Less of Everything

Time is everything, and there's less of it all the time. Everyone seems to agree that the older you get, the faster time goes. It's not that I work too much or am too tied to a mundane job. I've always worked full time. I've always worked 40 hours a week, not more and not less. But I no longer get everything done. And I'm always racing against time. There used to be plenty of time for everything. But there's not enough of it any more. So where does it go?

I was talking about this to a friend this morning and she told me that a friend of hers theorizes that each time the earth revolves around the sun, it moves a little more quickly. That could be; who can say? I do think there's a element of truth in it; that is, I think there's something physical going on. It may be something in the external world, or it may be internal.

I'm convinced that the sensation that time goes more quickly as you get older is more than just the way we think about it. I realize that I move more slowly than I used to, that I have less energy than I used to, and that it takes longer to do some things than it used to. But I don't think that's the whole story. Time is a construct, a convention. But we've lived with it for so long that we can't imagine life without it. Time has become everything. It may only be a construct, but it's all we have. Even if you take a new-age slant on the issue and say that the past and the future don't matter and that the Now is everything, the Now is a point on a continuum of time and time is still the center of everything.

I think human beings have some kind of inner mechanism – some sort of physical or physiological clock that has evolved as a result of living so long with the construct of time. And I think that somehow, out inner time mechanism gets wound tighter as we get older so that the way we experience time changes. I don't think it's just the way we think about time, I think it's physically real. I don't think we just get used to time as we get older. I think time actually goes faster. I think something physical changes as we get older and causes our experience of time to change.