We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year.
If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is, then we experience time logarithmically through our lives. Instead of middle age coming at 40 as linear time would suggest, in logarithmic time the midpoint of age 5 and age 80 is age 20. Childhood is one half of our life, and adulthood the other half.
This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
So how should this change how we live? Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
But what about those of us who are well into the flattening part of the curve, what can we do for ourselves? You can seek new experiences perhaps. If time goes faster because your life has fewer firsts and more routine, then it can be extended by adding firsts. You can learn new things, travel, take up hobbies, or new careers.
This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back. You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.
You can’t go back, but you can come close. The easiest way to add firsts to your life is to become invested in those of someone else, have kids. Nostalgia is only futile and self destructive because it is a sublimated desire to give your own children the life you want them to have.
Firsts
The first set of new firsts that children give you are those you don’t remember from your own life, smiles, laughs, food, words, steps, first rain, first creek. Every week becomes so laden with meaning that it is almost oppressive. Instead of worrying that the weeks are all forgettable, as you might have in your former life, you instead worry that you will forget. They won’t remember it, so the burden falls on you. You are recording the events that will become the mythology of their identity when you later tell the stories back to them.
Then start the firsts that you do remember and that you can recreate for them. Let me tell you about one.
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