Slowing Down TIME. An exercise in perspective shaping

Do you ever feel like time passes faster as you get older?

Well it does, and if you’ve ever felt the same way, you’d be relieved to know that you’re not crazy. I’m going to tell you why. I think I may have figured out how to slow down time…ok, i haven’t but I may have figured out how to slow down the perception of time & that’s important because no one lives in the objective truth, they just live in their perspective of it.  One of my favourite quotes which is a line from a poem called ‘Erwin’s Feline’ says, “We all live in this world, yet this world is all our own” sums it up nicely.  Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I figured out how to slow down time, but in order to understand how to do that, we first need to understand the reasons why time speeds up as you age.  So far I’ve come up with 3 reasons, not because 3 is my favourite number…actually it might be because 3 is my favourite number.  It might be because 3 just wraps things up nicely & is enough reasons to be believable but not too many to be boring.  There may be more, but 3 is all I have so far.

There’s 3 reasons why time speeds up as you age:

• First is the mathematical reason. Whilst every year is measured by how long it takes for the earth to do one revolution around the sun, 365 days give or take, the first year of your life this revolution is equal to 100% of the time you’ve been alive.  Every noise and movement you’ve made has been in this one year.  The second year you’ve been alive, 1 year is equal to half your life, still a significant portion.  The fourth year you’ve been alive, 1 year is equal to a quarter of your life.  By the eve of 11th birthday, you’ve been alive long enough to have circled the sun 10 times and consequently 1 year is equal to 10% of your life.  As you age, the proportion of your life that 1 year takes decreases, so on the eve of your 51st birthday 1 year has taken a mere 2% of your life.  If you visualise it in a graphical representation it would resemble an exponential decay graph like this:

Now you may be thinking if this is the case, and looking at this graph, then why is it that I only realised this feeling of time passing faster when I was well into adulthood? That’s because there’s something that combats this to prevent you from feelings of time passing faster and that has to do with memory formation, which brings me to the second reason.

• The second reason relates to memory. Memory is a very misunderstood function and largely unknown in the specificity of its mechanics, but what we do know is the more we’re making them, the slower time gets.  Now I've simplified that quite a bit so let me unpack that a little more & as I go on, you’ll notice me contradict myself, but it’s on purpose, I promise.

In childhood, we’re often experiencing things for the first time. Many sights, sounds, smells, tastes, social interactions are all novel things that catch our undivided attention.  Add to that the fact that children generally live in the present as compared to adults.  Adults are generally more obsessed with some time in the future and have experienced so much that most of the minutiae of their day is filled with known, unmemorable routines and it starts to become clear as to why the onset of the perception of time acceleration is delayed until much later in life. 

But wait, there’s more!

As you age, you may inadvertently seek out familiar experiences, less adventure, less exploration, less risk-taking activities, either by choice or by force of situational responsibilities. For example, you might have a family you need to take care of so you optimise for being alive rather than something that’s novel but potentially risky.   You may instead seek out more of the known, more of the things you know you can be in control of, more things you can seem like you’re an expert in because at your age not knowing something may hurt your ego. In a sense, you may perform some cognitive gymnastics to convince yourself that you have become jaded towards novel experiences so much so that the mere thought of them are enough to both physically and mentally exhaust you.

Up until recently I thought I had terrible short term memory, turns out I just didn’t do memorable things often enough.

Great! So the solution is to live a life jam packed with memorable, novel experiences?...right??

Not quite, because this is the part where I contradict myself and say, ‘you ever notice that when you’re bored time seems to stand still, and the saying of time flies when you’re having fun?’

Like, wtf time? Why is the perception of you so elastic?

I know personally and anecdotally that when I finish a holiday where I experienced new and novel things it feels like it went like a flash, but the waiting in line at airport customs seemed to take FOREVER!

Now this should totally contradict my previous points but guess what? You’ve done those things before. You’ve experienced the joys of being on a holiday before and you’ve experienced the agony of waiting before too.  These aren’t novel, but I bet you remember holidays as a kid & your first holiday without your family, maybe as a young adult backpacking around Europe. 

So the principle still stands, novel experiences make time slow down however it’s a bit trickier in adulthood because you have been in many situations where novel experiences happen before.  For example, you have been on holidays before & if that’s the time where you pack your novel experiences in, then the trick is to live in the present moment of your time rather than the expectation that novel experiences are bound to happen simply because you’re on holiday, because living on an expectation means, livin on a prayer…no, it means living in the future.  And WTH is the future anyway? It’s a place that doesn’t exist anywhere except in your imagination, which brings me to my third reason:

• The third reason is that time and the measurement of it is a human made construct. It isn’t real.  You can take a moment to digest that if you want, but time is not real.  You know those people who say money isn’t real and the only thing that gives it value is the collective belief that people put in it? And we agree on the measurement of its value using its many physical & now digital manifestations? And you can have your own personal perspective of money. Like finding $20 dollars on the ground might be worth a lot to a beggar but probably not much to a billionaire. In fact, I read somewhere that it would be counterproductive for Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos to pick up a $20 bill from the ground because in the few seconds it takes for them to bend over to pick it up they would have already made a few thousand dollars.  OK so i looked it up, Jeff Bezos makes around $5.5k per second. ANYWAY, like I was saying, people can have their own perspective on money.

Well, time is the same.  It’s not real.  And the only thing that gives it value is the collective agreement of people that such a thing exists and we agree on the values of its units of measurement, like minutes, hours, seconds etc. And it also means that people can have their own perspective on time. Perspective affects perception, like looking at time from a different perspective can change your perception of it and this is why time perception is so elastic.  It stands to reason then, in order to increase the breadth of the time elasticity you possess, you would need to increase your breadth of perspective.

So how does one increase their breadth of perspective?

Well, let me make it fun & answer that by telling you a story about the frog in the well. Once upon a time there was a frog who lived at the bottom of a well.  When the frog looked up, the well shaft and little circle of sky was all it could see.  It was also all it knew about the world.  Actually this was the frog’s entire world.  The frog had limited perspective, but the frog didn’t know that. What the frog did know is that it knew its entire world because it had not seen nor experienced anything else.  There were no behavioural motivators for the frog to leave the well either because the well was abundant with bugs that would keep it fed, and deep enough to prevent any danger from predators (which it also did not know about).

One day, the well ran dry and the bugs stopped.  The frog thought ‘I'm gonna need to climb up to the sky because that’s where my bugs were coming from, so it began to climb up the well.  When the frog reached the top of the well it saw that the sky was a lot more expansive than what it was able to see from deep down the well shaft and that the area surrounding the well was vast and diverse also.  At this moment, whilst perched atop the opening of the well, the frog realised something important. It realised the limitations of its own experience had led to the limitations of its own perspective.

Now, most of us are that frog, but we’re all at different locations.  Some of us are still deep inside the well shaft.  Mostly kids would be there learning how to catch bugs and getting acquainted, but there are plenty of adults who still reside and have not left the depths of the well.  Some of us are climbing our way up the well either by force or by choice.  Some of us are perched atop the opening of the well coming to epic realisations.  Some of us are going back down the well having seen what was on offer. 

And finally some of us look into the distance and say ‘hmmm, I wonder what’s over there?’ and hop towards the horizon.