The Illusion of Now

You never live in the present — and never will

You watch someone light a candle. The room glows with warm flickering light. And you think, “I love living in the moment — in the now.”

But you can’t. You can’t live in the now. Because there’s no such thing, not really.

You can’t experience anything instantaneously.

It’s not your fault — it’s the universe’s. This place comes with built-in lag.

You see, there’s a speed limit — the cosmic maximum, the fast lane of existence — and it belongs to light. More than 186,000 miles per second. That’s fast enough to lap Earth seven times in a single tick of a clock. But it’s not instant. And that gap — between now and what you experience — is where reality gets weird.

Take the candle. Light leaves the flame and travels to your eyes. That takes time — nanoseconds, maybe, but time nonetheless. Then that light hits the retina at the back of your eye, where it’s converted into electrical impulses. Those impulses travel down the optic nerve — more delay. Then your brain gets to work decoding the signal: color, brightness, shape, movement, context. That’s a cascade of neural activity, spread across multiple brain regions.

In neuroscience, this processing delay is known as perceptual latency. In vision, it’s somewhere around 80 to 100 milliseconds — a tenth of a second — before you consciously perceive what your eyes just saw. That’s the price of understanding.

So when you “see” the candle light up — what you’re actually experiencing is its afterglow. The real lighting happened in the past.

And the kicker? That’s true for everything.

It’s not just light. What about touch? That feels immediate, doesn’t it? The second you feel something — you know it. Right?

Again, no.

Touch signals — say, a brush against your ear, the feel of silk, the sting of cold — those start in your skin or deeper, in specialized receptors. Then the signal travels along nerves at speeds ranging from 1 to 100 meters per second, depending on the fiber type. Then comes spinal cord processing, cortical processing, interpretation, emotional tagging. It can take 300 milliseconds or more before your brain says, “That just touched me.”

By the time you feel it, it’s already over.

So — Your partner brushes the lobe of your ear. You flinch, maybe smile, maybe something stirs. You turn and look at them, thinking: “Maybe tonight we don’t watch TV.”

But all of that? The feeling, the looking, the smiling, the thought — every one of those things is delayed. You’re reacting to a moment that has already passed.

You’re living in echoes.

Even your reactions take time. Motor neurons have to fire, muscles must contract. You are, quite literally, chasing the present — and never catching it.

What happens at the extreme end of this delay?

Let’s say something catastrophic happens. A massive explosion. A sudden brain trauma.

You might wonder: would I feel it? Would I know?

According to studies on traumatic brain injury and neural shutdown, there’s a narrow window — milliseconds again — before the brain’s interpretive centers go dark. In high-speed catastrophic events, like certain types of explosive deaths or bullet trauma to the head, the parts of your brain responsible for perception and pain don’t get a chance to process the event at all. The lights go out before the signal ever arrives.

From a subjective standpoint, it may never have happened.

The ultimate irony: you could be destroyed by something your mind never had time to notice.