~a column by Colleen O’Brien
New years come and old years go, and the more that have gone by, the faster the next one comes. Time does not really speed up as we move from active life to the rocking chair on the porch. But the perception is there. The mystery is why we begin to think this. There are explanations for it, but no matter what theories pop up over the years, they all seem farfetched.
In attempting to explain the phenomenon, psychologist William James in 1890 said, “the days and weeks smooth themselves out . . . and the years go hollow and collapse.” This is a completely depressing phrase if I ever read one. Even as I think about it, I hope it doesn’t become my point of view — my days from childhood to middle age to now have gone from completely smooth and endless days to overly full, busy days to smooth and quickly gone days. I suppose the “hollow and collapse” of days means the end of the road, which most of believe will never happen. But what does this have to do with the idea that time speeds up?
When I was 10 it took forever for the Christmas holidays to come; now, at an age seven times that number, every time I turn around Santa Claus is coming to town. That it’s going to be 2016 in a day or so floors me. When I think of ’16 as a year, I think of the year my mother was born — 1916. 2016 is scifi.
One of the unreasonable explanations of “oh, how time flies” is this: when we’re young, each thing we do is new. The event, the person, the sight is interesting, startling, frightening, thrilling. It imprints on our brains. After a few years, we repeat just about everything; there are fewer and fewer new and compelling events, or people, or taste thrills in our lives, so we come to a point where we don’t remember what we did yesterday because it was something we’ve done a thousand times before. Our days run together, with no great peak experiences; minutes and hours and days are all of a piece, and from one new year to the next we glide quite gently because we have no real memory of any of it. This for some reason seems to make time whiz by?
This “explanation” doesn’t explain much at all, does it?
Although it is true to my experience that if I’m very busy on a vacation, say, and do dozens of things, the vacation seems to last a long time. If I do nothing, the days go by speedily, as if in a hurry to get me someplace where something actually happens.
The limits to “new” are profound at this age. We might think that hooking up to a zip line or signing up for a barefoot cruise in the Caribbean or a horseback ride on Galway Bay is the answer to ennui, but in reality, even the enticement of adventure palls when one has a few age “spots” (these spots vary — the heart? the back? the arches? the digestion? the need for your own bed, pillow, Barcalounger, tea at three, Manhattan at four?).
I’m really glad I did a zipline at 68 because now that I’m older than that, I don’t want to do it. I’m just happy that yesterday I could get out of bed after dancing the Twist the night before. A friend a decade older than me told me her bucket list still contained the item parachute jump. I looked at her with suspicion. Surely she jests.
Another explanation for the fast-forward of time as we age is called the “ratio theory.” It says that for a five-year-old, a year is 20 percent of her whole life; for a 50-year-old, a year is two percent. This is an 1877 theory that believes we humans are constantly comparing time intervals with the total amount of time we have left. I can’t recall a time when I did this, so I find this theory to be nuts. But perhaps it is so subliminal I’m unaware of it.
There is a theory that when you’re an adult you have more to think about than when you’re 10, and this makes time go faster. Really? Why? Does whoever thought this up mean to say that by the time you’ve thought about work, the party you get to go to, the leaking faucet, the approaching holiday you look forward to, the new baby, more time has passed than if you’re 10 and thinking only of one thing: what you’re getting for Christmas? This theory, too, is full of holes.
Another theory is that stress makes time go faster. This is the idea that if you have a dozen stressful things in your life — real worries — time will pass by like a bullet train. Why would it seem like that? I don’t really have a lot of stress in my tiny life, and still, time seems to be getting to the next station ahead of time.
If perception is reality, time indeed speeds up as we age. Even as it really doesn’t. The fallacy of faster clocks and calendars is in fact merely another thing in life to confuse and confound. Part of the problem being, of course, that when we’re old we do have more time to think about the perplexities of human existence, none of which are solvable, so even as we’re positive that time is speeding up we also get to think we’re dumber. The moral is that all of life, including the part that keeps time, is beyond comprehension. This is where the admonition “Eat! Drink! And be merry!” comes from. The end of that line is “for tomorrow we die,” but that’s not the problem. The problem is that we don’t understand very much about the human condition while we’re alive, including tempus fugiting.
