The Questions  ·  the self · moments

Why does time fly, and why does it crawl?

Why does an hour with someone you love vanish, and five minutes in a waiting room last a small eternity? Same sixty minutes on the clock. Completely different amount of life.

Density of moments, not duration.

The waiting-room person lives more moments in five minutes than the absorbed person lives in three hours.

A moment ends the instant any of the four lines changes.

What this settles

So the clock was never measuring the thing you actually felt. What moved was the count of configurations, and the count is set by how much was changing inside them.

What it leaves open

What is the grain of a moment?

Raised in this footing and marked open by the foundation itself.

Not this question

When we are?

Also in this footing, and a different question. That one defines the unit. This one explains the rate.

Also asked as

Where this is worked out

strand read

Groundhog Day Is a Complete Theory of Time

strand read

Why Time Flies and Why It Crawls

session

Why Doesn't the Day Change Until You Do?

session

How Do You Get More Life Out of the Same Years?

glossary

moment

Items without a link are sessions, shorts, strand reads or frameworks that live as video or audio rather than as pages. Everything Philosophy Zero puts out is listed on the Shelf.

Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.

Where this question sits

Moments

When a moment ends and what makes the next one — why an hour vanishes and five minutes will not, and how fine a change has to be before it counts. 2 of the 3 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.

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