Both depression and happiness come with specific intrinsic features that define them and give them their quiddity. One of these features relates to the different experiences of time inherent in each mood state.

Depression, for example, slows time to an almost syrupy consistency. Time appears to have no beginning, middle or end. We feel as if we have always been depressed and always will be. The “now” moment is experienced as glacial. Hopelessness and helplessness, two distinguishing mood accompaniments defining depression are felt as logical sequelae to the more primordial sense of time as a ground for all feeling. Depression is a jealous God; like a gas it expands to fill a vacuum. It feels so real because there is no comparison. It becomes the only show in town.

Happiness, with its myriad of definitions, is often characterized as being fleeting, ephemeral, transient. One definition of happiness is quite simply, “I get my way, get what I want.” Much like an orgasm, it is an experience that owes part of its being to the comparison with the emotional territory surrounding it. Happiness, contrasted with depression, has a lighter viscosity and is unable to sustain the requisite experiential time parameters that give other mood states a solidity and verisimilitude. The “fakeness” that is mentioned is the inability of the human mind to confer conditional, much less ultimate, reality to what it experiences as merely transitory. Herodotus, referring to King Croesus, added, “count no man truly happy until he is dead”.

Feelings are not facts. Depression paints a picture of a false reality. Happiness is denied a sense of reality because it is seen as insubstantial. Time is not the march of chronological minutes but a way that human beings are. Its subjectivity and elasticity help configure and determine the meaning of our world and contribute to our joys as well as our pathology. Perhaps one can speak of existential distortions as well as cognitive distortions.