September 2026

Chunking Time

When we talk about time, we can mean a few things: (A) how much objective (e.g. clocks, calendars, etc.) time has passed. (B) how fast it feels like time is passing (C) how fast it feels like time has passed (and this may be the same as how much time it feels like has passed—i.e. within a cognized interval). There is maybe nothing more important than time, to most people, because our time is our lives—it is the things our lives contain, and their changing, which is (at least in one view) what it means for time to pass. Yet, when we fail to distinguish A, B, and C, we can miss what is important about this most important of things. What matters most? I think there is no more important area to address how the subjective is flattened into the objective than here, with time.

I want to focus mostly on B, and discuss its relationship to technology. When sitting in a dark room for an hour, where nothing changes, it feels like time is moving slowly. When waiting tables in a busy restaurant, where change is constant, it feels like time if flying by. One observation here is that when for B—the feeling of time passing, consistent states feel slower. Like walking in the forest where not much changes. The scenery is consistent, and more than that—there is a cohesion we can notice in the trees, ground, and roots, like the cohesion of darkness. Something about being drawn into a cohesive scene, or perceiving within a consistent stream of phenomena, seems to change the way we track time.

Aside: an interesting point here is whether when we pay enough attention, we see the interconnectedness or non-chunked-ness of all things, and this again slows time in a B sense. If stuff is coming at us too fast, or the changes at a macro-level are too large, it is difficult to do this.

Are there counterexamples to this? Deep presence, like riding a motorcycle fast round a track—that seems to take us out of time. The scenery is consistent, but ten minutes feels like two seconds, or no seconds. So psychological presence or focus is a variable here. We can call its alternative reflective consciousness. 

For B (the percieved rate of time passing) then, we can say:

• Reflective + Consistent = slow

• Reflective + Change = fast

• Present + Consistent = fast

• Present + Change = fast

Revisiting the previous example, I'm not sure in the case of the waitress if that is Reflective + Change or Present + Change. One claim could be that presence makes everything consistent. In other words, perhaps reflective consciousness is needed to chunk things up, and / or presence dials us so deeply into the interconnectedness of things. What would be an example of Reflective + Change?

Well, therein lies the point about technology. When we reset the tape: i.e. a new text comes through, an alert, a tab, an app, an email, a new episode is released, etc.—what is happening? Surely these interferences, or resets, disqualify experience from consistency. Likewise, if you were walking through the forest peacefully, not much is changing, but suddenly a bulldozer plowed through the trees (or an avalanche) the experience would be "broken," no longer be consistent. There would be a before, and an after the bulldozer, or avalanche. We'd be yanked out of deep focus, from consistency. We may then become reflective, and organize this flow of phenomena into chunks (or, identify the chunks that are there—depending on your view of how perception and reality intermingle).

I'm not going to attempt to answer why when we chunk things it makes time feel like it's passing more quickly, but I think that it does. It's part of why articles are broken up by images, or why books with short chapters are appealing, or why stretches in the year without holidays feel longer, or the same for drives without pit-stops at gas-stations and parks. Part of it could be that our brains like information chunked (like it's easier to remember our phone number in chunks of three and four). When we chunk our experience, we can digest it, and in a way it increases the volume of information (tracked through chunking). That could be part of what makes time feel like it's passing quicker.

But again, not the focus here. The focus here is just to point out that we are chunking our lives into, well, bite-size chunks, and it's causing us to lose our lives faster—causing time to slip away like a river speeding up when it enters a narrow canyon. 50 years on a calendar doesn't matter as much as what it feels like to exist for that amount of time. Think of how radically different it would be to spend a year in jail, vs a year running an intense political or corporate campaign, vs wandering the wilderness. I'm not saying clock time doesn't matter at all (there's a reason it's more sad, usually, when young people die than the very elderly), but I'm saying at minimum it often matters less than subjective time.

Do we want our lives to rush by? It's not always bad when time flies. I feel like time flies in a flow state, and I love flow-states. After flow-states though, it often feels like (C) a lot of time has passed. In other cases though, when it's merely a case of reflective + change (or chunked) that's not always how it feels. We can be busy, reflective, with lots of change, and yet feel like not much happened, like the day just "got away from us."

I think it's important to experiment with different experiences of time, and the causes of time flying or moving slowly (B), of looking back and feeling like a lot has happened (or that a lot of "time," in a sense, has passed) or that the day just disappeared. How do we want to, then, experience time? How do we want to have experienced time in the future?

Doomerism, Denialism, Optimism, and other states

There is a duality in discourse about AI, climate change, etc. which is between those who are optimists and those who are doomers or radical pessimists. Yet, sometimes I think that doomerism is its own form of denial. It's not unlike a person who makes a meal for their friend. The response is underwhelming, and the cook says, "you hated it. It was terrible." Of course it wasn't terrible. But fake awful is preferable to real-bad. Likewise with AI, climate change, etc.

What, then, does it mean to actually be realistic? Part of these two poles discussed concerns attitude. Two people can see the same negative information, and one person can meet the challenge, despite the odds, and try to do their best to bring about a positive outcome. Another person can be confronted with the same truth and want to bury their heads. Beyond attitude, there's also information selection and perspective selection. A person might not be able to see the glass half-full and half-empty simultaneously, but they can alternate between both. Does this create an internal sense of equilibrium? Likewise, a person can alternate between the perspectives of wide the scale destruction climate change will and is bringing, the indifference and even opportunism in the face of it (mining Greenland)—and the perspective of the incredible energy mustered by everyday people to oppose some of the most powerful entities on earth, to stop it. Or the meaninglessness of a floating blue dot in a vast universe, and the meaningfulness of a kid smiling with an ice cream cone.

Perhaps being realistic is alternating between these perspectives to arrive at a kind of kaleidoscopic view of reality, or maybe the kaleidoscope should be internal, and the ideal is to have our minds empty, present, attending to each thing as it happens, with an intuitive sense of the complexity of reality, the ineffable enormity of it, and how it is never ever just one thing. And because it is never ever one thing, can we ever be sure enough about the future to be a doomer or an optimist?

Doomerism and optimism, I think, can both be irrational, and sometimes be founded in reason. They are both the result of biases, and they can be almost like ideologies that bias us. They can be moods or attitudes. If it's possible, perhaps we should hold both inside us at once, both lenses on a kaleidoscope (especially when it's a matter of perspective, when it's a matter of data-emphasis rather than data selection. Ideally, maybe, we'd select all the data). Maybe better to describe this state, though, as being neither—just rolling with the different date points, moods, attitudes, perspectives, and not clinging to any of them, integrating them into a worldview, or to a gut-feeling, and then just keeping eyes open for what comes next, and what's happening now.