Time isn’t real, but sure, let’s ruin our lives with it

Today my friend and I were talking about timing, and we landed on this idea that it’s magical. But is it? Some days, timing seems cruel and misaligned, and other days it feels serendipitous. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that nothing about time is actually real. That might sound obvious, but it becomes more trippy the longer I sit with it. A week can feel like a year when you’re grieving or waiting, and it can vanish within minutes when you’re immersed in something good. One minute can expand into a century if you’re holding a plank, but the same minute dissolves in a blink when you’re running out the door. What we call “time” is never neutral. It bends, collapses, and stretches in proportion to what we’re experiencing. That’s why when I say things like “I wisThanks for reading Just Christina! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.h I had more time” or “there aren’t enough hours in the day,” what I’m really saying is something entirely different: I hate something, or I love it, or I miss someone. Every season of life warps time differently. And eventually, you wake up an adult, drinking wine with a friend and complaining about egg prices, and in the middle of that conversation someone inevitably sighs, “Where did the time go?” or “How is it 2025 already?” Which is, in a way, beautiful: a good night is always fast, a hard day is always long, and when we don’t want something to end, we wish time itself would stop. It’s just a stand-in for feeling. It warps in different ways for each of us, but the distortion is familiar. We recognize it, even if we can’t explain it. But that’s all it is: a language. Our best attempt at quantifying what it feels like to move from day to night, again and again. And yet if I compared what a single “day” has felt like to me across different years of my life, they would not be at all the same. Take a Swedish summer, which has only three hours of darkness. That’s it. Yet we still bundle it into the same 24-hour block. We throw up some blackout curtains, call it morning and night, and pretend it makes sense. But it doesn’t. It’s our silly, very human attempt to make something universal out of something incredibly personal. The passing of time was never meant to be shoved into a calendar; it should be felt independently, intimately. It’s romantic and kind, and emotion-packed. It’s ironically subjective. Which is already what we’re doing when we say “the night flew by with you” or “that day would never end.” And here’s what I can’t ignore: whenever I’ve gone through heartbreak, or loss, or grief, people have told me, “Time heals all wounds.” But notice what happens when you ask, how long? The answer is always some version of: however long it takes for you. In those moments, we instinctively respect time as something personal, subjective, unmeasurable. Because healing can’t be rushed. Grief can’t be rushed. We recognize time bends and flexes to the person going through it. And yet, when it comes to simply living, to the day-to-day? We don’t allow ourselves the same grace. Suddenly it must be optimized, rushed, scheduled down to the half-hour. And for what? To get somewhere faster? To prove we’re “on track”? The irony is that in our deepest, most human experiences we already know time isn’t fixed. But in ordinary life, we pretend it is. Hence, why we say “a race against time”. Because we can all quietly acknowledge that this system we signed up for is, in many ways, working against us. It wasn’t built for the reasons we use it now. We allow it to block opportunities, justify settling, rush the beautiful moments, and stretch out the painful ones. So when we say “time heals all wounds,” what we actually mean is “give yourself permission to ignore time,” because there’s no rushing the real stuff. But, hell, we rush anyway. We rush a goodbye to our mom as we head back to where we live. We rush a meal that was meant to be savored. We rush a walk in the park. We even rush time with our closest friends. And when those things are rushed, they don’t feel shorter; they feel wasted. That’s the irony: by trying to optimize them, we hollow them out. And then we end up in this endless cycle of micro-optimizations just to get through the day, only to look back and regret them all. “But, Christina, hOw WoUlD aNyOne wOrK or mAkE moNey if wE diDn’t uSe tiMe?” Fair. But notice what becomes effortless when you forget about the clock: enjoying your morning, playing with your kids, walking through a park, getting lost in a conversation. Funny how everything inherently human flows better without time, and only the artificial stuff—deadlines, productivity hacks, keeping score—becomes harder. Which raises the question: what does that say about which things are truly human, and which things are merely scaffolding we’ve built around ourselves? So no, I’m not tossing my calendar in the trash. But I am done treating it as the measuring stick of my life, as the thing that tells me whether I’m behind or ahead. Because what would that even mean? If something takes “three years” but those years fly by like a week, was it really three years? Some people make twenty years feel like two; others drag the same twenty into forty. A forty-year-old can feel sixteen, and a teenager can feel middle-aged. None of it adds up. And why would we even expect that it would? Which leads me into contradictions I can’t fully resolve. If time isn’t real, then why do I feel late, or rushed, or like I’m running out of it? Why does the ticking of a clock, something I know to be arbitrary, still provoke anxiety in me? Last night, trying to fall asleep, I imagined what it would feel like to live without calendars, birthdays, or clocks. Immediately, I felt lighter, as though a weight had been lifted. And yet the moment I opened my eyes, my phone reminded me of the next day’s schedule. Maybe that’s the paradox: we need the structure to keep moving, but the movement itself is what erases the very thing we’re trying to measure. So maybe the truest way to think about time is not as a fact, but as a fiction: a story we tell ourselves so that we can compare experiences, even though the experiences themselves are incommensurable. And if that’s the case, then time is not something to optimize or master. It is something to listen to, like a translation of our feelings back to ourselves. Not a law, not a limit. Just a language.