IxnayOnTheTimmay (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ixnayonthetimma) wrote,@ 2008-04-08 23:40:00 |
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| Entry tags: | cat, life, perception of time |
Tempus Fugit...
Where does the time go? It seems everyone is always looking for time..they ask others if they have the time. Do you have the time? I don't have the time, but I know we all share the time. There is only one time to go around, and I think we all just get a little piece of it. A short time. A little while. Once the time is used, you can't get it back, so I have to wonder why it is we waste it on things that don't matter. There is too little time to ponder that.
Why is it as kids, time seemed to go by much more slowly than time does now? Stephen Hawking said in A Brief History of Time that one's perception of a unit of time is a ratio of that unit to the number of units that person has lived. So an hour to a one year old is 1:8760 where an hour to a 60 year old is 1:525600. Whether this is true, all I know is that as a kid, a week seemed like a long time to me, a month longer still and a year was unfathomable. And I don't recall that time itself passed any slower than it does now, I just feel as though the day lasted a lot longer when I was a kid.
I have a few theories about why that is. The bad thing about having any theories nowadays is that usually someone else already came up with them, so the thought is not genuinely original. Notwithstanding, my theory about the sped-up sense of time is that when you're a child, you have less responsibilities than when you're an adult. As a child, your main concerns are keeping the room clean and surviving the six hours at school. Beyond that, a kid's imagination is free to drift off wherever it is kids' imaginations drift off to. As an adult, there are much more things that need to be done that occupy the same narrow 24-hour timespan. The 6 to 7-hour school day is replaced with 9 to 10 hours devoted exclusively to work, and then there are all the other fun things that fill up the rest of the balance, such as going to the post office, buying groceries, washing the laundry, preparing food, keeping one's car in working order, writing out checks to people you don't know, making sure one has the latest and greatest cell phone or other mobile Internets device. And on top of that, we still have to keep our room clean!
For each minute adults spend on doing stuff they have to do, they also want a minute doing stuff they want to do. Leisure time becomes spread more thinly as an adult, because most childrens' lives are spent in leisure nowadays. The lack of as much "free time" as an adult is, I think, the key to why time seems to speed by; it is during this down time that people are free to reflect on life and ponder the state of things, even if just subconsciously while watching So You Think You Can Dance. There is less time for vegging out in adulthood, so we perceive that as less available time during the day at large.
I wonder if there is a hardware upgrade that can increase the front-side bus of my brain so that time can pass more slowly. It'd be nice to have the increased reaction speed, as well...
