The Holiday Paradox- Why Time Speeds Up

Time seems to be speeding up and it has me squinting my eyes at the calendar with greater regularity. I’m usually not baffled that it’s already May, for instance, but I am baffled that it’s somehow the year 2019. We’re living in the future, and time just keeps gaining speed.

The year 1989 is just as far away to us as the year 1959 was to people in 1989, and 1989 doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. When I was but a wee lad in 1989, people born in the mid 1950s were the age I am now. Confusing, and fascinating. Time, man.

After finishing this article, editing it, cutting out most of it, re-doing it, editing it again, giving up, having a beer, and eventually re-writing it, I decided to break down and do some actual research. It turns out that some real scientists wrote an article about why time speeds up and they basically said what I say here, only before I said it. BUT, I said it before I read what they said. Follow? Follow.

I feel partly vindicated that my ramblings are backed by science, but also disappointed to once again realize doing a little bit of upfront research would have saved me several hours of self-loathing, and would have made this article much easier to finish.

Anyway, they call this phenomenon The Holiday Paradox. The paradox being that time flies when you’re having fun, but when you look back on fun events they seem to last longer than mundane events. An afternoon at an amusement park goes by faster than a day filing spreadsheets, but when you think back on it, the amusement park day takes up a larger portion of your memory than the spreadsheet day.

Turns out a lot of people have already written about this whole time-speeds-up-as-we-age, thing. Never mind all that. You’re here now and I have drawings.

We all remember being kids. I don’t know why I said it all overly confident like that. I just assume we all do. I’m sure there’s a few people who have no memory of their childhood, but it’s certainly not the norm. A lot of us remember being kids.

Childhood memories are some of the strongest we’ll ever make.  The summers seemed to go on indefinitely, and the difference between being seven and being ten was so hugely significant as to almost not even be the same lifetime.  Time stood still.

Contrast that time in your life with how quickly the last several years have gone.  I’m only thirty-two and I can already feel the gravitational pull of time speeding up.  When you talk with people near the end of their life they all seem to say the same thing: “I was young, then I ate dinner a couple times, now I’m old.”

Why Time Speeds Up

Why does time speed up, and is there anything we can do about it? If you’re into reading blogs you’re probably well past the ‘being a kid’ stage in life, which means sometime very soon you’ll notice that you’re actually eighty-five years old and it’s the year 2043.

I think the MAIN reason it feels like time is speeding up is because we stop making as many new memories the older we get. When we don’t make new memories, we aren’t cataloguing specific events. We look back on the previous month/year/decade, and not many events stand out.

I think there are several factors that contribute to this time warp we experience as we age.

1. Most of our big life accomplishments happen in the first third of our life.
2. We run out of ‘first time’ experiences.
3. We stop learning new things.

This combination makes it harder for our brains to form new memories. The fewer memories we put in the brain bank, the more it feels like time is speeding up when we look back.

Most of our accomplishments happen in the first third of our life

Okay, so you’re born. Congratulations, baby you. You don’t really do much for the first several years except learn how to be a human. It’s overwhelming and you cry a lot. Once you’re sufficient enough to usually do basic human things, your parents put you in school. Each year you’re in an entirely different grade with different degrees of difficulty and expectations. Being a fourth grader feels way more important than being a silly first grader, and the eighth grade kids are basically adults. You change so much during the first couple decades of life that each previous year seems like a lifetime ago. Your life is constantly changing, and you’re forced to grow and adapt.

At first you accomplish something every few months-become mobile, learn to communicate, learn to use the potty, etc.- but once you reach big kid age, that tapers off to accomplishing life changing things a few times per year- first tooth loss, graduate elementary school, stay over at a friends house the entire night without wanting to go home, etc. When you reach teenager status, big life accomplishments start to get more spread out to every few years- get your drivers license, kiss a girl, graduate high school, etc. The older you get the more time passes between big life events, because an event has to be pretty large to even register as noteworthy.

Here’s a handy timeline I made to help illustrate the point.

 

Now, some of you were tempted to skip over that nice timeline picture, but it took a fair amount of doing. I’m not a great user of time, so really try and appreciate the drawing.

…

Okay. That feels like enough time.

At some point you look up and see you’ve already gone through most of life’s big events and you’re still pretty young. There’s three or four decades where the main objective is ‘career’ and ‘raising a family,’ with very few singular milestone events to separate the years. Somewhere way down the line is the big event of ‘retirement,’ and that lasts hopefully a few more decades. Then the last big event is you just die.

Having big life events to look back on makes it feel like the previous year was full and took a long time. As adults we don’t have as many big events, so looking back on the year usually means a lot of forgettable work experiences and maybe a vacation thrown in if we’re lucky.  After a few years of living this lifestyle even our vacations start to blend together.

