I may be losing my mind.\u00a0 Or it may hormonal (I’ve been going through “the change” for about three years now).\u00a0 It could also just be a normal part of aging about which I didn’t receive adequate warning.<\/p>\n
I’m talking about “time.”\u00a0 Time changes as you age.\u00a0 It moves faster.\u00a0 This is not a secret.\u00a0 Since time immemorial, the old have warned the young not to waste their youth.\u00a0 We are mortal, corporeal, and temporal. Tempus fugit<\/em>. We’ve always known this, and yet…<\/p>\n Kitty Carlisle, who was old for a long time, famously said, “You know you\u2019re getting older when every day seems like Monday.”\u00a0 We don’t think enough about the ramifications that many of us exist in different time zones, even as we work and live together.<\/p>\n I am not so much asking where did the time go, as I am amazed by its acceleration.\u00a0 In a normal day in my twenties or even thirties, I might get up, go running or do some other exercise, read a paper, have breakfast, all this and somehow be at work on time.\u00a0 Then after work there would be socializing.\u00a0 Sometimes even activities that extended into the next day.\u00a0 Still the rent got paid — by which I mean checks were sent, without even using the “time saving” Internet, but written and mailed.\u00a0 Other tasks were also taken care of.\u00a0 Yet now, I start on an assignment and the day is gone.\u00a0 It used to be that dull tasks felt like that they took forever. \u00a0Now every time I look at a clock, hours have passed no matter what I was doing, and I wonder, “Where did the time go?”<\/p>\n It feels more and more wrong.\u00a0 Like I’m in an episode of Twilight Zone<\/em> or on that island in Lost<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0People with certain psychiatric conditions talk of “losing time,” but I can account for my time. It’s not really lost, just gone.\u00a0 Maybe there’s always a generation gap because the old and the young are experiencing a completely different sense of time.\u00a0 Maybe it’s a miracle we can even see <\/em>each other.<\/p>\n Is any of this making sense?<\/p>\n I noticed early on that things were getting faster.\u00a0 Even as a teenager it was clear to me that summers were much shorter than they used to be. At some point in my twenties, I recalled a party and realized it had happened, five years before, which was astonishing. But by the time I was thirty, there were people I hadn’t seen in ten years.\u00a0 Now it’s twenty, thirty? \u00a0And they always show up in Facebook, and you either don’t remember them at all OR it’s like yesterday.<\/p>\n Time’s winged chariot is approaching quickly.\u00a0 The issue is not that I (probably) have fewer tomorrows than yesterdays, it’s that the remaining tomorrows will feel shorter and shorter.\u00a0 In the way that we experience time, childhood is not our first 12 years, it’s probably closer to half of how we feel <\/em>time even if we live to be a hundred. \u00a0I’m going to coin a phrase here, I think, “affective time.”<\/em> Affective time is not time on the clock.\u00a0 It’s time as we experience it.<\/p>\n Affective time is why an infant panics when his mother is gone, but may attach to a babysitter within minutes.\u00a0 Affective time is why you may remember how you spent your childhood waiting till you would be a “teenager” like your cool big brother four years your senior, and it felt like you were never, ever going to reach that goal.<\/p>\n The implications are this: At twenty you may look ahead and imagine another sixty years of activity.\u00a0 You may think that if you are lucky, and the genes are good, life will be long.\u00a0 It won’t be.\u00a0 You’ll never have enough time. It’s almost irrelevant if you die at forty or eighty because after forty every time you blink, it’s your birthday.<\/p>\n So here’s my very unscientific imagining of an 80-year life span divided into affective time<\/em>.<\/p>\n Age 0-3:\u00a0 3 chronological years =\u00a0 Time moves so slowly we can’t even measure it.\u00a0 Everything feels like forever.\u00a0 The good part is, you won’t remember most of it.\u00a0 The bad part is whatever you experience will somehow stay with you and influence who you are for the rest of your life.<\/p>\n Age 3-13:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 11 chronological years = \u00a0\u00a025 years in affective time<\/p>\n Age 14-24: \u00a011 chronological years = \u00a0\u00a020 years in affective time<\/p>\n Age 25-35: \u00a011 chronological years = \u00a0\u00a015 years in affective time<\/p>\n Age 36-46 \u00a0\u00a011 chronological years = \u00a0\u00a010 years in affective time*<\/p>\n Age 47-57 \u00a0\u00a011 chronological years = \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a05 years in affective time<\/p>\n Age 58-80\u00a0\u00a0 23 chronological years =\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a05 years in affective time.**<\/p>\n *Middle age is the point at which affective time begins to move more quickly than actual chronological time. Keep in mind that the above chart is an estimate. Affective time accelerates constantly, so between the chronological age of 36 – 40 affective time may still be slower than chronological time, but from 41- 46, it may begin to speed ahead of it.<\/p>\n **If you live past 80, it’ll be happening so fast, you’ll get motion sickness standing still.<\/p>\n Mortality is kind of a bitch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I may be losing my mind.\u00a0 Or it may hormonal (I’ve been going through “the change” for about three years now).\u00a0 It could also just be a normal part of aging about which I didn’t receive adequate warning. I’m talking about “time.”\u00a0 Time changes as you age.\u00a0 It moves faster.\u00a0 This is not a secret.\u00a0 … Continue reading Tempus fugit or in search of affective-time<\/span>