Rich experiences feel short while passing but long in memory.

Evidence

As Hans Castorp remarks in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and William James tries to justify psychologically, experienced time has the peculiar property of in a certain way “inverting” itself in memory when compared with lived experience: “In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences, seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.” The experience of time thus yields either a short-long pattern (short experiential time, long remembered time) or a long-short pattern (long experiential, short remembered time). As a so-called subjective paradox of time, this phenomenon is well-documented and also entirely explicable: episodes of lived experience that are felt to be interesting leave behind more pronounced traces in memory than the boring ones, and their larger memory content operates as an extension of the remembered time and vice versa. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 399

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern fragmented experience makes life race at both ends. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 405; Television consumption creates dense experience that leaves no memory trace. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 400