Alas, “ruh-roh” realizations alone do not diagnose problems, let alone fix them. I’m no computer scientist, but that seemed like an abnormally long time. It displayed “Indexing Spotlight,” with an estimated finish time of several MILLION hours. Not long ago, I went to use Spotlight (cmd + spacebar) and, well, it looked a little off.
But problems do crop up, even with the venerated Macintosh.