The thing that terrifies me about time is how it’s speeding up as I get older. Months pass like weeks, and weeks like weekends.
This is my second clue about time’s weirdness.
To talk to most people, this is a common experience.
Yet I did once find a man who didn’t have this experience. He was a former colleague, a man in his early 60s (much much older than me) and when I mentioned about time speeding up he just looked blank. He told me he didn’t know what I was talking about, and time was no different than when he was younger. I was amazed at this. Not only did he not experience time as speeding up, he acted as if he’d never heard of such a thing.
This still puzzles me. Perhaps he was joking? Only he wasn’t the joking type. And he didn’t budge an inch even when I went into my nosiest consultant mode and plied him with questions.
Why should I care? Because I want what he’s having, of course.
Only thing I can conclude about him is that he’s the exception that proves the rule. Or that he too is just part of time’s weirdness.
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Stefan Klein in his book, The Secret Pulse of Time, even has a chapter titled, “Seven years are like a moment: Why life speeds up as we grow older.” Too bad that like so many of the promisingly-titled chapters in his promisingly-titled book, he doesn’t actually supply the answer.
He raises the issues of novelty and memory and the degree to which a stretch of time is stimulating or not, but then he doesn’t take them anywhere. So I’m going to supply my own theory using his ingredients.
My theory is that we experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases. When we’re young time feels slow because there are so many “firsts” to experience. Then as we grow older there are fewer and fewer “firsts”. We accumulate experience and knowledge, and thus have a bigger and bigger store against which to compare new situations and new people. The bigger the store of experience – or, to put it another way, the more memories we have — the less novel will those situations and people strike us.
At the same time, as we grow into adulthood, most of us, by reason of work and family and other obligations, adopt a routine that means we’re less and less exposed to novelty anyway.
So while our experience and memories pile up, our exposure to external novelty goes down.
And without fresh supplies of novelty – either internally derived or externally supplied — time starts to race ahead of us. Disappearing down some rabbit hole at an unseemly rate.
More anon …
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I read that book in German when it came out, and was also a bit disappointed.
But time is of course very relative, and not only in the Einsteinian sense.
My daughter is 4 now, so one year is 1/4 of her entire life, and probably 1/2 of the life that she remembers.
I’m 39, so for me one year is just over 2% of my life, a negligible blip.
Yes, proportionality must come into it (ie, unit of time compared to size of store of memory or experience … mmm, I wonder how Alzheimer sufferers experience time?)
Yet there’s something else too, because our experience of time fluctuates. Will post on it shortly.
The man you knew who didn’t experience time speeding up may have been an extra-terrestrial alien, although looking completely human.
My theory is that we experience time speeding up as we get older because our experience of novelty decreases.
I agree. Holidays I’ve had in novel places often seem, after I’ve arrived home, to have been much longer than they were, no doubt because I had more new experiences in the two weeks I was there, than I would normally have had over a year at home.
“Can it only be three days since I visited that Aztec ruin? It seems an age ago”. Have you ever said this sort of thing after returning from a holiday?
Oh yes, getting back from holidays is prime time for time’s weirdness. Because the contrast shows up most clearly, the contrast between how we experience time in one block of time and how we experience it in another block.
This from a neurologist:
“As you know, our earliest memories are the ones that are etched most deeply (our sense of passing time is determined by how well we remember the preceding days/weeks/months – which is way the days hurry by ever faster as we get older). Emotion makes the memory groove deeper but of course as our neurones begin to drop out or long disused circuits get cobwebs on them and become harder to activate, we mercifully forget our sorrows.”
Know the feeling.
Welcome Foreign Toe. Thanks for stopping by. Ha ha to cobwebs. Can feel them being spun even as I type. Interesting theory about memory of preceding time playing a role.