Where Did the Time Go? The Strange Elasticity of a Human Life (#724)
There is something peculiar about time.
A minute is always sixty seconds. An hour is always sixty minutes. A year is always 365 days, give or take the occasional adjustment demanded by astronomy.
And yet almost nobody experiences time that way.
Think back to childhood. Summer holidays seemed enormous. Christmas took forever to arrive. The interval between birthdays felt like an appreciable fraction of a lifetime.
Because, of course, it was.
At ten years old, a year represents one-tenth of everything you have experienced.
At fifty, it represents one-fiftieth.
At seventy-five, another year is a much smaller fraction of the life already stored in memory.
The clocks haven't accelerated.
We have.
The Mathematics of Growing Older
The French philosopher Paul Janet proposed something like this in the nineteenth century.
Our perception of time, he suggested, may be proportional to the amount of life we have already lived.
It is an appealing idea.
For a five-year-old, waiting a year for something is almost unimaginable. It represents 20 percent of the child's entire existence.
For someone who has lived seventy-five years, twelve months amount to barely more than one percent.
But mathematics is only part of the story.
William James offered another explanation in The Principles of Psychology.
Young lives are filled with novelty. First school. First bicycle. First kiss. First journey without one's parents. First job. First home.
The brain has work to do.
It notices things.
And because it notices them, it remembers them.
Later, life can become more repetitive. Monday resembles Tuesday. This September resembles last September. The morning routine is familiar. We drive the same roads, shop in the same stores and sit in the same chair.
When little distinguishes one day from another, fewer landmarks are placed in memory.
And without landmarks, the road behind us appears shorter.
Two Kinds of Time
This produces one of the delightful paradoxes of human perception.
There is time while we are living it, and there is time when we remember it.
They are not the same.
Sit in an airport for three hours after your flight has been delayed and time crawls.
Take a three-hour walk through a city you have never visited and the afternoon disappears.
Yet several months later, something curious may happen.
The airport wait has almost vanished from memory. There was nothing much to remember.
But the walk through the unfamiliar city has expanded. There was the old man with the dog. The tiny bakery. The church around the corner. The woman hanging washing from a balcony. The smell of coffee. The unexpected square. The conversation with a stranger.
Both experiences occupied three hours of clock time.
Only one became three hours of life.
That distinction may be more important than we realize.
The Pandemic Experiment
COVID inadvertently conducted an enormous experiment in human time perception.
Days lost their landmarks.
Monday became Tuesday became Thursday. Work entered the home. Restaurants closed. Trips disappeared. Meetings moved onto screens. The small rituals by which we unconsciously divided our lives were suddenly gone.
Researchers subsequently described widespread time disorientation during the pandemic.
Some people felt that time slowed dramatically. Others thought it accelerated. Many experienced the peculiar combination of both.
A day could feel interminable while you were living it.
And an entire month could disappear when you looked back.
That is not contradictory.
Boredom makes present time feel slow.
Repetition leaves few memories, making retrospective time appear short.
The pandemic gave millions of people the worst of both worlds: long days and short years.
And Then Came the Phone
There may be another distortion occurring now.
Consider the empty moments that once existed throughout a normal day.
Waiting for an elevator. Standing in line. Sitting at a café waiting for someone. Riding on a train. Waiting for the doctor. Sitting on a park bench.
Once, we simply waited. We watched. We thought. We became bored.
Today, almost instinctively, the hand reaches into the pocket.
The phone appears.
A message. An email. A headline. A photograph. Another photograph. A short video. Another video. Scroll. Swipe. Click.
Five minutes disappear.
Then twenty.
Recent time-perception research discussed by Mike Mariani suggests that our brains may judge duration partly by registering changes in what we perceive. At the same time, retrospective duration depends heavily upon memories - and the endless succession of digital fragments may provide stimulation without leaving many distinctive autobiographical memories behind.
That is a remarkable possibility.
We may be filling more of our time while remembering less of it.
Our days are crowded with information but strangely poor in landmarks.
The Importance of Doing Nothing
Perhaps boredom has been unfairly maligned.
We have turned almost every unoccupied minute into a problem requiring a solution.
Waiting must be filled. Silence must be filled. A train journey must be filled.
Even walking down the street may require headphones, a podcast, or a telephone conversation.
But an unoccupied mind notices things.
The clouds. A bird. A conversation at the next table. The architecture above the shopfronts. A dog waiting impatiently for its owner. The face of a stranger.
Perhaps these apparently insignificant observations are not wasted time at all.
Perhaps they are what give time texture.
There is a lovely irony here. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to extend life.
We exercise, watch our diets, take medications and undergo medical examinations in the hope of acquiring more years.
But there may be another way of making a life seem longer.
Put more life into the years we already have.
Travel and the Expansion of Time
This may explain one of the great pleasures of travel.
Travel interrupts routine.
Suddenly everything requires attention.
Which street? Which train? What is that building? What is that bird? What does that word mean? Why do people eat dinner so late here? Why is everyone sitting facing the street? Why does this village look different from the one twenty kilometers away?
The brain wakes up.
A week in an unfamiliar place can generate more distinct memories than a month at home.
Perhaps that is why a journey can feel extraordinarily long when remembered later. It has acquired density.
The days have edges.
Photography Does Something Similar
Photography - especially street photography - can be another way of slowing time.
A photographer cannot simply look. A photographer must see.
Light. Gesture. Expression. Juxtaposition. Color. Shadow. Relationships between strangers.
The tiny dramas taking place everywhere around us.
Photography converts an ordinary walk into an exercise in attention.
And attention may be one of the secret ingredients of a long life - not necessarily a longer biological life, but a life that feels fuller in retrospect.
Perhaps that is why photographs can become such powerful anchors. A single image can reopen an afternoon that would otherwise have disappeared.
Not merely what happened.
But how it felt to be there.
The Third Act
There is a temptation as we grow older to regard accelerating time as inevitable.
Another birthday. Another Christmas. Another year gone.
Where did the time go?
Perhaps that is the wrong question.
The better question might be:
What made this year different from the one before it?
A new place. A new friendship. A new skill. A book written. A photograph taken. A conversation with someone whose life is completely unlike our own. A bird we have never seen before. A street we have never walked. A question we have never thought to ask.
Novelty need not mean climbing Everest. It simply requires breaking the smooth surface of routine sufficiently for the brain to say:
Remember this.
Making Time Visible Again
We cannot slow the clock.
And we certainly cannot persuade it to run backwards.
But perhaps we have more influence over our experience of time than we imagine.
Put the phone away occasionally. Walk somewhere unfamiliar. Sit at a café and do absolutely nothing. Watch people. Travel. Learn. Photograph. Write. Talk to strangers. Take a different road home.
Allow yourself to be bored.
Above all, pay attention.
Because perhaps the tragedy is not that time passes quickly.
Time has always passed at the same speed.
The tragedy would be to allow it to pass unnoticed.
And maybe that is the real secret to slowing down a human life.
We cannot manufacture more time.
But we can create more memories per year.
Further Reading
Mike Mariani. Your perception of time is, in fact, warped. https://www.noemamag.com/your-perception-of-time-is-in-fact-warped/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter&user_id=69d58cc5b1876a1b150c7424\
Paul Janet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Janet
William James. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Psychology
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