What makes units of time so strange is that they never feel fixed. The same hour can drag or disappear depending on who is living through it.
There was a period when I was obsessed with talking about time. I kept feeling that a human life simply wasn’t long enough, so I wanted to break everything down to the minute. In those years, I became much stricter with myself about scheduling and time management. It did make me more efficient. It also made me noticeably less happy.
Time feels almost like a spell. People who know how to use it well seem to get more out of it than those who do not, yet under this absolutely fair rule, everyone is paying the same price. Every day lived means 24 fewer hours of life. 1,440 fewer minutes. 86,400 fewer seconds. And because the game only moves in one direction, every second lost is gone for good.
There used to be a silly joke that sounds meaningless at first, but the more I think about it, the more philosophical it seems: if a person is angry for one minute, then they have spent 60 seconds being angry.
Obviously. But if you pause on that for a moment, there is still a choice hidden inside the sameness of “one minute” and “60 seconds.” Are you angry for 30 seconds, or for the full 60? That may sound abstract, so it is easier to explain through something concrete.
I once took the judicial exam. Papers one and two each had 100 multiple-choice questions, so 200 in total. Each session lasted three hours: 180 minutes, 10,800 seconds. Many candidates liked to calculate an average. If you reserved 30 minutes for checking your answers, then you had 2.5 hours left, which meant each question needed to be finished in 90 seconds, or 1.5 minutes, or 0.025 hours. Otherwise, people would say, time would not be enough.
But that neat average immediately runs into reality. Questions are not equally difficult, and every candidate has subjects they handle better than others. I could move quickly through criminal law questions, for example, but needed more time when dealing with civil law. So in practice, trying to keep every question inside a “safe range” of time becomes much harder than it sounds.
And when that system starts to fail, a breakdown can happen in an instant.
That is why people often create a backup rule under the 90-seconds-per-question system: mark the question, put it aside for the moment, and move on so the next question still falls within the safe range. But this leads to two particularly miserable possibilities.
The first is mechanical disaster. Leaving one question blank can shift everything that follows on the answer sheet by one line. In the exam session I took, I saw a candidate collapse because of exactly this. He had likely skipped a question and then filled later answers into the wrong positions. Only in the last ten minutes did he realize it. He started frantically correcting the answer sheet, erased so hard that he damaged it, and then simply gave up. At least for the remaining sessions, he never showed up again.
The second kind of collapse spreads slowly. Once you leave a question unanswered, it becomes very hard to truly ignore it. Even while working on the next questions, part of your mind keeps circling back. That unresolved question turns into a bug in your system, and it begins to eat into the “safe range” meant for later questions. You start wondering whether to go back and try again.
But legal multiple-choice questions are not like math problems. If you do not remember the relevant principle or legal concept, reworking the problem one more time will not magically produce the answer. At that point, trusting your instinct may be better.
So let me add another rule to the 90-second rule, even though it is the least standard rule imaginable: luck.
I was never the kind of student who seemed lucky in exams. If anything, my first instinct was often ruined by my own confidence and by the feeling that “option B looks better,” especially when I changed an answer at the last minute and turned a correct choice into a wrong one.
And even luck is constantly interfered with by the mind’s own subjectivity. People start doubting their answers based on some invented common sense: would the test setter really make five answers in a row all C?
So besides luck, the 90-second rule seems to need one more thing: objectivity.
But the irony is obvious. Most of this so-called objective analysis is still built out of subjective reasoning. The less certain you are of the actual answer, the more likely you are to start guessing how the person who designed the question might have arranged the options.
By the time you are halfway through the paper, this whole system usually begins to fall apart. The delays pile up. Unless you are the kind of student who clearly knows which legal concept, offense, or doctrine each question is testing, you eventually have no choice but to trust your intuition. The rule of the “safe range” forces you to pick the answer that looks most plausible, convince yourself it is probably right, suppress the doubt, and move on.
That painful tug-of-war usually lasts until the final second of the exam. Which is why the judicial exam is one of those rare large-scale tests that measure not only knowledge and ability, but also a person’s mental stability.
The unfortunate thing is that whether you rely on preparation, luck, or constant self-suggestion—telling yourself that the answer you chose looks familiar from some past practice question—the exam is still the same for everyone: three hours, 180 minutes, 10,800 seconds. No matter how beautifully you plan it, no matter how precise your “safe range” is for each question, time itself does not change in quantity or quality.
A simple question you can finish in ten seconds seems to leave you eighty extra seconds for the next one, but when you hit a question that stops you cold, those eighty seconds can vanish just as quickly. And the people who cling most tightly to exact timing per question are often the ones most vulnerable to panic when their internal schedule falls apart.
That brings us back to the beginning: emotion is what gives time its felt differences in length and speed.
Take three years as an example.
I would never want to relive my three years in high school. I was not built for academic life. My luck was poor, and my attempts at “objective analysis” were no great help either. In that kind of pain, time felt unbearable.
But three years of married life feel completely different. There are no endless exams in it, and I would rather spend each day learning one more odd little thing just so I can share it with the person beside me. Because of that, those years seem to pass too quickly. Some memories feel like they happened yesterday. Others already feel as though they belong to a winter that has only just slowly begun.
So if someone insists on asking me what time really is, I can only shrug and point to these two completely opposite examples. They contradict each other, but they also depend on each other. If a person had never lived through three painful years, how would they ever understand what kind of three years they actually want?
From there, I arrive at another way of understanding time: it contains three elements—luck, objectivity, and emotion.
Luck gives time its uncertainty. Some people, through luck alone, can avoid a path that might otherwise have taken decades. Others are forced by bad luck to carve and polish their lives with far greater care.
Objectivity creates the illusion that time can be transformed through method. People who become deeply attached to time-management systems try to slice time into cleaner, more efficient segments. That effort is not useless. The mistake is believing that such structured time must automatically be more valuable than the time of someone who does not manage it so carefully.
In fact, this piece was written last night. It was scheduled to publish automatically, and yet that did not give me any real sense of relief. Objectively speaking, I still had to finish another daily piece today for tomorrow’s scheduled publication. The schedule had only been shifted forward by one day. It did not mean I had escaped a day of writing.
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And in the end, time is governed by something almost impossible to pin down: emotion.
Happiness makes time speed up. Despair slows it down. Reluctance to part makes it flash by like a galloping horse glimpsed through a crack. Impatience and hunger for quick results can turn time into the slow persistence of dripping water wearing through stone.