Time is a weird concept. We track it with quartz crystals in watches and atomic vibrations in laboratories, but the human heart doesn't care about physics. It doesn't care about 3:00 PM or the Gregorian calendar. When you’re sitting across from someone you love, or perhaps staring at a ceiling fan after a breakup, time stops being a measurement and starts being an atmosphere. That’s because forever is a feeling, not a date on a calendar.
People get this wrong. They think "forever" is a promise of infinite duration—a linear line stretching into a literal eternity. It isn't. Not really. In the context of human psychology and the way our brains process intense states of being, "forever" is a qualitative descriptor of the now. When you are in the thick of a depressive episode, it feels like you’ve always been there and you’ll never leave. When you’re falling in love, the sensation is so expansive that it occupies all available mental space. It feels permanent.
It's a trick of the amygdala.
The Neuroscience of Emotional Permanence
We have to talk about how the brain handles high-intensity events. According to researchers like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, trauma and intense emotional states can actually bypass the part of the brain responsible for "time-stamping" memories. Usually, the hippocampus helps us categorize events as "past." But when an emotion is overwhelming, the brain loses its ability to see the finish line.
This is why forever is a feeling that can be both beautiful and terrifying.
Think about "The Flow State," a concept popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When you’re deeply immersed in a task or a connection with another person, your prefrontal cortex—the part that monitors time and self-consciousness—takes a backseat. You lose the sense of "before" and "after." You just are. In that moment, the internal experience is one of infinity. It’s a glitch in our biological software that allows us to feel the weight of eternity in a single afternoon.
Short moments can be heavy. Long years can feel like nothing.
Why We Make Promises We Can't Keep
We’ve all seen it. Two people get married and swear they will feel exactly this way until the sun burns out. They aren't lying. At least, they don't think they are. When they say "I will love you forever," what they are actually saying is, "My feeling for you right now is so massive that I cannot imagine a world where it doesn't exist."
They are describing the scale of their current emotion, not predicting the future of their neurochemistry.
The philosopher Henri Bergson spoke about durée (duration). He argued that lived time is fluid and subjective, unlike the "spatialized time" of clocks. If you’ve ever waited for a pot to boil, you know that three minutes can feel like twenty. If you’ve ever had a "perfect" night out, six hours can vanish in what feels like twenty minutes. Because forever is a feeling, we often mistake the intensity of a moment for the inevitability of its duration. This leads to what psychologists call "affective forecasting" errors. We are remarkably bad at predicting how we will feel in the future because we are trapped in the "forever" of our current state.
The Dark Side: The Forever of Grief
It’s not all romance and flow states.
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Grief is perhaps the most visceral example of this phenomenon. Ask anyone who has lost a spouse or a child. They will tell you that the pain doesn't feel like a temporary phase. It feels like a new climate. It feels like a permanent shift in the laws of gravity. In the early stages of mourning, the brain struggles to conceptualize a "later." The "forever" of the loss isn't about the next fifty years; it's about the fact that the pain is so all-encompassing that it lacks borders.
Joan Didion captured this perfectly in The Year of Magical Thinking. She described the sense that time had looped or stopped. She was living in a "forever" that was defined by absence.
We see this in clinical depression too. One of the primary symptoms is "hopelessness," which is essentially the inability to feel that the current state is temporary. The "feeling" of forever becomes a prison. If you can’t remember feeling good and you can’t imagine feeling good, then the "now" becomes an infinite loop. This is why "it gets better" is such a difficult phrase for someone in the middle of a crisis to hear—their brain is literally telling them that their current suffering is a permanent feature of the universe.
How to Navigate an Infinite Now
So, what do we do with this? If forever is a feeling, how do we live without being jerked around by every passing emotional storm?
First, we have to practice what some therapists call "dual awareness." This is the ability to acknowledge the intensity of a feeling without accepting it as a permanent fact. You can say, "This feels like it will last forever," while your rational brain adds, "But I know that feelings are transient by nature." It’s a way of honoring the experience without being gaslit by your own hormones.
The Stoics were big on this. Marcus Aurelius wrote about the "passing nature of things." He wasn't trying to be a buzzkill; he was trying to provide a tether. When things are great, realize it’s a temporary peak so you can savor it. When things are "forever" levels of bad, realize that the feeling of eternity is just a side effect of your biology.
Practical Next Steps for Emotional Regulation
Understanding that forever is a feeling gives you a specific set of tools for handling life's highs and lows. Instead of being a victim of your internal clock, you can start to manage the "infinite" moments.
Label the sensation. When you feel overwhelmed, literally say out loud: "I am experiencing the feeling of forever right now." This shifts the experience from your emotional centers to your logical prefrontal cortex. It creates distance.
Audit your promises. Before making a major life decision based on a "forever" feeling—like a tattoo, a sudden breakup, or a massive career pivot—wait for the "feeling" to subside. Wait for the clock-time to return. If the desire is still there when the intensity has leveled out, then it’s likely based on values rather than just a temporary neurological spike.
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Use the "10-10-10" rule. Ask yourself: How will I feel about this in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years? This forces the brain to re-engage with the concept of linear time, breaking the illusion of the "infinite now."
Savor the positive "forevers." When you are in a moment of pure joy, don't rush through it. Acknowledge that this is one of those times where the world feels infinite. Let the "feeling" be your reality for an hour. It’s one of the few ways humans get to experience something resembling the divine.
Focus on "Permanent" vs. "Pervasive." In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), we look at how people explain their lives. Pessimists tend to see bad events as "permanent." Optimists see them as "temporary." Remind yourself that while the feeling is pervasive (it’s everywhere right now), it is not permanent (it won't be here in 2030).
Forever isn't a long time. It’s just a very deep one. By recognizing the difference between the duration of an event and the intensity of our reaction to it, we stop being overwhelmed by the scale of our own lives. We learn to ride the waves of these "infinite" moments without drowning in them.