I'm not sure it's quite that bad...but it might be!
I'm reminded of St. Augustine's famous remark: "What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not."
It is tough to find anything meaningful in the literature about the nature of time. One of the more insightful researchers was William James over a century ago. He noted that we sense something, not the flow of time exactly, but something like the extended present, which extends a few seconds, some into the past which is still the present in a psychological sense, and there is a possibility it extends into the future a fraction of a second depending what is being measured. anythng before that is already some kind of fading memory and anything in the future is a guess, an anticipation.
There is a school of thought that denies such things as the flow of time altogether. There is only now.