Maybe let's not do the time warp again???
What's a 30something supposed to do when the arrival of middle age coincides with a global time jump?
The concept of time flying once seemed to us unfathomable. As kids, we sat in class, willing ourselves not to look at the clock (again), which had somehow only moved a minute or two since we last glanced its way. Then summer rolled around and we spent lengthy afternoons at the community pool, or at the library, or at the mall—no doubt trying to figure out which tasteful Charlotte Russe top to spend our babysitting money on—waiting for something to happen, wondering how to kill all this time before us.
But as the years wore on, their passage started to seem more fluid. Then, suddenly, not fluid at all; instead, the days/months/years began to bump into us as they rushed by, like rude pedestrians to whom we still feel compelled to mutter “sorry.”
The phenomenon of time appearing to speed up as we age is well-documented, although nobody seems to know exactly why it happens. Apparently, it’s a commonly cited manifestation of Weber’s Law, which outlines the relationship between a given stimulus and the point at which we can perceive changes in said stimulus. (This handy explainer does a decent job of breaking all of this down. Ignore the scary-looking graphs and variables!!!) In the case of time, each tick of the clock in a child’s life represents a bigger proportion of total life lived, which makes those increments more noticeable. Adults, on the other hand, are less likely to register the moment-to-moment shifts that carry so much more weight when you’re young, because what’s one more minute if you’ve already lived millions of them?
If you’ll allow me to go further into the weeds (if you know me you know ~*~I LOVE THE WEEDS~*~), the exact mechanisms that explain how we perceive the passage of time appear to be a source of debate. In 2019, Professor Adrian Bejan, a physicist at Harvard, published a study pointing to the rate at which we process visual information. According to Bejan, this happens more slowly as we age. New information coming our way has to navigate the complex networks of neurons we’ve built over time, potentially bumping into damaged areas along the way (which can cause additional resistance).
Focusing on visual perception, Bejan posits that slower processing times result in us perceiving fewer ‘frames-per-second’ – more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. This is what leads to time passing more rapidly. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images. Like a slow-motion camera that captures thousands of images per second, time appears to pass more slowly.
Other experts would argue that it’s not that complicated, instead citing time pressure as a major factor for everyone but the very young and the very old. There’s also the simple fact that, as we get older, we aren’t exposed to the quantity of novel experiences we once were. As psychologist William James wrote in 1890,
In youth, we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day … but as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
With all of this in mind: It makes sense that our brains would have no idea what to do with an interruption as seismic as a global pandemic. Life became, simultaneously, agonizingly mundane and astoundingly limitless in its capacity to deliver fresh horrors to our doorstep every day.
I watched the date on the calendar change, not really registering the numbers before me. At the start of every work day, I continued to label my to-do lists with the appropriate day, month, and year, choosing to ignore the fact that regardless of what I wrote down, every morning felt exactly like the morning before that, and the one before that, and on and on stretching all the way back to March 2020.
Despite—or maybe because of?—this mundanity, life took on a dreamlike quality. As my days fell into a relatively predictable pattern, I assumed everybody else had carved out a cozy little corner for themselves in this liminal space too, collectively agreeing that under these bizarre circumstances, nobody could possibly be expected to accomplish anything.
Against this backdrop, I admit that I wasn’t quite processing the significance of the long-distance phone calls and texts I received announcing friends’ major life events. It wasn’t denial, exactly; it was more that my imagination during this period of time extended only about as far as my personal bubble.
Except it turns out that beyond my bubble—even in the face of all the death and destruction and incessant Zoom calls and doomscrolling and ever-present existential despair—other people were managing to take huge leaps forward.
Don’t ask me how. I didn’t get the memo.
Four years ago, when everything shut down, I was two weeks away from my 33rd birthday. Now, as I write this, it’s six weeks after my 37th birthday and I’ve only now begun to take stock of the changes in the lives of everyone around me.
What I see: most of my friends, and even my younger siblings, all partnered and/or expecting and/or new parents. How did they find the time? I wonder. How did they find the energy? Weren’t we all too busy simply existing? Weren’t we all just trying to make it through the day, even though we knew intrinsically that our tomorrows would be exactly like all the other days that stretched out before us?
