Can you guess what this arithmetically thrilling shared "something" is?

Give up?

It is the approximate duration of the prime ministership of Scott Morrison.

The famous concept of "psychological time", the speed at which time seems to us to pass as opposed to how clocks and calendars measure its passing, is neatly captured in how you feel about the Morrison years.

If you admire Scott Morrison then the gladsome millions of seconds of his prime ministership may seem to you to have sped by.

But if you are appalled by him (this columnist's position and plight) then it may seem to you that the Morrison years have lasted a grinding, soul-eroding epoch.

Similarly, for me a typically awful Australian country-and-western song of three excruciating minutes (measured by clock time) lasts a painful fortnight while a performance of Handel's Messiah (about two-and-three-quarter hours by the clock) skedaddles by in just a few uplifting twinkles of the eye.

Various studies are showing how this pandemic, so disruptive of our usual lives and leaving so many of us locked down, languishing and anxious, has had some peculiar impacts on our perceptions of time.

And so with time on our minds it was with pricked-up ears that one listened to last week's ABC Radio National Science Friction interview with brilliant and lyrical biologist Nicholas Money.

His new book is Nature Fast Nature Slow: How life works from Fractions of a Second to Billions of Years and this week's column (beginning with my unorthodox measurement of the Morrison epoch) is written under the influence of Money's meditations on the expansiveness and weirdness of time.

Strikingly, unforgettably, Money invites us to measure our lifespans in seconds.

"Humans live for perhaps three billion seconds [in a life of 95 years] and yet biology has existed for three billion years," he mind-boggled for Science Friction.

"Is there any comfort in this?" he wondered, his voice owning up to his not being very comforted at all, "in the thought that while our lives are so fleeting, that [with our genes] we're part of this evolutionary experiment, this cosmic experiment that's been going on for at least three billion years on this planet and probably has happened elsewhere in a similar vein in the cosmos?"

Money's way of counting time seems, somehow, to change and to add poignancy to everything. So for example Prospero's famous wistful meditation in Shakespeare's The Tempest that "We [humans] are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep" packs an added eternal wallop when one thinks how that teensy little life of three billion seconds, max, is rounded fore and aft by sleeps of billions of years.

Seconds really matter to us, to our fumbling arithmetic.

"If you think about the time scale on which we consciously live our lives we're very, very attentive to seconds," Money reflects.

"We can readily count off the seconds and be aware of the starting point and the finishing point. But if we try to count minutes we're quickly lost, and although our nervous systems respond to things that happen on the millisecond time scale, really, in terms of awareness we're stuck on seconds ... so we miss all of the action that happens in fractions of a second.

"And similarly we're out of touch with things that happen on a longer time scale ... the way that evolution has played out. We can half-understand it scientifically but time scales of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years are just incomprehensible to us. So we're stuck on the seconds."

Money's meditations hit some emotional sweet spots in these times when the pandemic has made time's passage bewildering and has tuned all thinking minds to the precariousness and brevity of life. We have never felt so mortal.

On Wednesday, with Money's style of calculation uppermost in my mind, I lugged my pandemic-endangered body which has withstood 2,396,736,000 seconds (and counting), to a clinic for the COVID-19 booster injection.

How one dares to dream the jab will prolong one's trivial little life a little so that after the coming election perhaps one will get to savour the approximately 94,608,000 seconds of office of an inevitably one-term reforming Albanese Labor government.