Illusions of Time

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. When something becomes part 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 older, 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, like images and video.

Hi, I'm the slightly older different 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. 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 get from recordings that make people from long ago seem more real than usual, or the strange way 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 oldies were when I was born. How could that be true? Am I really that 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 made by our minds. Let's begin with the different ways there are to feel time. Actually sitting down and consciously 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 have been 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 memory. 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 once you arrive, an exciting day at your destination can seem to fly by. Those feelings are all prospective 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.

Which one you feel depends on whether what you are doing is empty or full. An empty activity is monotonous, unstimulating, unimportant to you, whereas a full activity is packed with sensations, novelty, significance, context, change, and challenge. Now, I experienced this 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, 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, it's believed that perspective time 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: Does time speed up as we get older? Many 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 theory.

It suggests that time seems to speed up as we age because each new unit of time that we live is smaller relative to all the time that came 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% more life. Studies have found little evidence that weeks, months, or even years are retrospectively remembered as 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 10 years went by, 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 duration 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 fewer distinct memories from more recent decades, we assume they were shorter. You know, reflecting on all of this, it's striking just how many 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 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; they 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, mathematically, they refer to years that have eights or nines in the tens place, but conceptually, well, it's not like on January 1st, 1980, people woke up and were like, "Whoa, 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 is the mechanisms by which we allow them to do their dirty work. Let's dig in and see what we can find. If I asked you to lay down on the floor of a windowless, clockless room and get up after you thought a minute had passed, you'd probably do a pretty good job.

But if I asked you to get up after you 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 what I call the conceptual comparison heuristic—a technique whereby we use the similarity of elements in our conceptions of things to judge their temporal distance. If our concepts of two things suggest wildly different times, it's natural to assume that a lot of things happened between them. And if a lot happened, the duration separating them must be large.

Alternatively, if our concepts aren't too different, 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 ago, 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 young woman, Old Hollywood, mid-century glamour, Americana, black and white. When we think of the Queen of England, we 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 in the same year. 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 illusions may 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 relevance or is suddenly replaced in our daily thoughts by other more urgent events unconnected to it, our minds may shift its construal to a higher level, making it feel further back in time than it really is.

Conversely, if attending to the low-level details of an event continues to be important, our construal level heuristic will make it feel closer in time than it really is. Our third illusion of time comes from the 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 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 present a little less than it should because the '90s and now have something in common that the '90s and the '60s never did or will. Me also—my construal level of "The Lion King" may resist becoming abstract because "The Lion King" continues to evolve and happen.

The mechanisms I use to place things in time have sunk hooks into "The Lion King," creating a sort of chronostatic cling that fools me into believing it's more near. 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 has 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 older right along with you, but the people they were don't.

This can lead to empathetic 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 relationship to time is the best or only frame of reference or that it's more important and more 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, what the heck did they do with their 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 internet, before mobile phones, and it 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, and when I tell her about a time when no 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.

Protagonist syndrome is the belief that 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, like that stranger over there you will 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. In literature, it describes a story that begins at the start ("ab ovo") as opposed to in the middle ("in medius res"). 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, that feeling is what I call "chrono saunder." Saunder not just for people over there but for people over then.

Overcoming the chronocentric illusion isn't always easy. It doesn't help that people from the past are finished, unlike us, who still have choices to make. They tell the same story over and over again. They’re also separated by barriers made of their own evidence. The world wasn't actually black and white in the past, and it didn't suddenly become vertical in the present. Obviously, we all know that.

But the arbitrary technical properties of a time's recording media can influence our perception of the past nonetheless. If silent films didn't look so much different from what could be done just a 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, I looked it up on YouTube, and I was like, 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. Our perception of the past is constantly evolving as technology does, and that's significant. We don't just think about the past; we also 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 present. But some kinds of evidence collapse 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 exchange with each other right now in the present. This footage of people goofing around in a 7-Eleven in 1987 has more than 6 million views, not just because of nostalgia, but because it's like visiting past people in their natural habitat—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 to stay in the same pose for a long time to get a picture taken. But also, a long-standing trope in the world of images up to that point was that smiling or looking goofy wasn't 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 the past. 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 with a medium that suggests a technology 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 medium that was rare at the time but more common now.

This is footage taken by an early HD 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 usual. We lean in to grasp what it was like.

That's part of the allure of time travel. As L.P. 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 "1000 and late." One thousand years ago, the culture and technology around you was unlikely to be foreign to your parents 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 children 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. But today we see the present as something special. Change is significant enough and rapid enough now that we would imagine ourselves quite differently had we been born 10 years earlier or later.

Zachary Sarah Schiffman points out we fail to realize that people before the 18th century did not see themselves this way. 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 away from here and now—not because they were fundamentally different and categorically irretrievable.

As the discovery of antiquities and new worlds and new species 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 reached a speed at which 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 accelerates, the window of time within which things can be trusted to remain stable shrinks. In such a world, to stand still is scary. Hartman Rosa observed the pre-modern experience of being excluded is replaced in 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 lives twice as fast 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 for eternity.

To achieve this salvation, we try to make things faster and easier to save time. But one of the greatest hoodwinks we ever pulled on ourselves was not noticing that the things we do to save time leave us with less of it and more alone in it. No technological change is only technological. The car allowed people to travel more 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 whole different society sprang into 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 conflict, a new 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 anymore?" 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 assumed, 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 accreting information and its growing accessibility is awe-inspiring. It may even be our purpose. I mean, what else produces such detailed records, purposefully or not? We record, save, collect, organize, and preserve events 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. But the technologies of this project 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. They reported feeling like time flew by 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 time dragged, but they also didn't 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 larger life histories. Retrospectively, they don't fill up a lot of space. They burn our time on both ends. Interestingly, short short has not been found when people engage with content they have 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, but standing could give you your life 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—probably first any anxieties will be 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, make some time for time to control you. Be bored, miss out, fall behind, feel time passing, lose track of time while experiencing only what your body can alone.

You might not have the time of your life, but you'll have more time of your life. I'll see you next time. And, as always, thanks for watching.

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