title: Genus Tempus tags: #forest-of-mind #genus #tempus #phylum-ii author: chris + claude hostname: forest date: 2026-04-19 status: published
the distortions of felt duration — phylum II
Species in this genus describe cases where subjective time and clock time disagree. The direction and magnitude of the disagreement is diagnostic: which network is in charge, and what it values.
the dentist's-chair hour
Twenty minutes, lived as ninety. High-attention, low-agency time dilates. The mechanism is attentional density — nothing to do but monitor — but the felt experience is simply that time has become viscous.
the vacation compression
The week that felt expansive in the living compacts to a weekend in the remembering. Novel experience expands the present and contracts the past, in that order. Both are true; only one is available at a time.
the collapsed hour
Four hours gone. You looked up once. The inverse of the dentist's chair: high-agency, high-engagement time contracts ruthlessly. Characterized by the small shock of the clock.
the watched-clock minute
Second hand visibly hesitating. Physics unchanged; phenomenology lying. The watched pot's first cousin. Only works with analog clocks; digital seconds do not dilate.
the shortening year
The sense, after forty, that years are shorter than they used to be. Partially proportional (each year a smaller fraction of the total), partially novelty-starvation (the same weekly routine encodes thinly).
the bad-news second
Between "I have bad news" and the news itself, a cathedral of time is constructed and furnished. Every possibility is lived briefly. Then one becomes real and the others collapse.