Sorry blog, I haven’t updated you for a while!
It’s hard to believe that the last post was almost two years ago. Maybe I have been lazy, maybe nothing came to mind. Writing has always been difficult for me, but I’m not giving up this blog. I guess it’s time to pick a topic and write something. The topic is going to be: Time.
Where did the time go?
The Steam Awards event is going on right now. It always scares me. The last event always feels like not very long ago. It is a reminder that a whole year is already gone, again.
To explain why time goes so fast, I have heard people say that “the subjective perception of the passing of time tends to speed up with increasing age in humans (Time perception – Wikipedia)”. Some people also say that, to a 10-year-old, one year is 1/10 of their life, but to a 30-year-old it’s only 1/30, so one year does not appear as long to older people. I’m not sure what to believe, but recently I’ve started to think that time goes so fast because every day is so full, leaving no time to be bored.
As I grow older, time becomes more and more precious. I can’t stop getting old, I can only try not to waste the limited time and youth. In this day and age, it’s easy to make use of every moment if you just have a phone. Two hours in commute everyday? Fill them with audio books! Need to cook and do dishes? Listen to podcasts or TED-Talks at the same time! Waiting on the microwave? Pull out the phone and read Morning Brew (daily news)! The guilt of wasting time has become heavy. I’d feel bad if I browsed Reddit for more than 15 minutes. I also hesitate to post anything on Reddit or social media, worrying they would hook me in and I would keep thinking about my posts.
Video games, though—call me biased, call me stubborn—I never think gaming is a waste of time (unless the game sucks).
“Gaming is LIFE! LMAO.”
My DNA
I have heard that kids these days are able to split their attention. They would multi-task using multiple screens/devices at the same time. They watch videos in 1.25x speed. I find it fascinating. I wonder if time goes fast for them since their minds are so occupied.
The minds never rest.
Speaking of minds being occupied, a few years ago, I was brainstorming about something for weeks. I tried to brainstorm whenever I got a quiet moment. In the shower, in the bus, in the car, whenever, I’d spin up the brainstorming mode in my head. The more I did it, the faster I could get into that state of mind. Then even if I was just waiting in line for customer service, I would load the brainstorming mode.
I enjoy doing creative work, so it is nice to be able to do more brainstorming, but on the other hand, I worry that something might have gone wrong—it seems I cannot stop my mind anymore, and time seems to have sped up.
It’s like a muscle has become tense and won’t relax. I find myself often pondering about things whenever it’s quiet. I feel a swelling sensation in the back of my head. If it’s in the middle of the night, I would have trouble falling back to sleep, unless I start meditating, which takes a lot of will power.
It wasn’t like that before. Maybe the brain is like muscles, doing exercises can activate it.
What was I brainstorming about at the time? I can’t remember.
Where did the time go?
“Every day is so full” is only half of the reason why time goes fast, the other half is “every day is so dull”.
When people say “it was a long day today”, they mean that many things happened in the day making the day seem long, and time seem slow. When we think about the past in retrospect, how long a period of time feels is greatly affected by how many memories there are. The more eventful and stimulating the day is, the longer the day appears in our memory.
While we are keeping our minds busy these days, what we are doing may not be memorable at all. For example, binge-watching Netflix could occupy our minds for the whole day, but later when we think back, it was just a single piece of memory about a nerve-numbing day. If for some reason, each time we finished an episode, we go to a different friend’s house to watch the next, then the day suddenly appears much longer.
I guess I can say that, for most people, adult life tend to be dull. For me, every weekday is like:
Get up > get ready for work > one hour commute > get busy at work, and soon enough it’s home time > one hour commute > cook, eat, dishes, chores > free time to do whatever before bed.
I don’t really have much control over other parts of the day besides my free time, so they are going to look similar day after day. On average, I have about 2 hours of free time each day. Dividing by 24, that’s less than 10% of a day. What difference can I make with the 10%? It’s at the end of the day and I am already tired.
Because everyday looks the more or less the same, life feels dull and not memorable. It’s so dull that I just want to set my mind to auto pilot and sleep through the week.
You see, the mind is both full and blank—full because we keep feeding it information, fearing short-term boredom, and blank because life is so monotonous that we yearn to shut down our minds, fearing long-term boredom.
If you don’t pay attention to the passing of time, time does slip away before you know it. Sometimes it’s already half past Thursday, but I don’t remember the last three days, and Sunday feels like it’s only yesterday. It may sounds nice because I can get to the next weekend quickly, but it’s scary when I realize it’s already half way into the year, three quarters into the year, or end of the year.
Time to conclude
Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant there, I just wanted to make the point. I do think that my life is at its best point ever, and it will still get better and better.
In short, I think time goes fast because we want to avoid both short-term boredom and long-term boredom, so we keep reaching for entertainment, while not creating enough meaningful memories to get more life out of the limited time we are given (not speaking for everybody).
If what I was saying didn’t make sense, check out Michael’s video Illusion of Time on his YouTube Channel Vsauce.