Without the sensation of having lived it

Claude Monet - Wisteria, 1920

From Jenny Odell's Saving Time: 

WHEN I was very young, I encountered a terrifying story about time in a 1970s-era book my mom picked up from a garage sale, called Magic Fairy Stories from Many Lands. A boy who is impatient to grow up is wandering in a forest when a witch appears and gives him a ball with a golden thread sticking out of it. If he pulls the thread, she says, time will go faster. But he must use the device wisely, as the thread can no more easily be put back in than time can run backward. Predictably, the boy can't help himself: impatient to go home from school, he pulls the thread; impatient to marry his crush, he pulls the thread; impatient to have a child, he pulls the thread. All too soon, he finds himself at the end of his life without the sensation of having lived it.

The moral of the story is supposed to be about "living in the moment" and the folly of wanting to skip over the bad parts of life to get to the good ones. But when I read it, the thing I fixated on was the thread and the ball, simply as an illustration of the irreversibility of time. 

Even though it has a happy ending (the witch finds the old man and lets him live his life over again), I remembered this for a long time as a horror story.