Time is not only what the clocks measure or what calendars record. Time also has a feel. A single minute can be stretched unbearably when one is waiting for news in fear, while another minute can vanish unnoticed when absorbed in laughter. Both are sixty seconds in any objective measurement, yet the subjective texture is profoundly different. Philosophers sometimes call this the qualia of time, the irreducible felt quality that cannot be reduced to numbers.
Humans are both gifted and burdened with the awareness of duration. We know that a day is one rotation of the Earth, that a year is the path around the Sun, that an atomic clock can mark time with almost perfect accuracy. Yet when we say an hour felt long or short, we are saying something about experience rather than physics. The paradox of time is that it is simultaneously the most objective and the most subjective of all measures.
When we try to capture this dual nature, we discover that the mind and the world are constantly interwoven. The world gives us the cycles of stars, seasons, and oscillations, while the mind transforms these measures into textures of patience, impatience, joy, or boredom. In this way, we never live only in objective time or only in subjective time. Every moment is both measured and felt.
Is Life Long or Short
When we ask whether a human life is long or short, we already betray the ambiguity of scale. Eighty to one hundred years can feel like a great span, filled with generations, memories, and the weight of history. Yet when compared to the life of mountains, rivers, or galaxies, a century collapses into nothingness. Both impressions are true, depending on where we place our attention.
Compared to bacteria or ants, humans live almost endlessly. A mayfly may know only a day, a mouse only a few years. To such beings, our life would seem impossibly vast. Yet to the Earth itself, which counts its years in billions, our lives are fragile sparks. We can only hold both truths together, feeling at once the grandeur of a century and its brevity against the background of cosmic time.
Cultural and religious traditions have long wrestled with this relativity. The book of Ecclesiastes insists that life is fleeting, like a vapor that passes away. Buddhist texts speak of kalpas, cycles so long that even the erosion of mountains is used as an illustration. Within these traditions, a human lifetime is at once precious and ephemeral. The very tension between long and short is what sharpens our sense of mortality and meaning.
Distance as Time, Time as Distance
Our perception of time is never detached from our perception of space. Distance and duration are felt together. In premodern Japan, the walk from Tokyo to Osaka took weeks. That was not just a measurement of kilometers but an experience of nights in inns, meals on the road, aching feet, and long conversations. The distance was heavy with time.
With the Shinkansen, the same journey compresses into a few hours. On an airliner, it can be less than one. The kilometers remain the same, yet the lived thickness of the journey has collapsed. What was once a saga of weeks has become a single afternoon of gliding landscapes. The qualia of distance has been transformed by speed.
This pattern extends beyond Earth. The Sun is about 150 million kilometers away, yet we speak of it as eight minutes at the speed of light. Is that long or short? From the perspective of human travel, it is beyond imagination. From the perspective of a galaxy, light taking billions of years to cross its span seems unbearably slow. The experience of distance and speed is always relative to the body, the tool, and the frame of reference.
The Relativity of Long and Short
The question of whether something is long or short cannot be asked without a standpoint. To a child, a summer is endless. To an adult, it passes too quickly. To a being that lives for an hour, a chemical reaction may feel eternal. To a godlike intelligence, even the lifespan of stars may appear fleeting. The categories of long and short belong not to time itself but to the consciousness that measures it.
Even physics confirms this relativity. Time dilation in relativity theory shows that duration is not absolute but depends on the frame of motion. The closer one travels to the speed of light, the more time stretches compared to an observer at rest. This is not only a metaphor for subjective perception but an actual feature of reality. What feels long or short depends not only on human psychology but on the nature of motion and gravity themselves.
Yet even with these insights, our language of long and short betrays our human orientation. We rarely think in billions of years or in femtoseconds. Our categories are molded by lifespans, heartbeats, and the rhythm of sleep and waking. To call light “too slow” because it takes billions of years to cross the cosmos reveals our longing to compare everything to our own measure. The universe itself is indifferent to such judgments.
Beyond Anthropocentrism
Awareness of our confinement can be liberating. We are bound to the human qualia of time, yet we can imagine scales beyond ourselves. We can picture astronomical spans where galaxies merge over eons, not as unimaginable, but as ordinary. We can picture quantum intervals so brief that they could be considered normal for the life of a particle. By imagining other scales as natural, we loosen the grip of our anthropocentric perspective.
This does not mean we actually escape our human condition. Even when we speak of billions of years, we still feel their strangeness as if stretching beyond what is normal. To us, “astronomical” means incomprehensibly vast and “quantum” means incomprehensibly small. Yet if we were shaped to live in those domains, they would feel no more strange than a morning commute or a daily meal. What we call extraordinary might be ordinary from another vantage.
The true challenge is to reflect without clinging to our categories of too long or too short. Instead of asking whether light is slow or fast, we might simply say that it is what it is, the measure of separation in our cosmos. Instead of asking whether our life is long or short, we might say it is the span within which our consciousness unfolds. Relativity then is not only a scientific insight but a philosophical one: every measure belongs to a perspective.
Beyond Time and Anthropomorphism
All of our reflections so far, whether subjective or objective, remain within the human frame. We ask if life is long or short, if light is fast or slow, if a journey is thick or thin. These are anthropomorphic categories. They belong to our embodiment and to our particular consciousness. To imagine otherwise is already to imagine in human terms.
Yet there is another horizon beyond this. We can ask not only what time feels like to humans, bacteria, or gods, but what it would mean to exist outside the very confines of space and time. Such a state would not be longer or shorter. It would not be eternity, which still belongs to the imagination of endless extension. It would be the absence of measure itself, the before and after of all categories.
Perhaps before our birth and after our death, we are in some sense beyond both confinements: beyond the anthropomorphic ways of judging, and beyond space and time as structures. If so, then the deepest mystery is not whether life is long or short, but that we pass through duration at all. To live is to be inside the fabric of time, and to die may be to step outside it.
Returning Home
After such speculations, we always return to ourselves. We return to the hour that feels short when joyful and long when painful. We return to the decades that seem stretched when lived but compressed when remembered. We return to the awareness that our lifespan is finite, whether we call it long or short.
The meaning of time is not discovered only in astronomical comparisons or quantum extremes. It is found in how we live the ordinary hours of our days. The qualia of time is not only about stretching our imagination to the lifespan of stars but about noticing the texture of waiting for a friend, or the timelessness of watching a child sleep. These are not less significant than the speculations of physics. They are simply closer to the ground of experience.
To ask whether life is long or short may finally be the wrong question. What matters is not its length but its texture, not its measure but its feel. Whether we think of it as fleeting or endless, our time is what it is. To live it with awareness is perhaps the deepest way to honor both the objectivity of clocks and the subjectivity of qualia.
Image by An Le Dinh
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