Jul 30, 2021

The flow of time

Our experience of time gets faster as we get older. When you’re a kid, a year is a long time. It is less so when you’re an adult. 

What I didn’t fully consider until speaking with my friend’s dad the other day is that this acceleration of time doesn’t seem to slow down. The analogy that he used to describe this experience is like the unraveling of a roll of paper. 

Imagine a roll of paper being pulled and unraveled at a constant speed. That’s time. Now, think about the roll in the center. At first, it spins slowly. But as you get closer to running out of paper, it spins faster. The spinning roll is your experience of time.

In our lifetimes, we could figure out how to extend our lives much longer than our current life expectancy. We might even live for centuries instead of decades. All of that extra time seems like a lot but when you consider how our experience of time keeps accelerating, it might not be much different than what we have now.

Not everyone is as anxious as I am about running out of time so if you’re already at peace with your mortality or not even thinking about it yet then this doesn’t concern you. But if you’re like me, this thought is sobering. Whatever you want in life, you gotta start doing it now.