We run out of ‘first time’ experiences

The older we get the harder it is to do something for the first time. You probably remember getting your drivers license, or your first kiss. You probably don’t remember driving to the store last month, or kissing your wife and her saying, “Honey, it’s too late for that. It’s almost 8:30.”

As a kid you’re constantly doing things for the first time. I still remember the first time my mom brought me a leftover bite of lobster from the world famous restaurant Red Lobster. I had never eaten such a fancy delicacy, albeit was wrapped in a paper towel. For the next several years I went around telling everyone lobster was my favorite food, as though I frequently could be found eating it.

Side note: It wasn't until very recently that I found out Red Lobster isn't universally considered a fancy place to eat. They have endless shrimp, cloth napkins, and some even have live lobsters in tanks near the entry. If that's not fancy to you, I don't even know what you want.

When you do something for the first time it goes in the memory bank. There’s a huge list of things you do as a kid for the first time. The older you get, the harder it is to get those ‘first time’ experiences. By the time you’ve made yourself pizza for the forty-seventh time, it stops being memorable.

Birthdays, family gatherings, trips to Walmart, Christmas, what year it currently is, all those things eventually blend together into one big adult soup.

Fun Burrito Bowl Fact: We've used the same actual calendar since 2016. Every year we make it to the end and just start right over. The dates don't even line up, and sometimes we don't have it on the right month until most of the way through the month.

We stop learning new things

In the few years that encompass childhood, we learned the basic idea of almost everything we do on a day to day basis. We learned to ride a bike, swim, not to jump off high places, not to order squid, basic directions, several ways to embarrass yourself when talking to a girl, how to handle the snack situation when you’re sleeping over at a friends house, how to build a fort, why deodorant is important, how to write in cursive, how to type, that ice cream is great, that mud puddles are less than ideal if you have to be outside for a long time, that you control whether or not stoves are hot, and how to tie your shoes so the laces won’t come undone.

Childhood was comprised mostly of downloading new information. Each thing we finally grasped seemed like a very big deal. “I’m no longer in the group of humans who CANNOT tie their shoes, I’m in the group that CAN tie their shoes.” Each new skill learned felt like a right of passage. As adults we just pay someone else to tie our shoes.

Somewhere along the way we figured out that we don’t have to learn everything. When things seem too hard to learn, we just skip them. As a kid you thought they’d keep you in sixth grade forever if you didn’t figure out how to divide 456/983,615 so you tried really hard.

As an adult you realize nobody wants a 32-year-old in the sixth grade, so they would have eventually let you leave anyway. We aren’t forced to struggle through the process of learning, so most of us don’t. Nobody is pushing us to do new exciting things, so most of us come home from work and watch tv.

In short: Time Speeds up because we’re living on auto-pilot

Now that we’re several hundred superfluous words into this article, let’s get to the point.  Time speeds up because we don’t make new memories, because we’re living on auto-pilot.  Once we become adults we essentially live the same few days, over and over. Doing that for several decades, it’s no wonder our brain has trouble differentiating one day from the next, so it doesn’t really catalogue many memories.

We know time isn’t actually speeding up, but when we look back on the year we just lived we don’t have very many unique days that stand out.

So the way to make time slow back down is to get off auto-pilot and start making new memories.  This is hard to do because it requires a lot of effort. But remember, you’ll be dead soon, so now is the only time in history you are able to give effort.

The two best ways I can think of to make new memories are 1) Do things you rarely do, and 2) Go learn some new stuff.

Sometimes it just takes a little motivation to get off the couch and go see some sites. I’ve been to the ocean a bunch of times, but it’s still a pretty rare event. Going to the ocean would certainly be more memorable than sitting at home.

A few years ago I went to a trampoline jumpy jump thing with my nephew. I still remember that day. I’d never gone to a trampoline place like that and it’s a memory I won’t soon forget. I think it’s important to specifically go out and do new stuff every once in a while. Don’t live the same day over and over until you die. Live some unique days while you’re at it, and then die.

Also, go learn new stuff. Think of all the things you kind of wonder about, but don’t really know about. Things like: How to do basic mechanic stuff, how to read sheet music proficiently, how to speak Spanish, how to play the banjo, how to grow a garden, what the deal is with American History, how does art work, how to build a house, etc. There’s so many things I don’t really understand, but they’d all be fun to learn about.

What if we each made a list of things we’d kind of like to know and then, wait for it…we went out and learned them?! Youtube is a thing now. We can just go online and learn just about anything we want. OR, we can teach ourselves. Figuring out something for yourself can be a rewarding experience.

Learning new things sucks balls because it’s frustrating and requires a lot of effort. But, doing so will lead to a fuller life. Doing things we don’t usually do requires us to get out of our comfort zones, which can be scary. People rarely die from being scared, so get out of your comfort zone and do some scary stuff. This might be going off the rails slightly. Don’t do dumb scary stuff. Do life affirming scary stuff. You are a brave and unique human, use that to your advantage.

Go team.

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