Time is not going anywhere. People minds are. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest problem is that we perceive time linearly. What if, rather than a countdown towards death, we’re heading towards birth instead ?

For one thing, the child doesn’t keep trace of time like we do. From rise and shine until the dead of the night, we don’t seem to be having enough time. We are starved of time.

The question is really like iteration math in Excel spreadsheets, since the statement is made by an adult. By making the statement that time is slipping fast, you are also applying an adult construct to what a child might experience. And since experience is subjective…

Let’s assume for a moment that you are a child. You have little or no concept of time. What now ? Time won’t be “fast” or “slow”, you can’t really meaningfully measure the child’s assessment of time.

Quote of the day: “If you operate out of the straitjacket of logic, you remain a clown in the circus of life.”- Sadhguru

Jordan Gaines Luis at Scientific American talks about the “holiday paradox” -“the brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.”

We estimate the length of an event from “two very different two perspectives: a prospective vantage, while an event is still occurring, or a retrospective one, after it has ended“.It appears the “retrospective perspective” gains more as we age simply because we are not adding up new experiences. The brain grinding mill has to go over something, and in the absence of prospective experiences keeps going over retrospective experiences over and over again. That’s why career changes can be positive.

Some people talk about the “ratio theory”: For a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their entire life. For a 50-year-old, however, one year is only 2% of their life. I don’t buy into that, because, once again, it’s viewing time as a linear progression. If you have exponential growth at some point in your life, you’ve broken that linear progression.

The world teaches you time is a progression towards decay. It is not.

Time is like water in a river. There’s plenty of it, and you can never step into the same water twice. Emily Dickinson’s statement : “Forever is a series of NOWS” has a connection to the quantum theory.

Buy why do old people seem to remember what they did when they were 12 or 20 like it was yesterday ?

Some people have a condition named HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) which is “like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories, each one sparked by the appearance of present-day stimuli.” (Total Recall, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, The Guardian, 8 Feb. 2017, ) Does HSAM account for the huge number of old folk recall superpower ?

Perhaps the biggest mistake old people make is that they live vicariously, aka living though younger people’s lives, their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. Why say that ? Because vicarious living doesn’t exist in nature. In the wild, animals don’t surrender their lives to the young. Neither should you.

Until next time,

Your Man,

Max Cantor

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