When Time Flies: Feeling, Meaning, and the Construal of Duration

In everyday life, we often say things like “time flew by”, “the hours dragged on”, or “the day just disappeared”. These aren’t statements about clocks, calendars, or relativity. They’re not “mistakes” in reasoning. They are patterned construals — ways in which we bring meaning to the experience of unfolding.

In a relational ontology, where reality is not composed of things but of processes and the relations that hold between them, these expressions are not trivial. They are semiotic enactments of how we live through time. And they do important meaning work.

Time as Actor, Time as Medium

When someone says “time dragged”, time is being construed metaphorically as an Actor in a material process — as if it has slowed itself down, stretched the moments thin. Similarly, when someone says “time flew”, time becomes a moving entity, speeding beyond the bounds of attention. These are experiential metaphors, compressing the relation between consciousness and event into the behaviour of “time” itself.

Yet in both cases, what’s being evaluated is not time per se, but the felt rhythm of a process: waiting, anticipating, enduring, enjoying. These metaphors are relational approximations of affect. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), they sit at the junction of the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions: experiential in how they construe the world, interpersonal in how they express stance or affect.

Not Relativistic, But Still Relational

It’s important not to confuse these expressions with relativistic construals of time in physics. Einsteinian time dilation arises from co-instantiating processes across different frames of reference. In contrast, “time flew” describes a shift in felt temporal density — how thickly or thinly experience seems to unfold.

But both are relational construals.

• Physics construes time’s unfolding as differential motion relative to spacetime topology.

• Consciousness construes time’s unfolding as affective density relative to the rhythms of attention.

Each is a valid mode of meaning within its system of value. Both take experience and construe it through relation — whether formal (as in physics) or lived (as in phenomenology).

Meaningful Time

A relational ontology does not divide these into “real” and “illusory”. Time is not a thing; it is a dimension of unfolding, and all construals of time — in physics, in grammar, in metaphor — are meaningful structures projected onto the relational field of experience.

So when time flies or drags, it tells us something not about the ticking of a clock, but about the structure of feeling as it unfolds. It shows that time, too, is part of the meaning we make.