You know how it's pretty dumb we often can't do things? We're just sitting here, living our time. But we also want to live. We want this boring time pass and actually live the interesting part. Can we not just skip that? Can we separate the times, so we don't need to live what we want to skip, and don't need to let the part we want to live end?
This may seem like absurdist fantasy, but there are very practical mechanisms to make exactly that happen, to create an ecstasy of presentness. The most obvious of them is masturbation, followed by things like drugs or self harm. On the other side, there are similar effects that produce the opposite outcome of letting things move past, like brainfog and dissociation. What do they have practically in common to change time that way? And do they change time, or only our view on it?
The most known example is that of sleep. When we sleep, time passes very directly, not just our view on it. However, we only see time pass, not stay. We can make events fleet by sleeping through them, but making events stay, to focus, is much harder. And it's similar with the other factors. We can dissociate or masturbate, have brain fogs or self harm results or drug effects, they can only make time pass, not stay. That is in some sense obvious, they are limited effects, obviously they will run out at some time, and while they may "skip" that time, they can't let anything stay for longer than they themselves last.
So time perception is itself in time, so to say, it also changes. It makes a kind of present that appears to make things last for longer, but really just makes me make them last longer. And after that factor is gone, it's gone too. So how does time perception make me actually perceive time, and not just a moment?
But I really do see the moment that way. The sleepiness of the littles or the drowsiness of the teens is not just in-headspace, it's viscerally there. And in that moment, the past also feels differently, seem otherly attached to the now. In that moment, the present seems to reshape the past, offering my wishes (almost like in this hyper complex cosmological fantasy premise Ipa wrote diwn a few years ago). But yet, it is not really able to actually change anything. After I, or whoever else, is no longer sleepy, the distorted view of the past is gone. Or almost gone. Because sometimes, I then forget stuff. Is that maybe something that broke from stretching time perception like that?
On a maybe unrelated mode: there's a certain weirdness of coming back to desires after masturbation. If the perception in it is pure presentness, afterwards, this past present needs to be excluded. Any view of the past can't have something in there that reminds us, it was one time a lively present and not just a museum piece after all.. And in a sense post-masturbation amnesia is part of the record keeping in that museum we call "biography", as if it actually mattered. It (and maybe Ipa) thinks it matters, but the records are so rarely used they might as well not be there beyond the absolute necessity. Most use of "biography" is the choice of flattery and very selective memory. Its brainfog is the intentional after image of the real thing, a spurious kind of trick.
The reason for that however is the same as we try to do now! We just let the boring stuff past and tell the interesting story. In a way, wanting time to pass to the good bits is a result of looking at life as biography; we want the skip button for our own production, which we think is already done. But if we actually want to live and do things, we can't skip; we have to produce it ourselves! But then, what about that desire? And doesn't it really seem like that sometimes, that we really need a skip button, especially when we're stuck and can't do the things we want to do?
The problem is tho, that the only things we could skip are the others, not ourselves. When we're sleepy we're out of the picture, and as nice as it is to sometimes let some time pass by, we don't really get much from it except from what others would do anyway. If we think we could only do bad we at least could have had more time to think about what to do instead, instead of waiting for the right time for our old plans. So really, we want to get through it without waiting because we're improving, and we're impatient because we're too lazy to do the thinking we should do anyway. That makes sense. But how do we get to and away from here? Because there is a good reason to still hate this place, right?
Yes, obviously. Having impotent wishes is sad, but the problem is our belief that our impotence is a fluke, a fluctuation that has to have an equal and opposite reaction or something. And that's just not true. So even when we so things against it, we might still move further into a bad place, so we have to look at it, not away from it, if we want to at some point do what we actually want, not just what's possible right now. But I also really hate self-aggrandizing self-help self-care; because the self isn't the point, and it's not about "motivation". I have enough motivation, I often just don't see the point of running into walls (and similarly for some of the others of us). So what do I do then?
Paradoxically, it's the right things to do that what makes it seem as if you skip time, while you don't. If I do things that I can do and like in the moment, it brings presentness. This presentness creates agency of the present against the bulk of biography. In a sense, agency is something I need to train; and afte a while, I can actually see the opportunity to do things. I don't need to run into walls; it's enough when I can stop punching myself and can start building the rag dolls of my true desires.
(and then maybe I'm also less tired of all this stuff.. because the biggest pain of all is being exhausted from being afraid of not being able to do what you want because you are exhausted, and so on on repeat, a miserable infinite loop of draining time. from that, we need quite literally a break;, and hopefully before we reach the unfortunate exit call. but enough of that too; writing about it is its own kind of misery, and I _really_ do in fact have bettet things to do at least than raving on about this stuff, as limited as it still may be.)