This is how the game tricks you and is the main reason I love the game and its themes.
No matter where you are in Termina, look to the horizon and you can see the moon slowly descending. A looming sense of imminent doom, reminding you that you only have three days before it comes down and destroys everything and with a big, frightening face staring down at you.
But here's the thing. Yes, you only have three days... Except you don't. With the ocarina, you can go back in time at any point, for any reason. Messed something up? Oh well, let's go back and try again. And again. And again until you finally succeed. You may not have infinite time, but you DO have infinite tries. Tries that you yourself are in control of. The descending moon, clock and countdown timer are there to trick you into thinking you have less time and control than you do.
And what's more, each time you go back, you get to keep what you gained. Maybe not the AMOUNT of it you had (bombs, arrows, deku nuts, etc.), but when you go back, it's not a full restart; Any masks you gained and any tool you unlocked are still available to you. Whenever you restart, you are pretty much always in a better position than you were at the last restart. Even if you didn't unlock any new masks or equipment, you still have the psychological upgrade; You know better what to do and are better equipped to do it. It's like that saying: "You're not starting from scratch, you're restarting with experience".
And that scary face on the moon is also a trick. Would you feel equally unsettled if it was just a regular moon without the face? Judging from general consensus, I'd say the answer is a pretty clear "no". That doesn't matter, however. Face or no face, the moon is still going to crash in three days... right?
The way I interpret this game is that it's like an allegory for the way we think about our life: Shorter than it actually is. We always have this sense of dread about the length of our life, acting as though the world will end in three days, even though it most likely won't. We act as if we don't have time to do things and ESPECIALLY don't have time to fail and try again... except in most cases, we do. More often than not, we DO have the time to try again. To restart with experience and do a better job at it, but with the looming sense of imminent doom that is death, we trick ourselves into thinking we don't have time when we definitely do!
Sure, we don't have a magic ocarina to send us back in time for infinite tries, but we do have an (arguably) non-magic brain that can retry until it dies and we need to untrick ourselves about not having it.
Majora's Mask is one of my favourite games and I find it very relaxing, because it reminds me that even if I f--k up: as long as I'm alive, I have infinite tries.
