The Binary Circumstance

You know how when you take a drive to someplace new it seems to take longer to get there than it does to return?

Those of us who are old enough have experienced age-related time-warp where time seems to pass faster as we get older. And the rate of acceleration seems exponential not linear. The older you get the faster time passes.

Remember how when you were little kid and every day, every hour seemed to pass so slowly? Now that I’ve crossed the 50 mark, and it’s May already, I’m wondering what happened to the first four months of the year. They went by so quickly, I almost didn’t notice.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has a post about subjective perceptions of the passage of time. About the asymetrical perception of time on a trip he says:

When taking the route for the first time, you are engaged in an act of problem solving. Subjective time passes more slowly (this has been validated by various experiments).

But think about all the times that you’ve been working on solving a problem and you “lose track of the time.” Think about the times you’re really into doing a painting or writing, really enjoying a movie or under pressure at work to meet a deadline. Time goes by very quickly, too quickly it seems. It’s as if there’s not enough of it.

An old saw says, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” It does indeed. Not enough time for having fun.

But suffering, fear and pain can seem to last forever. Too much time for suffering.

Tyler quotes Jay Ingram:

“When your mind is focused on something other than the passage of time, you are fooled into thinking that less time has passed.”

If I understand that correctly, when I’m focused on something other than time, an event that took thirty minutes by the clock could seem like five in my mind.

I’m not sure about that.

I remember when I was in San Francisco during the 1989 earthquake. It only lasted a few minutes but felt like forever. “When will it stop?!” It was a moment of pure terror and it felt like a lifetime. Once it was over, there was a lot of waiting for lights to come on and for aftershocks to stop. That lasted for days. During that phase time was still slow to pass but not as slow as during the quake itself. As things got back to normal, time sped up again. At least it seemed to.

I think that during the quake I was focused on all the movement around me, how the house was vibrating so violently that I couldn’t even walk across the floor. I was paralized and caught in the realization that this earthquake was not like any I had ever experienced before. It was BIG! And the sound! My God, the roar that was all around me. It felt like it was the end of the world.

Maybe wondering when it will end, or if it will end is being focused on time, which would make a small moment seem much bigger. But I don’t recall that that was in the forefront of my conscioussness. I was more concerned with if I was going live, if the house was going to shatter into pieces and fall down with me inside it.

Perceptions of time definitely have something to do with focus but also with how much pleasure or pain is involved.

When I moved from San Francisco after living there for 23 years to my new home in the Seattle area, I noticed a big change in my perception of time. In San Francisco, I was pretty much into the same routine every day and the years were racing by. Each day was familiar and I was also getting older, so those were at least two factors affecting my perception of time.

Once in a new environment, where there were new problems to solve, new challenges, new people to meet, time slowed down considerably. My first year seemed like my longest year in many years. But years are all the same length, aren’t they? Now that everything is more familiar and I have my routines, time has sped up again.

It seems that sometimes when there are new challenges and problems to solve, the time seems to go more slowly. In other cases, like when I’m focused on fixing something or even writing for this blog, the time always seems in short supply.

I think one of the problems with getting older is that our lives become so predictable and structured. We made them that way because we wanted security in a nest, a steady income, a sense that life could be managed and controlled. With our physical needs taken care of, our survival seems more assured. But our life goes by much more quickly then when there were so many more things that had to be learned.

Subjective perceptions of time seem dependent on a variety of factors. It seems that if we want the feeling of a longer life, we should fill our lives with new things, especially pain and a sense of terror. If we want the feeling that time is running away from us we should be constantly stimulated by a revolving assortment of familiar pleasures. It can’t be the same pleasure all the time, that would be boring and you know how slowly times passes when you’re bored.

I’m also wondering how regulation and nanny states fit into all this. As our lives become more predictable and all our basic needs are assured, won’t it seem that our lives sail by? Won’t we be robbed of time?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2004 at 2:00 am and is filed under Government/Politics, Weblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a reply. Pinging is currently not allowed.