"The Years Pass Like Months." Why Does Time Speed Up?
When I was in my mid-twenties, I worked as a low-level graphic designer and technician (Mac nerd) at a printing plant in a tiny town in Nova Scotia, Canada. I made hundreds of newspaper ads for a couple of years, then graduated to pizza flyers and fishing equipment catalogs.
Places like this pretty much don’t exist now. Guys would smoke cigarettes while standing beside literal tons of highly flammable newsprint. Some folks were clearly alcoholics and that was ignored so long it didn’t get out of hand.
The guy who serviced the vending machines was a fun character. He had friends at the plant and dropped in during his breaks. He was a huge, powerful, big-bearded man with a potbelly that stretched thin the mid-section of his t-shirt.
I would guess now that he was probably 60-ish – or maybe 50-ish with a lotta miles on him.
He was a light-hearted guy who loved small talk and jokes. But one day he was earnest and I’ve remembered what he said ever since.
“Time speeds up when you’re older. It’s all so fast now. The years… they pass like months.”
I’d never heard of such a thing. Time was… time, right? You get older and older faster and faster? It gave me an existential chill. Especially because I instantly knew he was right.
As a kid, every day was a long and winding adventure. A year was an infinity.
By the time I’d heard this guy’s insight, my thirtieth year was approaching and I was noticing how quickly the odometer was spinning. As the decades have passed since it’s just gotten faster.
Time accelerates as we age. Days blend together. Did we go to the play gym yesterday or the day before? A week begins then it’s over. You get used to being in your 40s, then you’re in your 50s.
Each year of your life passes a bit more quickly than the one before.
I’d never considered that I could do anything about this.
I’ve been listening to Moshe Bar’s fantastic book Mindwandering and he thinks you actually can do something about it.
Why do the years pass more quickly as we get older?
Bar thinks one of the reasons time speeds up is because we experience less and less novelty. We’ve seen so much that we engage less and less with the real world and spend more and more time in our mind’s perception of the world. We increasingly look at our mental map, not the territory around us.
I’ll also add: we vaporize thousands of hours on phones, TV, and video games. This is huge.
Bar believes when you spend less time lost in your interior monologue, time slows down.
One way to do this is through mindfulness meditation. (If you’re curious, just search. There are loads of resources out there.)
But it’s even simpler than that. We all know how to quiet our minds. Stop talking to yourself.
When you notice your mind jabbering away about nonsense, let it go. Begin to recognize when your mind is churning and let the thoughts pass. Don’t say anything in your head.
Your mind will always churn, that’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s trying to make meaning and plot your future. You can only reign it in.
We all have to work, parent, study, caretake, et cetera. Sometimes you need to talk in your head while doing these things. But when you don’t have to, don’t.
How do you slow down time?
The answer is simple: think less, experience more.
This can feel boring. Accept the initial discomfort.
Try this out this week. Quiet your mind. Slow it down. It isn’t easy to do, but it is simple to work at and improve.
Oh, and more important than slowing time down: it feels better. It’s a better life.
Love,
K