Poll 54 - "Speaking purely subjectively, does it feel to you like time is moving faster from day to day now than it did when you were a child?" Poll ended December 15 2009. 82.6% said "Yes", 10.7% said "About the same", and 6.7% said "Slower".
First of all, I'm surprised that almost 7% of respondents said time is moving slower for them now than it did when they were a child. Most of us, as this poll shows, remember what it was like to be 8 years old, starting a school year in the fall, and feeling like next year's summer holidays were far, far away. I'm convinced that this is not just an "I hate school" thing because personally, I loved grade three, Miss Cranch was one of my all-time favorite teachers, I had good friends and learned a lot (hey, that was also the year I first read A Wrinkle in Time!). But oh my, I certainly do remember how thinking a decade, or even a year, into the future seemed like an impossible time-span that would take just short of forever to occur.
As some of you already know from my facebook page, my eldest son Todd and his wife Audra just had a baby girl, so now I'm a grandpa! Where did that time go? Again, looking back from this vantage point it seems like an astonishingly short time ago that Todd was eight years old himself.
Is time moving faster? I created this poll question around the same time that I published what has turned out to be my most-viewed blog entry of all time, Jumping Jesus. That blog talks about the accelerating information stream we all have to deal with as it doubles over shorter and shorter time spans. In the following couple of months, I published entries like Life is But a Dream, Time is in the Mind and Consciousness in Frames per Second which also explored this intimate relationship between our role as observers and our experience of time.
For me, this becomes a relativistic question. If space is accelerating its expansion, and our experience of time is accelerating, and our incoming information flow is accelerating, then wherever you are within that curve becomes your personal experience, what you become acclimatized to. By the time Todd was 8, time was already moving faster for me, as I was then in my 35th year. But Todd's own experience back then was no doubt the same as mine had been, with the months crawling by much more slowly for him. Even though we were both part of the same consensus reality each of us were experiencing it differently.
So, if each of us are experiencing the same (or a similar) reality differently, are there any ways for us to look "outside the system" to say whether things are really changing or if this perceived acceleration is just some strange side effect of the aging process? There's another poll we'll be discussing in a couple of weeks that explores this idea further - it's called "Placebos and our Interface with Reality".
Enjoy the journey!
Rob Bryanton
Next: Poll 55 - Lying to Children
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster?
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9 comments:
I would like to think the the perception of an accelerating time-frame is a result of the "units" of time (day, year, etc) becoming less and less of a percentage of the amount of time we've lived. Another year when we're ten is forever because we've only been aware of a handful, but another year when we're 50 is fine (a bit long, but fine) because we have so many years of memory to reference that another isn't that bad.
Hey Rob! I agree with you time feel like it´s moving faster but i like to think of it this way.
for a one-year-old child, a half-year is 50% of it´s life (1/2)
And for anyone older, this number would decrease, meaning a half-year feels shorter. and that´s why it feels like time is speeding up when compearing.
mindfullness meditation deals with such a increasing speed of time.
A customer of mine explained this phenomenon like this:
When you are less than one year old, the world is open ended and life is timeless. One Earth cycle has not yet been completed.
When you are one year old, one year is a lifetime.
With each birthday, the last year, although the same duration in time around the sun, is a progressively smaller percentage of your lifetime to date.
What is interesting to me is that this phenomenon does not click over on the birthday like an odometer on a car, and the older we get, the more sun cycles we have "under our belt," the more acutely we perceive the passage of time.
Your fifth dimensional self contains the amount of sun cycles you enjoy in your unbounded yet finite lifetime. It may be that sun cycles have nothing to do with the phenomenon, but if they do, then humans may find when we escape the gravity well of our sun (gravity/light), our aging process may be determined by the much older gravity well of the galaxy with rather longer cycles.
Time surrounds and connects just six things, like the ocean surrounds and connects all lands.
Thanks everyone for your comments, and for the useful ideas you've added to the discussion. Alex, you might be interested to know that I took my first mindfulness meditation classes just a few months ago.
And thank you for these wonderfully evocative thoughts just posted, Anonymous, they are beautifully aligned with the running threads I'm playing with in this project.
Rob
Hello, Mister Bryanton! I realize that this comment is a bit late on this entry compared to the previous commentator, but I recently found your blog and have taken quite a liking to it. This entry in particular, as well as a few other entries, has piqued my mind. I'm a bit of a dreamer with a big imagination, but I feel the need to finally speak (er, well... type) my mind.
In one of your blog entries, you talked about OBEs and the 5th Dimension being linked. It began a series of thoughts in my head that lead me to the conclusion that Imagination (thought processes, in general) are a product of the 5th Dimension. (I'm no professional scientist, so everything I say is most likely only going to be speculation.) The neuron electrical impulses of the brain act as communicators between our 3D Minds and the 5D Realm of Possibilities. (That's how I justified myself.) Now, I'd hedge a bet that you're now wondering why this particular blog entry sparked that particular thought pattern.
The answer actually lies in one of your other blog entries I read just yesterday where you mentioned Music and stroke victims. The musical periods (Baroque, Classical, etc) from the past and the time between them generally got shorter as the years went by. Each period coming and going faster than the last. It made me remember what I learned in my Music Appreciation class. (Good thing for the test on Monday!)
If you seek and ye shall find that time passage is determined by your attitude, if you are in a job or life situation you are not happy with, time will seem to go very slow. When you are happy and love your work and life and all that there is, time will pass quickly. You would hope that it would be the opposite, but there are also spiritual lessons being taught at the time. Wait until you see how fast 2012 will pass, for those that are embracing the enlightenment, it shall fly and for the one's that embrace the 3 dimensional environment we have created, it will crawl.
Its my belief that another cause may be with our fading ability to remember new experience. There is a drug called VERSED that suspends your ability to remember while on it. In essence, time goes by in an instant while on this stuff. Maybe age interferes in a similar although less extreme manner and there is some counter measure we can take to fix this perception. I'd like my next 10 years to be as memorable as my first.
Hi Unknown, thanks for the interesting perspective! Here's a couple of other blog entries about this discussion:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/12/time-is-in-mind.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/12/consciousness-in-frames-per-second.html
They talk about the scientific theory that moments of crisis - a car crash, for instance - can seem like time stretches out because we are creating a lot of memories in a short amount of time.
Thanks!
Rob
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