The other day, I was noticing how slowly time seems to go these days.
In a bad way, I can look ahead at an afternoon or an evening and think, “I’ll never make it through this.” In a good way, I can think, “I’ve got all the time I need. I can relax.”
The other day, I had a feeling of being into a just endlessly expandable kind of mental time. I’d rather think of this as a good thing. After all, the faster you time goes, the sooner you die. My neighbor Rita, who’s in her 80s, was bemoaning this the other day. “You say Christmas is in two weeks? I feel like last Christmas was just two weeks ago. I feel like I’m on a express train to the graveyard.”
My time slowdown is happening — why? I can think of three possible causes.
(1) Idleness. I’m not teaching, and don’t have the concomitant mental check-list: do this, do that, do the other thing, etc. I’m still adjusting to retirement.
A job makes time pass because you carry with you a mental check-list that makes the time melt away. Plus there’s the commuting to help kill the day. Even now, when I read, or write, or when I work on my blog, the time melts away. A hobby, like a job, is a “pastime”.
TV is a pastime, too, but to me, watching TV almost always feels like I’m being robbed. I think I’d rather spend my time staring at my shoe.
I do have more empty time than before. I have to fight the capitalist, puritanical fear of empty time. Slow, empty time is a good thing.
(2) Thoughts per second. Another factor in the time slowdown could perhaps be that, thanks to thinking about philosophy so much as I work on my Lifebox book, the world is starting to seem denser and stranger to me. Trippier.
I’ve always thought that the speed at which I perceive time to be flowing might relate to the rate at which I’m having thoughts. So if you’re having a billion thoughts per second, then, yeah, a second seems like a long time. And if you settle in on the zombified gerbil wheel of TV programming, with a thought every five minutes or so, then yeah, the whole evening is gone in a flash.
But I'm not really sure I'm thinking that much more than I ever did.
(3) Isolation. Talking to people passes the time. Now that I'm retird, I’m spending more and more of my time alone.
The idea that conversation speeds up the perceived passage of time doesn’t really dovetail with the “thoughts per second” idea that time goes faster when you have fewer thoughts. Because it seems like you’d be having more thoughts rather than fewer thoughts if you’re having a lively conversation, so it would seem that the conversation should seem to make time go slower rather than faster.
I think the reason conversation speeds time up is that it takes me out of myself. If I’m continually monitoring my personal state, navel-gazing if you will, then the time will seem to go slower because I’ll have a lot of memories of wondering what time it is. Nothing slows time down like looking at your watch every thirty seconds, like when you’re waiting for a work day to be over. Or in the back seat of your parents car asking, “Are we there yet?”
What time is it now? Is that all?