A nice semi-hidden feature of timestamps in Eloquent is that they don't just return strings from the database - they actually return an instance of Carbon, a great extension of PHP's DateTime library. What this means is that a heap of functions (and I mean a heap) are available right on your model's timestamps. It's worth having a read through the GitHub README to see what is available, but one of the coolest methods is diffForHumans(), a handy little function providing the long sought-after "time ago" format we often need.