Why does time fly when you're having fun?

Is that even the right question?

I googled “why does time fly when you’re having fun” and found the answers unsatisfying, because they largely took a scientific approach. Something about dopamine being released when you do something unexpectedly enjoyable, and that release of dopamine causes your internal clock to run faster. I guess the answer to this question could be, in summary, chemicals, but for whatever reason, that doesn’t feel like the full answer to me. 

What it feels like to me is more like — when I’m having fun, I forget about time. I don’t know how long it’s been, because how long it’s been is the least important part of what I’m doing. And when I finally do wonder, what time is it anyway? it’s later than I thought.

I think that’s the gift — to be unaware of time passing. 

To that end, time doesn’t fly when you’re having fun. It becomes irrelevant. 

Sometimes when Jess and I walk to the Prospect Park Lake and stare out at the water, a whole lifetime goes by. 

When Caleb makes me laugh, time actually goes backwards and I don’t pay rent, I don’t live in New York, I just go to classes and dining halls. 

On the ferry with Jess, Nancy, and Alex, I have no idea what time it is, time doesn’t exist on the Friendship Express. 

Making Jane laugh and hearing about the coffee she’s drinking brings me to Berkeley, I’m holding her hands, forever in a coffee shop before she leaves for her law school class. 

When I eat pastries with Micah and we shower Kate with praise for the scarf she knitted, that moment could go on forever! It’s still going on in my head right now!

When I sit on my parent’s bed and talk to my mom, uncovering truths from her childhood, I am every age. 

When my dad tells me about what it was like to be a freelancer, the gift of advice I asked for is so large it defies the constraints of both space and time. 

When I look around our living room at Julia, Aaron, Haleyann, and Jess playing Ticket to Ride — Toby lying on the floor shirking his duties as Banker — I know how useless a clock can be.

When I write, the need to convert my cloudy thoughts into legible, accessible sentences is like a black hole or a magnet; the sensation of pulling is stronger than anything else.

There are so many more things that erase time. The Kacey Musgraves concert! Petting the cats! The first time that Buckett looked up at me! Honestly, watching Survivor and The Challenge! Reading the Elena Ferrante series! Hiking in Yosemite and New Hampshire! They’re all around me, these magical things that render time irrelevant.

When I think about how frequently I get to erase time, I feel immensely grateful. I think it is nothing short of life-affirming. To be aware of time passing is to be aware of mortality — time is a limited resource in constant depletion. 

But to be unaware of time is to expand the resource — because the system of measurement falls apart. Yes, an hour is always an hour, but who cares? What benefit does awareness of time passing bring to the one being aware? Knowledge that this all ends? Who needs that? 

I don’t need to be reminded that our time here is finite. I know that in my bones.

What’s really incredible — magical, I think! — is that there are people, places, activities, and moments that can warp time so wholly that the finitude ceases to matter. They don’t make time fly, because that implies continued adherence to the system in which time operates. They make the whole system disappear. They make time a distant dot on the horizon, one you can barely see, if at all.