August 17, 2026
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In the words of the author Douglas Adams in his iconic work, The Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy, ‘Time is an Illusion, lunchtime doubly so.’ Written in humour and yet, grounded in fact, Mr Adams is certainly a guy who knows where his towel is!
The idea that time is an illusion isn't just an existential thought, it's a concept grounded in the study of physics.
In the realm of quantum mechanics, the perception of time takes an even more fascinating turn. Some physicists argue that at the fundamental level, time may not exist at all. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, explores this idea in his book, ‘The Order of Time.’ Rovelli states, "The difference between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." His work suggests that our linear perception of time, where moments pass from future to present to past, is a construct of human consciousness rather than a reflection of reality.
Further supporting this notion, Julian Barbour, a British physicist, posits that time is merely a series of ‘nows’. In his view, all moments exist simultaneously, and what we perceive as the passage of time is simply a way of navigating these moments. Barbour's perspective aligns with the idea that time is not an external entity, rather an internal mechanism to order our experiences.
While physics provides a theoretical foundation for the illusion of time, NLP and neuroscience offer insights into how you perceive and experience time. Your brain is equipped with various mechanisms to track the passage of time, yet these mechanisms are far from perfect.
One key aspect of time perception is the brain's reliance on internal and external cues, like your sense of day and night. Your subjective experience of time can be influenced by many factors, including attention, emotion, activity and how you naturally ‘perceive’ time. So, not having ‘enough’ time is simply a product of perception.
In NLP, the concept of your perception of time is often simplified by creating a linear (or not) visualisation of your past, present and future, a line if you like. Even though ‘now’ is all there is in reality, visualising your own perception of time allows you to sort out your ‘memories’ and ‘aspirations’ and to rationalise them in terms of their emotional content, facilitating a greater focus on ‘now’ without interference from the past. Time can be viewed as a mental framework rather than a strict boundary.
Embrace the idea that time is not a rigid constraint, more a mental framework you can navigate. As Albert Einstein aptly put it, "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
The difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. Our perception of the passage of time depends on the fact that we cannot comprehend the world in all its minute detail. A distortion that is produced by myopia. If we could perceive every molecule then the future would be exactly like the past.
In general thinking, there is your past, all the events that happened before what you term as now. There is your future, the events that will happen after the moment that you call now. Between the past and future there is an interval that is neither past not future and still has duration, however small. That moment is now and every problem can only exist in now.
Where did we get time from? It helps to free up your thinking if you understand time as a human construct. For centuries we have divided time into days. The word ‘time’ derives from an Indo-European root ‘dai’ meaning to divide. We divide the days into hours. For many centuries hours were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter because the 12 hours divided the time between dawn and sunset. The first hour was dawn, the twelfth was sunset.
Sundials, hourglasses and water clocks existed in the ancient world, in the Mediterranean regions and China. They did not play the same role as they do today in organising our lives. It is only in the 14th Century in Europe that mechanical clocks began to regulate our lives. Cities and villages built their churches and bell towers with clocks to regulate the rhythm of collective activities. The era of clock regulated time began.
The usefulness of clocks resided in the fact that they all tell the same time, this is a very modern idea. When travel was on horseback, foot or carriage there was no reason to synchronise clocks between one place and another. Midday is by definition when the sun is at its highest. Every city and village had a sundial that registered the moment the sun was at its midpoint, allowing the clock on the belltower to be regulated with it. Of course, the sun does not reach midday at the same time everywhere because the sun moves from east to west.
In the 19th century the telegraph arrives, trains are commonplace and fast and the problem arises of properly synchronising clocks between cities. It is in the US that the first attempts were made to standardise time. It was proposed to standardise time across the globe and fix a universal hour. So, midday in London would be a totally different time in New York. This wasn’t well received as people are attached to local time. In 1883 the idea of dividing the world into time zones was suggested as a compromise. Time was standardised within each zone.
Aristotle was the first to ask the question, “What is time?”. He concluded that time is the measurement of change. Things change continuously and time is how we count the change. Time is what we refer to when we ask ‘when?’
A minimum interval of time exists, below which there is no time. The world is made of events, not things. The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not permanence. Not of being, of becoming.
There are crucial differences between how we perceive the past and the future. The past leaves traces of itself in the present. Traces are everywhere. Craters on the moon, fossils, books of history, memories in our mind. The future does not hold the same traces. The traces of the past produce the familiar sensation that the past is determined. The lack of traces in the future lead us to believe that the future is open. The traces in the past enable our minds to create an extensive map of our past. So we believe that we can choose a future and not act on the past. This is what we call ‘deciding’. We think in terms of ‘causes’ that precede ‘effects’.
We say that the cause of a future event is a past event. The future would not unfold as it does if not for that cause. Memory, causes and effects, the determined nature of the past and the indeterminacy of the future are just names we give to understand the improbability of the past state of the universe. All memories are particular to a point in time. Causality, memory traces, the history of the world can only be an effect of perspective. So the study of time returns us to ourselves.
We all identify with a model of the world. We are a complex process that reflects the world and elaborates the information we receive in a way that is strictly personal. We are histories of ourselves. We are our thoughts full of the traces of the past. It is memory that holds together the processes through time of which we are made. In this sense, we exist in time. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time and to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves. The mind interacts with the passage of time and establishes bridges between the past, present and future. It uses memories of the past to use them to predict the future.
We are always in the present, the past is the past and therefore doesn’t exist and the future is yet to arrive so it doesn’t exist either. We are in a present which is instantaneous. Time is shaped by our internal sense, how we order states within ourselves. So, reality is formed only by memory and memory is a collection of traces. We are stories, contained within our minds. Lines drawn by traces left by the mingling together of the things in the world and orientated towards predicting events in the future.
We know that we are myopic. We barely see a tiny window of the vast electromagnetic system that is emitted by things. We don’t see the atomic structure of matter or the curvature of space. Our thinking is prey to its own grammar. It took only a few centuries to move from devils, angels and witches to atoms and electromagnetic waves. We hide our emotions, as they propel us forward and drag us back, in our words. Our words compel us to act, or not. Our emotions drive us.
Given that time can be perceived as an illusion, how can you apply this understanding to improve your utilisation of time? Embrace the concept that time is flexible and that you can influence your experience of it. This mindset shift can alleviate anxiety about deadlines and allow you to approach tasks with a more relaxed and focused attitude.
Consider how your beliefs about time influence your behaviour and stress levels. Challenge the notion that time is always running out and that you must constantly rush to stay ahead. Instead, cultivate a healthier relationship with time by recognising that it's a construct you can navigate rather than a relentless force you must obey.
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