The odd reasons your day drags but your life flies

The older I get, the more I find time losing its reliable cadence in favor of a disconcerting fluidity. One day can seem epic, but every passing year - especially this one - accelerates in a flash. How is it that my sense of time is so extremely subjective?

In search of answers, I've found out that smart people say time is ultimately a mind game. Here are some of the reasons that time can be so slow and so fast, depending on the circumstances. These insights make for an interesting way to look at your work day.

1. We're not that great at marking time. Karl von Vierordt - who studied time perception - found that people tend to overestimate short durations of time and underestimate long. As recently shown on Radiolab, if you play a metronome slow and fast and get someone to try to predict the next tick, you'll see this human foible in action. I think this explains a lot about a day at work.

2. When we're afraid, time crawls. In a post in Brainpickings about Claudia Hammond's book Time Warped, Hammond describes a study in which people with arachnophobia were asked to look at spiders — which they feared — for 45 seconds. They thought the experience was far longer than that. Another study found novice skydivers thought other divers' falls were short while their own were longer. You know the feeling if you've ever been in an accident. Time seems to stand still when we're terrified. I think this is because we're aware of each passing second in a way we usually are not.

3. Time seems to speed up as we age. Some people think this is a matter of proportion - for example, your 40th year is proportionally smaller than your fourth. But I doubt we do that kind of mental mathematics. I think it's because we sense the unknown but finite measure of what's left in our lives. Regardless, it's a universal feeling.

4. When we're on vacation, we lose our sense of time. Vacations flash by, but we remember them for a long time. That's apparently because -- like our life from ages 15 to 25 -- vacations are full of novelty. So we remember them best. We know their measure in slower time because they were new.

This all begs the question, since time is a mind game and our brain is flexible when it comes to time, can we mentally control our sense of it? I think so. As noted in the Brainpickings post, if we have the ability to shape time, we can shape it in a way that enriches our life. Claudia Hammond says:

"We are able to change the elements we find troubling — whether it’s trying to stop the years racing past, or speeding up time when we’re stuck in a queue, trying to live more in the present, or working out how long ago we last saw our old friends. Time can be a friend, but it can also be an enemy. The trick is to harness it, whether at home, at work, or even in social policy, and to work in line with our conception of time. Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organize life, but the way we experience it."

In the wake of the devastatingly sad news of Nelson Mandela's death, I think of how our heroes look at time. Here is a man who spent nearly three decades locked up -- and then painstakingly showed us the power of reconciliation. Here is someone who treated time in a way that allowed his work to transcend it..

How will you choose to experience your time today? I will attempt to spend mine in the moment, minute by minute, trying to appreciate what's around me. As good people do. As I would if I were taking a break or trying to make something meaningful. It makes the best times last longer and the bad ones go easier. And it makes subjectivity an asset in thinking of the greater meaning of the clock. It's your clock. You get to experience the minutes the way you choose.

Surreal coffee via Reddit. It was made by Kazuki Yamamoto of Cafe10g in Osaka, Japan.