REally feeling the sands of time time slipping out from under my feet lately. I can’t believe it will be the last week of July soon. It feels like Canada Day was only yesterday, and summer started the day before that, and my birthday was just a week before that.

They say that once you are over the hill, you pick up speed. But what they do not mention is that at the bottom is the grave and most of us would actually prefer to get there as slowly as possible.

Now I try to tell myself that this is all just a trick of memory and perception. Logically speaking, Every day has exactly the same number of minutes in it that every other day in my life has had. I have the same number of waking hours, more or less. The minutes pass at a minute per minute, no matter what my subjective sense of time tries to tell me. Time has not, in fact, sped up.

This is rock solid scientifically and logically indisputably true.

And I also know the source of the error. As we grow older, our minds grow stronger and broader and deeper, and are hence able to grasp larger units of time all at once. When you are a small child, five minutes seems like an incomprehensibly long time. You do not yet have the mental faculties to encompass it. You cannot imagine what things will be like after such a long period of time. You simply cannot imagine that far into the future. Your frontal lobes lack sufficient complexity.

But as we get older, our frontal lobes develop, and we can grasp larger and larger units of time, and feel comfortable that we can know what the world will be like and what the future will hold for that amount of time.

The problem is that as these chunks of time grow larger, our brain does not fully compensate and keeps thinking of time as the time it takes for a certain number of chunks to pass.

And if the amount of subjective time it takes X number of chunks to pass stays the same, but the amount of real time increases, it makes it seem like time is passing faster.

The amount of time that passes in between the points where we are aware of time, the points where we subjectively speaking “look at the clock”, grows larger, and it feels like we are accelerating, and we go from impatient youths for whom nothing can possibly happen fast enough to grumpy oldsters who want everything to just slow the hell down for a minute so we can catch up.

And this is not entirely illusion. There is a cost to this increasing complexity of sentience. Those points where we “look at the clock” are also our points of decision and reaction. And when you are getting fewer of those in a day, you quite legitimately feel like things are happening faster than you can react to them.

You have fewer moments in which to adjust to change, and hence, absorbing change becomes harder and harder. In fact, at some point, you simply stop being able to keep up. The adjustment rate lags behind the rate of change, and you develop an adjustment backlog that gradually comes to stretch off into infinity with no hope of ever catching up.

And this is why the older people get, the more conservative they become. They will violently and vehemently resist the change that is happening now because they still have not adjusted to the changes from last month, last year, or last decade.

This is also what leads to their overpowering nostalgia for a previous era, once that seems pristine and perfect to them now. They will even say “Back then, things made sense!”

Their error, of course, is thinking that this has something to do with the nature of the world back then, rather than the nature (and content) of the brain perceiving it.

But I have gone on at length before, I believe, about the error of being unable to accept one’s own subjectivity. The lens is not dirty, dammit, the world is!

I find myself prone to this sort of nostalgia myself. I find myself increasingly feeling as though the 1970’s were a time of innocent, goodwill, understanding, and cultural wonders. And anything I see with a strong Seventies vibe gives me a wonderful flood of warm, gratifying nostalgia.

Of course, by sheer coincidence, that happens to be the era of the first seven years of my childhood. What a lucky man I am, to have had my childhood in the one era which was, in a purely scientific and objective sense, was the time when the world was absolutely perfect in all ways and all deviations from that one perfect golden era are a filthy nightmarish deviation from perfection that can only possibly be motivated by the purest and most malign evil.

Luckily, I have not seriously gone that far… yet. I cannot guarantee that I will not end up there. I bet a lot of people who laughed at their parents and said “Thank goodness I will never be like them!” ended up there just the same.

So I will not pretend that I am somehow immune. I have devoted myself to objectivity my entire life, but I am still a human being. The emotional power of nostalgia is incredible. It is like a drug that you can administer yourself with just a picture, a TV show, or a song.

I do not wonder that, given the seemingly out of control world that old people face, they decide that they simply want to leave the modern world and live in the world of their nostalgia.

The problem happens when they insist that the whole world be somehow magically returned to the world of their nostalgia, and try to drag everybody back there with them.

Luckily, it is impossible for them to succeed.

They sure can slow down progress trying, though.