Our relationship with time changes over… um. time.

When I was a kid, nothing was fast enough. Tiny delays felt massive. Postponement of something i wanted was agony. I always wanted things to go faster.

With my hypercharged brain, it was like I was a Pentium with a custom OSand the world was running on a 286 running Windows 1.

As I got older, this effect lessened, and around when I was in my last year of high school, I synced up with reality and it was awesome.

Things felt like they happened at more or less exactly the right time. The days felt like they were the right length. I still got impatient about things sometimes but for the most part, the glorious combination of the lengthening of my sense of time and my hormones FINALLY slacking off a tad from their pubescent high water mark meant that I went through my days finally freed from that goddamned fire burning in me.

We didn’t start the fire, by the way. It’s been always burning since the world starts turning. We didn’t start the fire.

That’s actually some pretty clunky phrasing. It’s been always turning since the world starts turning? Yikes. But it’s a Billy Joel song, so it doesn’t sound wrong when he says it because his songs are so musically beautiful.

Anyhow, I am convinced that being in sync with time is one of the reasons my college years were the happiest time of my life. Not the only reason – having cool nerdy friends to do fun nerdy stuff with quite often for the first time in my life was the big one – but the time thing sure helped.

But of course, that does not last forever and by the time I was in my early 30’s I was just starting to get that “stop the world till I can catch up” feeling.

It wasn’t too bad at first. More amusing than anything else. When I felt it, I would just smile and give my head a shake then jump right back into the fray.

But it just got worse and worse with time until some time in my late 30’s, I started to feel pretty panicky about the whole thing. Subjectively speaking, it seemed like everything was speeding up. But I was savvy enough to know that I was slowing down.

Still, the panic was real, and so I dealt with the issue the only way I know : I thought about it obsessively till I figured it out to my satisfaction.

That’s when I started seriously thinking about our sense of time. ^[1] It’s not something I have ever heard talked about in the media. Not directly. And I have only ever found passing references to it in psychology texts.

Hence my not having a decent name for it.

And that’s when I had my crisis where I got totally freaked out by this sense of subjective acceleration and started to wonder whether the rest of my life was going to be like a slideshow where each picture is further apart in time than the previous one.

Lucky, it was a productive crisis^[2] because that’s what led me to realize that this sense of accelation was an illusion caused by our minds having more and more memories to navigate and that slowing things down.

The days have exactly the same number of minutes as always. Time passes at the exact same rate. There is still the same amount of time to get things done.

Time – the real, objective kind – can’t be changed. It’s as regular and logical as anything can be in this Universe.

So you can feel free to ignore the silly sensation of acceleration, knowing it to be just a quirk of how memory works and possibly the fact that we live a lot longer than when we evolved and therefore our minds are not optimized for storing, indexing, and accessing the amount of memories we accumulate by the time we are 40.

That thought is what has gotten me this far. It’s the thought I use to beat back the darkness when that feeling of panic and helplessness rears its ugly head.

As patient readers know, I am the guy who, as a kid, conquered his fear of the dark via the relentless application of logic via telling myself over and over that there is nothing there in the dark that was not there in the light.

Thus, I conquered my fear via mental strength and discipline.

Well, and the fact that I was just plain fucking sick of being scared. That’ s a very important factor in a lot of my life changing moments. I reach the point where my growing irritation at something ignites into full blown being pissed off by it, and then I make big changes with that energy and the resulting kamikaze fanaticism that means I will do whatever the fuck it takes to defeat “the enemy”.

That mode is kind of scary when seen close up. Sure, it seems pretty awesome when it’s fueling important life changes, but that same thing could lead me to doing some pretty fucked up shit if it attached to a person or institution.

Being someone who is literally capable of anything has its downsides.

Dammit, I have gotten lost in my own asides again. Where was I?

Oh right, time.

As it stands now, I feel like I have a handle on the whole false acceleration thing. At least it’s keeping pace with the slowing of my reflexes. And I take great comfort in knowing that slower is not necessarily stupider. In many ways – the most important ways – I feel like I am smarter than I have ever been.

I might not be lghtning fast any more – or at least, not reliably – but I have so much more insight and wisdom and above all depth to my intelligence that I don’t feel like I have really lost anything.

Intelligence is great and all.

But wisdom is worth its weight in gold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.