Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
So when you’re a kid it feels like a single week holds more life, more drama than an entire year later in life. Later, time feels faster. I’ve lived in the new apartment for over a year and it feels like that just swooshed by.
You might’ve heard or realized that one reason for this is that a year as a kid is like one seventh, one eight of your life up until then while a year for psycho biddies like me it’s like one forty-fifth, barely an inconvenience, a little over two percent. So time passes faster and faster because a day is a smaller proportion of your experience. Not sure how that would literally affect your experience of the passage of time. It’s not like your shoelace is tighter or looser for the first loop, or your bookshelf has less room on the left or you get more tired after the first step on your walk. But just to stave off any arguments, let’s say I do accept this factor as a partial explanation.
There’s another factor which causes this effect even more strongly. Routines make life go way faster than when everything in life is new. That’s why the fastest, most whooshed-by period in my life was senior high. Monday to Friday school school school, and I had gotten used to school and I had moved out from home and I was addicted to IRC and email and video games. Life in my twenties when I hung out with all those art weirdos was a much slower and richer time. Every day back then is like half a decade now that I’ve sorted things out with Laundry Monday, Vacuum Thursday, Socials Saturday. I’m lonelier now, too, which also causes this time–speed-up effect.
To slow down time, I’ll make room for some new experiences and for actually hanging out with real people. Although not sure that’s a good thing; life as a kid was not exactly easy. Time passing more quickly because we’re dealing with problems that are more familiar and solved, with horrors that are not as fresh and raw, that’s not entirely a bad thing.
寸阴尺璧
分秒必争