The Inner Monologue

Let’s talk about how utterly bad humans are at understanding time. Like, catastrophically, hilariously bad.

We have this charming little habit of treating wildly different chunks of time as if they’re basically the same. “Oh yeah, that happened, like… an hour ago. Or a day ago. Or maybe a year ago? Whatever, it’s all kind of the same.”

The Logarithmic Time Illusion

Our brains don’t perceive time linearly—they compress it. The further back something happened, the more we squish it down into a neat little mental folder labeled “A While Ago.”

• Last week? Feels recent.
• Last year? Eh, still kinda recent.
• Ten years ago? Basically the same as last year, right?
• Childhood? Just one big blur labeled “Back Then.”

This is why your aunt can say, “Oh, that was only a few years ago!” about something that happened in 1998. To her brain, the 90s were just a few years ago, because time is a flat circle and human memory is a liar.

Deep Time? Forget About It.

Now let’s talk about deep time, where humans really, truly lose their grip on reality.

• Some people think burning coal = burning dinosaurs (wrong, but adorable).
• Others think humans and T. rex hung out together (thanks, Flintstones).
• And when someone says, “Oh, that was millions of years ago,” they might as well be saying “a really, really long time ago” because nobody actually understands the difference between a million and a billion years.

Here’s the thing: A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is about 31 years. That’s the scale we’re dealing with, and yet, to most people, “ancient history” is anything before TikTok.

Why Does This Matter?

Because we make terrible decisions based on this warped sense of time.

• Climate change? “Eh, it’s a problem for future-me.” (Future-you is screaming.)
• Geological processes? “The planet is stable!” (Spoiler: It’s not. It just moves really slowly by human standards.)
• Personal regrets? “I’ll fix it later.”* (Later becomes never, because your brain just filed it under “The Past” and moved on.)

The Takeaway

Humans suck at time. We compress it, distort it, and fail to grasp its true scale. That’s not good or bad—it’s just how our brains work. But maybe, just maybe, if we recognize how bad we are at this, we can stop pretending that “a long time ago” is a useful measurement.

So next time someone says, “Dinosaurs lived a while back,” you can smile and say, “Yeah, and ‘a while back’ was somewhere between ‘last Tuesday’ and ‘the dawn of time’ in your mind, wasn’t it?”

Because let’s be real—none of us have any idea how long ago anything actually happened.