If you really want to slow time down and live each moment, I recommend having a panic attack. Even a brief four minutes of anxiety, 240 seconds is abject torture in which you can contemplate 60 years of uninterrupted suffering, consider ripping your own face from your skull or lying down in front of a bus only to be trampled first by indifferent strangers.
The body itself, the flesh and bone substrate that we run on, causes much day to day suffering. There are contemporary theories of mind that say the digestive system and its metropolis of bacteria has as much sway on thought and action as the brain. In a future where technology has liberated us from being bound to our mortal wetware will I be able to upload my gut to the cloud? Would suffering end with mortality’s death? What would I be without a body, without emotions and hormones, without interaction with stimuli? I suspect I would have the same capacity for consciousness as a table or fridge. Some peace, some happiness. I’ll take the dread of waking up every day with the horror and knowledge of being: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”*.
Franz Schubert said “No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.” Pessimistic as it may sound, we are all alone, shuffling through permutations of language and pre-verbal communication, anxious to offer subjectivity to each other. But of course this is why people make things and why anyone says anything at all.
There is a certain perverse euphoria when I eventually am released from a panic attack, revelling in the simple fact that I didn’t explode. I want to run up to those indifferent strangers and tell them about the time phenomena I’ve just experienced, grasp their hands in mine and look deeply into their eyes, thank them for their kindness in letting me live. E.M. Cioran puts it best: “We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”*
*Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’, 1953
*E. M. Cioran, ‘The New Gods’, 1969