Fast or Slow

The say time speeds up as you get older, that your perception shifts so that time passes by more quickly not that time itself actually changes.  Personally my explanation for this was always to define time frames as a percentage of the life you have lived, for example for a child of 5 years old, a year feels like an eternity because a year is 20% of the life they have lived.  At age 10 a year represents 10% of their life, and by age 20 that year is reduced to just 5% of their life lived.  The higher you age gets the smaller the percentage of your lifespan that period of time represents which to me was always the reason why time appeared to accelerate because in context those time periods grew shorter relative to the rest of your life.

There is another theory I have come across that attempts to explain this shift in perception and that is centred around boredom or to be more precise, novelty versus routine.  That is to say, the more novel and engrossing an experience is to us the more attention we pay to it and thus the elongation of our experience of time occurs, and that conversely the more mundane and repetitious an experience is to us the less attention we pay to it and thus the acceleration of our experience of time occurs.  This is not meant in terms of how mentally draining something becomes like a lecturer droning on about some subject which we have no interest in but instead it is meant in reference to expectations, or to be more precise, how much our brains expect the outcome to be predictable as an indicator of how much attention it should dedicate. There was an article on Digital Trends which takes this idea and applies it to people and their perception of time during lockdown.

Taking this theory and attempting to put it into practice, if you desire time to speed up then you would choose to do something repetitive that requires little conscious effort - most cookie clicker type games and casual games in general fit this bill quite aptly.  If your desire however is to make time slow down so that you can live more in the moment then you would need to choose to do something that you have not done before or that will be mentally taxing, anything that will require you to pay attention to detail, ultimately this can summed up as the search for new experiences. 

In recent months we have all had to spend a lot of time waiting for things and in an effort to put this theory to the test I have been listening to a familiar series of podcasts, played youtube playlists, and played mindless games - not all concurrently but in different combinations.  The results have been hard to gauge namely because I have no idea how quickly time would have passed for me had I not done any of these so I can't accurately measure success, moreover since this entirely defined by perception there is little tangible data that can be compiled as a result.

What I can say conclusively is that although I am still waiting for life to move forward, the amount of thought I have given to that fact is minimal and a lot less taxing.  If ever there existed a remote control that we could use to control our lives like those depicted in various cartoons, I fear the two buttons I would use most would be the fast forward and the pause buttons.  The former in an effort to skip most of the repetition, and the latter in an effort to escape commitments when they caused me stress.  When I was a kid there was a children's drama series called 'Bernard's Watch' that revolved around this premise, the main character Bernard possessed a pocket watch that could be used to stop time.  As a kid I can't tell you how much I wanted that watch, but even now as an adult the desire is still strong although the potential uses for it have become a lot more mundane like sleeping at a normal time as opposed to the erratic sleep pattern I struggle with.

Our relationship with time does seem to be quite bizarre as a concept.  Whilst other animals exhibit behaviours that show an inclination towards an awareness of time passing, most of these seem to be related more closely to day night cycles and indeed when lighting levels are unnaturally altered, the behaviours of those animals responds to the change demonstrating a lack of ability to discriminate between these and the actual passage of time.  To our knowledge in this regard human beings are the only animal on this planet that is not only aware of time passing but actively measures that passage of time.  That's not to say animals can't predict routine and identify patterns, having raised dogs all my life they are certainly aware of when they should be fed and when people usually come and go but there are other cues that can be used in those instances to explain those behaviours.

The question remains if you could control how fast time progresses, but not the ability to go backward, would you actually use it to speed things up or would you use it to slow things down, or even bring them to a halt?