You ever go to a movie with someone and forget that they are even there with you? So entranced with the entertainment that you not only forget that they are with you, but you forget that you are even physically there, in front of that screen, taking in those images and sounds. It's not so much that time stands still, it's more that time doesn't exist at all within these experiences.

As the movie-story resolves and wraps up to the black screen of scrolling names of the people that made the film, you come back to yourself and your life, almost breathless in contemplation at what you just experienced. You turn in anticipation to share your experience of the movie with your friend, the corners of your lips rising slowly as your head turns, your mouth slightly agape, your eyes shining in anticipation...and then you see the expression on their face.

They make eye contact with you just long enough so that you can watch their eyes roll mockingly away from yours. It is clear that they did not experience the same thing that you experienced. Or, to be clear, they did not have the same experience that you had.

The experience of time that for you did not exist, slowed to an infinite crawl for them. The black screen credits that brought you back to yourself, was the cue for them to stand and leave the theatre dissatisfied.

I think we have all experienced something like this, more or less, on both sides of the eye roll.

When I was in my late teens I went to see a movie with my older brother, but I just couldn't get into the story or acting. After about 15 minutes I leaned over to him and whispered, "This is pretty terrible."

"Yeah. We should get out of here," he replied.

"That would be a waste of money to just leave" I quickly countered.

"You don't get it, Shawn. We wasted our money already. Now we are just wasting our time. Let's go," he said, gesturing with his head to stand up and leave.

We left the theatre and shared a couple of hours of just walking around and talking.

When I had indicated to my brother that it would be a waste of money to leave the theatre after 15 minutes I was operating under the idea that we needed to get our money's worth out of going to see the movie. I equated getting my money's worth as the time spent watching the movie.

My brother, on the other hand, was operating under the auspice that time is money, and if we were not being entertained by the movie (which was its purpose) the more time that we gave to it the more it was costing us.

This movie going experience with my older brother fundamentally changed the way I framed my worldview from that point forward.

Have you ever heard of the Sunk Cost Fallacy? It's the propensity to continue to invest time and energy into something even though you have determined that the benefit is not likely to outweigh the cost. You keep investing because you reason that you have already invested so much already that the previous investment would be wasted if you didn't continue following through. Addicts call it Chasing the Dragon.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy and Chasing the Dragon have our present behaviour couched in a future focus in order for us to relive a past experience.

It feels good to invest our energy into something and experience the hope of its potential flourishing return. And it's a drag to realize that what feels good isn't really good for you (in fact it's bad for you), and that you need to stop doing it.

Of course we can do the opposite of chasing after reliving a positive past experience. We can spend our life energy running away from potentially reliving a negative past experience. Oddly enough though, this running away from the past is still future focused, as we are still devoting our present behaviour to a future focus, a future that avoids a past experience.

What really would benefit us the most would be for us to focus on the present. It is our present behaviour that creates our present experience, which will in turn become our past experience.

If we are too focused on the past we sacrifice the present, which results in a stillborn future (a dead future that is the same as the past).

Conversely if we are too focused on the future, the present is un-experienced and un-born, forever in utero. The joy of being alive that is experienced in the present is stalled and held in abeyance when we are too focused on the future.

There is a great truth in the old saying, "There is no time like the present." In fact, how we treat and measure time in the present changes at different points in our lives, and this in turn changes us.

I used to measure time by my birthday, which was when I received gifts. As I got older I started to also measure time by the school year, which was when I would receive grades.

When I started working, in addition to the other time measurements I used, I began to also measure time by the hour, which is how I earned money. Soon however I changed from hours and began to measure my time by weeks or pay periods, because this was when I received the hourly money that I had earned.

As the working years went by I no longer measured my time by the pay I received from work, instead I began to measure my time by the weekends when I didn't have to work. Then eventually I began to measure my time not by the weekends away from work, but by the holiday breaks I took from work.

It then occurred to me one day that I experienced time through the absence of my work.

My work to me was like the movie experience that this article opened up with: an all consuming and rapturous experience. I loved my work. When I was working there was no past and no future, there was just an ever expanding present. It was beautiful.

It was only when I was with my wife and daughters, away from my work, that I became aware of time, that I realized that I was not in living in the present. When I was away from work and with my family I would experience reflecting on the past (the times that I had missed with my young daughters and wife), and anticipating the future (when I would retire and spend all my time with them), such that I was not actually present when I was there with them.

Realizing that I was not in the present when I was with my wife and daughters was like being back in that theatre with my brother all those years ago. "This is pretty terrible," I whispered to myself, but I felt that I just couldn't get up and leave like I had in that theatre years ago.

When I had gone to that movie with my brother I was doing it to have a shared experience with him. The movie was a backdrop. It was a prop. But when money got involved it became the focal point for me. I had forgotten that the only reason that I was in that theatre was to spend time with my brother, whom I loved.

It turned out that the exact same thing that had happened with my brother and I in that theatre was happening with my family and I with my work. I was more focused on the experience of money than I was on the experience of family.

Work should be the backdrop, the prop, for the experience of family life, but somehow I had got that backwards. I was using the experience of being a husband and a father as a backdrop and a prop for my work and career, instead of using my work and career as the backdrop of being a husband and father.

It was a brutal realization.

I was in the wrong theatre. I was in the theatre of the absurd.

I wasn't working to live, I was living work.

I was consumed in my own production.

Having turned my back to the old narcotizing regime of all those Should authoritarians in my youth, I had nonetheless in my middle-age exploited my own self by becoming an intoxicated achievement-subject of the nascent Can culture that Byung-Chul Han illuminates in his 2010 book, The Burnout Society.

I was loving the movie, but I needed to leave the theatre in order to live life.

I used to experience time by clocks and calendars, invites and meetings. And now I experience time by seasons and the weather, bird songs and the river's movement.

When something becomes so pervasive in our lives it becomes invisible and unreflected on. The morning coffee purchase. The scrolling through social media. The sun that rises and sets in the sky.

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of sunlight in the year. The longest time that remarkable yet unremarked glowing mass of life giving energy will stay in the sky and provide light to our day, staving off the night that ends it.

You will not see this sun if you stay in the allegorical cave/theatre of screens and labor that is the world of homo economicus. You will not see this sun if you are devoted to achievement-society's theatre of ever expanding invitation to greater production and capital acquisition. You will not see this sun if you make a meeting and send out calendar invitations to attend its experience with friends and colleagues.

You have to leave the theatre.

It's about time.