The last time I wrote something here, I talked about tomorrow land becoming today land and then yesterday land. The point was that time somehow seems to have speeded up. I’ve often heard it said (and maybe I agree) that the older you get, the faster time seems to go. I’ve also heard that time flies when you’re having fun. But I’m pretty sure that as you get older, time flies whether you’re having fun or not.
Seems like when we were kids, the summers were long — I never remember feeling rushed at all. Now, just when the weather starts to get warm, we’re getting ready for fall.
So, anyhow, I figured I’d do some extensive research and see if there really is anything to this “time speeding up” school of thought. Interestingly, I found a theory — supposedly a scientifically proven fact — that time really is speeding up. The explanation of how time is speeding up is explained by something called the “Schuman Resonance.” This is a measurement of the resonance, or frequency, of the earth. I don’t pretend to understand it very well, but all matter has a frequency (kind of an electro magnetic “pulse.”) The earth’s “pulse” is measured by Schuman Resonance. When that resonance was first measured in the 1950s, the earth’s frequency was 7.8 hertz. It has recently been recorded at 12 hertz. That means that a 24 hour day now feels like it’s just 16 hours.
If you were, or are, a fan of Einstein you’ll remember that he calculated that the faster we go, the slower time goes and conversely the slower we go, the faster time goes. When an object’s speed increases toward the speed of light, time moves more slowly. If we were in a spacecraft moving at the speed of light for just a few days and then returned to earth, we’d find that while we were gone, decades had passed.
Then there’s another theory of why time speeds up, or at least we think it does as we get older. Maybe time perception is relative to the length of our lives and the number of recurring milestones. When you are doing things for the first time and when you are younger, that experience becomes a big milestone and forms a significant percentage of your life (to date.) As you get older, your life (of course) becomes longer and the percentage of your life taken up by an experience becomes smaller. When you’ve done things before, or do them routinely, they seem (to you) to take less time. Remember when you were a kid, Christmas took forever to arrive. Now it shows up right after Halloween.
My extensive research found a study that asked people of various ages to describe time. I didn’t read the entire study, but the conclusion was that younger people tended to use phrases like, “time is like a motionless ocean” or “time is quiet” to describe time. Older people were more likely to use phrases like, “time is like a speeding train.”
So what’s going on? Maybe time is actually speeding up, or maybe it’s just our perception… but one thing is certain — once time is gone, we can’t bring it back. That should give us all reason to use it wisely. I often think of something Dr. Seuss said, “How did it get so late so soon?”
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