Slipping away?

You emerge from the supermarket to find it’s dark outside, or lift your head from your screen to realise it’s way past lunchtime. If it feels as though time regularly escapes you, grab a moment to read this…

It’s a dislocating feeling, a sense that you’ve been removed from the earthly plane. You look up: the clock startles you. It’s been – what – 30 minutes, an hour? And in your scrolling through bad news and puppy videos, you’ve achieved precisely nothing.

The mind-bending sensation that time has travelled along without you is the stuff of science-fiction fantasies, where the protagonist takes a brief sojourn to another world and returns to find that 40 years have passed. And in that period, life has moved on. Things have happened, and our hero’s missed out.

It’s the same feeling, albeit on a smaller scale, when you get lost in your phone. Deep in hyperspace, it feels as if only a few seconds have elapsed. Yet when you resurface in the material world, you realise it’s been much longer.

Missed time can feel intense and unsettling, and there can also be a sense of grief and loss. Yes, losing an hour of your life might only deliver a thimbleful of sorrow, but add them up over a week, a month, and they start to count.