernity by the constantly present fear-inducing possibility of becoming excluded in the sense
of getting left behind things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die whoever can realize twice as many worldly possibilities and thus as it were
live two lives in the span of one whoever becomes infinitely fast no longer needs to fear death the annihilator of options acceleration becomes a secular substitute
becomes a secular substitute for eternity to achieve this salvation we try to make things faster and easier to save time but one on ourselves was not noticing that the things we do
to save time leave us with less of it and more alone no technological change is only technological quickly and whenever they wanted
but once available it meant people could live further from where they worked so cities and towns changed personal associations changed roads divided neighborhoods created new opportunities
while ending others jobs and industries and cultural forms of expression and a existence simply because we found a way to move faster likewise smartphones and the internet
made information access and communication easier and faster but that's not all they did along with them came new social conventions new communities new levels of exposure to ideas and
understanding of what it meant to be available that's a lot to have to adapt to they even redefined what now is made of digital spaces are filled with not just what's being said
but also what has been said and it's all right there not tucked into a library across town or on a tiny plaque on a statue covered in bird poop it's in our hands and outside of time
things used to acquire signs of age veneers that tucked them appropriately into their place in time now they're automatically updated to always look like now digital spaces are so packed with
timeless messages between bygone people that we don't even ask is anyone here instead we ask is anyone now in order to adapt to all of this we have to consume information in an increasingly dehumanized
decontextualized and decentralized way each next bit is often unrelated to the last our participation is not acknowledged or and it's all fed to us by machines we don't know and didn't build
that only put it in our eyes and ears the sheer weight of all of this accessibility is awe-inspiring it may even be our purpose i mean what else produces
such detailed records purposefully or not we record save like nothing else in the universe i've said before that if humans were to go extinct the sun would still shine the universe
would keep expanding jupiter would continue being gassy but the universe would lose its best autobiographer have yet to address our bodies enter the tv paradox
remember the short long and long short patterns of time well a new pattern has been emerging and growing in frequency short short it was first observed in people watching tv alone
quickly oh wow have i really been watching for four hours but later they didn't remember their tv session as a major moment of significant import or duration they didn't attend
the passing of time during it they didn't feel bored or like accumulate a lot of new significant memory-worthy experiences rapid stimulating streams of experience provide a fullness that makes time fly
by but fractured decentralized one-way experiences feel unconnected to ourselves and our feel unconnected to ourselves and our larger life histories retrospectively
burn our time on both ends it feels shorter during and after interestingly short short has not been found when people engage with
connections with for example things they own memorabilia of made friendships through attended conventions about so the pace of life may be taking your life from you
back in the future we will surely find other ways to overcome the negative side effects of the faster experiences we crave the development of digital media that
engage the other senses more linked as they are with long-term memory or that build contexts for us could help so could surgical solutions like removing the parts of the brain that make us not like doom scrolling
recognized as a condition treatable with medication now this is all to say that we live in a transitional period the conquest of space made the world smaller and now the conquest of time
has made our lives smaller we live after the conquering of time but before its resurrection in the meantime meantime make some time for time to control you
be bored miss out fall behind feel time passing lose track of time can alone but you'll have more time of your life i'll see you next time
of your life i'll see you next time and as always thanks for watching
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