The moment when you suddenly realize how much time has passed, feeling disoriented by the gap between your internal sense of time and actual chronological time. It's the shock of discovering that years have slipped by unnoticed.
Borrowed from firefighting terminology, where 'flashover' describes the sudden ignition of everything in a room when heat reaches critical levels. The psychological meaning captures how awareness of time's passage can ignite suddenly and completely.
Flashover moments often trigger midlife crises or major life changes - suddenly seeing that decades have passed can create urgency about unfulfilled dreams. It's why people say time seems to accelerate with age; we become less aware of its passage until these jarring moments of recognition.
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