How do you think about your life in relation to time? I suspect that most people think about this the wrong way - let me explain.
When my sister got her first son in 2016 I joked with her:
What is it like waking up having never gone to sleep?
A seemingly silly question that is easy to ask, but very hard to make any sense of. Similarly, in a funeral we might think:
What is it like going to sleep, never to wake up again?
These two questions touches the boundaries for what we call life. Birth, a past experience no one remember, and death, a future experience we're experientially blind to.
The keywords here are past and future. Baked into the language of how we commonly talk about our life, birth and death, lies the notion that the concepts can be fixed on a timeline. This timeline constitutes a lifetime for us human beings. It can be visualised as a line with three points (Birth, Present, and Death) which appropriately map to past, present and future.
TOOD: Insert slider?
This is a pretty nice mental modal [1] It's easy and straight forward. Using this model we can calculate lifetime as the distance between Birth and Death. Normal people call this distance age.
However simple, I belive that thinking of life that something you have ahead of you is slightly incorrect. It might be comforting to reassure someone with a feeling that they're "behind" that "Don't worry, you got most of your life in front of you". But strictly speaking, we really don't know.
If you think about it, no part of your life is in front of you. I believe that we are the sum of our past experiences and present sensations, but the future hasn't happened yet, so how can most of your life be there? This seems quite strange to me.
I get what you're thinking:
This is overly pedantic, very pessimistic and also kinda sad – stop it! The phrase is just a positive way of saying most of your life hasn't happened yet
You might be right. But something happened when I challenged it: I started asking myself, if "life isn't some variable thing dependent of how old you are – is it fixed?". Of course it have to be: If I died this very second, then my life would be over, right? No future events, only past and present. So instead of thinking that life is something I have ahead of me, I'm living at the edge of death, aren't I? In fact, we all are.
Again, sorry if this hits you as very grim – it's not intended to. But it started to increasingly make sense while reflecting over my past experiences: Didn't time pass much slower when you were younger? I remember the dreaded car trips during summer vacation – they took forever! But when we finally arrived some 3 hours later, it was just like time stood still. Those 8 weeks of vacation seemed like forever.
While the days were long when I was younger, these days time seem to be speeding up. In my mind, the cause of this effect becomes easier to spot after deleting the negative space of future lifetime from the mental model of my own life. In other words, is our experience of time related to the time spent on this earth? It certainly seem so.
Let's look at an example:
TODO: Add car trip example?
Maybe this can be used to build empathy for people younger/older than yourself? If not, I just hope you found this interesting in some way or form and that it wasn't a waste of your time ✌️
I originally started to ponder about this back in 2012. In 2015, I made an attempt at creating a small CLI that made it possible to calculate the experienced time between N people (source).
In the time since, I've came back to thinking about this several times. Although not directly related, I suggest checking out "I Am a Strange Loop" from Douglas Hofstadter and "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett if you found topic this interesting.