The Passage of Time & Parsimony of Attention

Much of my life I have heard people, especially those in their middle years, assert that, for them, time had accelerated incredibly, their children were zooming into maturity, the years passing in eye blinks, and so on and so forth. It is a cliché.

My experience has not supported this claim at all. Whatever happened last week seems to me to be a substantial distance behind me. Changes arise constantly. situations shift, overturn and become new in an endless stream. I seem to live a lifetime each calendar year.

I have no idea why others experience their lives so much differently than I do. I suspect it has much to do with just paying attention, with attaching importance to one's thoughts and actions, rather than sinking them in oblivion as if one's life were a treadmill of trivialities. I feel like there is always something right there in front of me to engage with, that is worth my full attention. But then, I really don't understand those people who claim to be speed-skating through life.

I'm curious to hear the experiences of others in this regard.

I was 11 years older last week

This phenomenon varies depending on what's going on in my life and how I'm dealing with it shits relative man

I will say 2012 feels like ten years ago

I agree Aimless. I think a lot of people in our society seek anaesthesia after their late 20s - hanging around people with similar views and life experiences, listening to the same music, pursuing the same sports and hobbies, watching similar movies, etc. That feels like death to me. Staying in "seek mode" is kind of exhausting but you feel more alive.

when yr young, the years are pretty regimented: there's school, and perhaps university, and first real job, and maybe you move around a bit, and maybe you get married. you can say 'this event happened while i was doing this'. if you have children, this gauge of time may reset to their events.

as someone merely trying to mentally survive each day, i can say that things do run together. my last six years are kind of an undifferentiated blur, so it's sometimes surprising to realize that i'm 45.

22 years ago when i lived in alaska i had a 40yo coworker with three kids who said the best thing about getting older was that you lost the existential angst. that turned out to be true for neither of us

aimless are you high rn

https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/

That thing is fatuous bullshit, as if you reference a time period to the entire duration of your life.

Lol

nah, not high. I wrote that just before supper, so I hadn't even had my glass of red wine, yet. It's just that I keep feeling like life is long and enormously full and interesting, while I keep hearing about other people who don't seem to feel that way at all. It nags at me, so I thought I'd use ilx as a sounding board on the matter.

i judge how old I feel by how I react to 69 Boyz "Tootsee Roll"

Time definitely feels elastic and to me it depends on how much BS I am dealing with at work. You sleep 1/3, work 1/3 and that sliver you get in-between seems to go by so quick. Sometimes days and work weeks are agonizingly long and then you look up and five months of a year have past. I got projects I'm working on for myself and you look back and it was 14-15 months since you started, but part of it is that you only spend a few hours a week on it, so the time is not condensed, it is spread over a calendar - yet it does not feel that way. I do find it somewhat strange.

xp

I'm not really talking about how old I feel. There's no question I'm old, especially by ilx standards. I notice it. I am tired and I'm slowing down. But time is not flying by me. A week still paces by, full of incidents small and large and by week's end I know I've been places, thought things, had many experiences. If I have another 25 years in me, I expect it will continue at this stately and regular pace. Is that weird or is it 'normal'? I can't say. I only know this is how it feels to me.