To paraphrase some British lady, it is a truth universally acknowledged that there comes a time in every single-late-30-something’s life when they begin to understand their reality looks very, very different from the lives of their peers. But usually this understanding accumulates out in the open. This hasn’t been the case for single millennials. The pandemic obscured the changes happening to and for others, making this already-shocking realization feel all the more abrupt. And now here we are, deposited on the other side of 35 like bewildered castaways, watching the tides come and go at a pace that only seems to be accelerating and wondering if we missed the boat on the experiences we’re told are essential if our lives are to have meaning.
Listen, I’ve done my fair share of therapy. I am at least logically aware that EVERYONE IS ON THEIR OWN JOURNEY. And also: MY TIMELINE DOESN’T HAVE TO MATCH ANYBODY ELSE’S. Yet I can scribble those inspirational maxims on Post-It notes as many times as I want—neither does much to change the fact that I still feel left out in the cold.
If I’m being honest (because what is Substack for if not to get RAW and REAL with internet strangers), this is something I grapple with regularly. At times, I am filled with such a degree of despair that I completely lose sight of the very real progress I’ve made.
In an effort to stop falling into this trap on at least a weekly basis, I decided to make a list of all the ways I’ve changed over the past few years. Cringey? Possibly. But desperate times and all that.
Except in a twist I never saw coming, I came away from this exercise feeling much more hopeful(!!) than I expected.
I won’t bore you with the details—also, I might not be ready to get that real on an internet platform. But to summarize a few of the entries that made up my personal audit of these past few years:
I like myself a lot more than I used to, and I’m very comfortable in my own company.
I’ve made a real home for myself and have learned to love the place I live even more than I did when I first arrived.
I give myself permission to make stuff for the sake of making stuff, without worrying too much about the outcome. Once upon a time I was too afraid of looking dumb to try anything I might be bad at. Now I watercolor and sketch and embroider and make digital collages and WRITE (something I’ve loved doing since I was a little kid but became quite self-conscious about as I got older). And for the most part, I don’t really care if what I’m making is good. The most important thing is that it’s fun and it feels good. (Exhibit A: the pink ceramic dinosaur I painted using a $5 kids’ craft kit at Target. Color blending is obviously a specialty of mine.)
Also, what was once a source of pain is now a point of pride: I handle most things on my own, and am always a little perplexed when other people express that they “don’t know how” to assemble furniture, do their taxes, cope with pet and house emergencies, pay bills, feed themselves, clean their living spaces, etc., etc., without support from a partner. (For the record, I don’t believe I’m specially equipped to take on any of this; a lot of it has been out of necessity. When you’re alone, during a pandemic and beyond, it’s sink or swim baby, and you better get used to being your own life jacket because no one is coming to save you :) :) :)
I’m not going to pretend my little list fixed everything, but the effect of seeing all of these things in one place had me, as the kids say, shooketh. Every item I wrote down was a reminder that everybody’s lives, including mine, are changing all the time. Although the shifts in my life have mostly been internal and aren’t (alas) the kinds of milestones that warrant the creation of any gift registries, it is impossible to deny the fact that I am a very different person than I was four years ago.
If you related to any of the above, should you listen to me and conduct your own audit? I say yes! Not that I’m an expert—how could I be? I’ve never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express in my life. But I guess I’m writing this to say that sometimes you need concrete proof that although time has marched onward, it hasn’t left you behind. Far from it. What’s more, if you’ve managed to stay by your own side throughout it all, that in itself is worth celebrating.
So to all the folks who have been holding it down on their own, I want you to know that I see you. And I would be thrilled to send you a waffle iron or tasteful throw blanket in honor of your more quiet wins. Go ahead and tally them up, then let me know where you’re registered.
Today’s Rabbit Hole(s):
More on Weber’s Law:
A visual representation of how time flies
Why does time fly as we get older? (from Scientific American)
Related to time flying: what is highway hypnosis?
Last but not least: