v38: Aging and Time Acceleration
Damn. I feel like I just wrote one of these annual birthday posts (v37, v36). As it turns out, the time warp “old people” have been talking about is real. Time doesn’t just march on; it accelerates from the steady cadence of marching medieval soldiers to the hypersonic speed of an F-22 fighter jet.
The topic of time acceleration seems like a good place to start since I’m diving into my annual birthday essay without the safety net of an outline.
I recently discovered an interesting hypothesis from Harvard Professor Adrian Bejan on why time seems to speed up as we age. Bejan explains that our brain’s neural networks become more complex over time. As a result, electrical signals must travel further, taking longer to reach their destinations. Additionally, as we age, our nerves accumulate damage, which increases resistance and slows down these signals even more.
Bejan suggests that this slowdown causes us to experience fewer “frames per second,” so more time passes between each mental image. This is why time seems to fly by as we age. When we’re young, each second is tightly packed with mental images. It’s like a slow-motion camera capturing thousands of frames per second, making time feel slower.
I don’t know if this explanation is accurate, but it’s interesting to think about, especially as summer starts. The season seems to come and go almost immediately now, unlike those summers as a kid that seemed to last forever.
There are plenty of other theories about time acceleration. One of the most common is rooted in how we perceive the passage of time relative to our age, a version of Weber’s Law — the observation that the ability to perceive changes in magnitudes of stimuli is proportional to the magnitude. When we measure any interval — a minute, an hour, a day, or a week — we compare it to the total time we’ve already lived. For a one-month-old baby, a single month represents their entire existence.
Compare that with my 38 years. At this point, one month is one of 456 or 0.22% of my life. This proportional shrinking means that, as we accumulate more experiences, each new period feels shorter in comparison. It’s like adding another page to an already thick book — the latest addition seems insignificant when compared to the chapters already written.
Another idea involves the role of routine in our perception of time. When we do something for the first time, time slows down because our brains must process a wealth of new information. For example, the first day at a new job seems to stretch on forever, but soon, the days blur together as routine sets in. We encounter less novelty as we age, so time appears to quicken.
I’ve even come across a religious understanding that suggests our days will become shorter as we approach the end, based on an interpretation of Matthew 24:22: “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”
Whatever the explanation, it reinforces the lessons from Stoic philosophy I’ve embraced over the past several years. Here are some of my favorite insights from Seneca on the shortness of time:
People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man who is already full and satisfied food which he does not want but can hold. So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
I spend a lot of time absorbing the wisdom of people I admire, aiming to be more like them. Simultaneously, I watch those whose mindsets and behaviors I find destructive, ensuring I don’t follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, I notice many people who, as Seneca described, have grown old in years but not wisdom; they’ve merely existed. I don’t want just to exist. I want to live. I don’t want to be tossed about in a raging storm. I want to enjoy the voyage.
So for v38, I’ll chase sunsets and not just the clock, fill pages with stories and not just appointments, and embrace the acceleration of time with a sense of equanimity. And I’ll heed Seneca’s advice — I won’t “lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
