No. It is not back to school season. I refuse to accept it. I have just barely begun to enjoy summer in earnest. Don’t tell me it’s already nearly over.
It feels like this summer really flew by. This is always true to an extent, but it feels more pronounced this year, and I’m not really sure how to parse it. I’m used to having time seemingly ambush me when I’m sick, having weeks seem to disappear from my life in feverish haze, but not when I’m well.
If I have to start working myself back towards productivity, and break my bohemian habit of rising at the crack of noon, then I suppose that summer was worthwhile. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I expected. Near as I can tell, nothing I failed to accomplish was vital in any meaningful respect, but it is somewhat disappointing. I suppose I expected to have more energy to tick things off my list. Then again, the fact that nothing was vital meant that I didn’t really push myself. It wasn’t so much that I tried and failed as I failed to try.
Except I can’t help but think that the reason that I didn’t push myself; that I’m still not pushing myself, despite having a few days left; is, aside from a staunch commitment to avoid overtaxing myself before the school year even begins, a sense that I would have plenty of time later. Indeed, this has been my refrain all season long. And despite this, the weeks and months have sailed by, until, to my alarm and terror, we come upon mid-August, and I’ve barely reached the end of my June checklist.
Some of it is simple procrastination, laziness, and work-shyness, and I’ll own that. I spent a lot of my time this summer downright frivolously, and even in retrospect, I can’t really say I regret it. I enjoyed it, after all, and I can’t really envision a scenario where I would’ve enjoyed it in moderation and been able to get more done without the sort of rigid planned schedules that belie the laid back hakunnah mattata attitude that, if I have not necessarily successfully adopted, then at least have taken to using as a crutch in the face of looming terror of starting college classes.
But I’m not just saying “summer flew by” as an idle excuse to cover my apparent lack of progress. I am genuinely concerned that the summer went by faster than some sort of internal sense of temporal perception says it ought have, like a step that turned out to be off kilter from its preceding stairs, causing me to stumble. And while this won’t get me back time, and is unlikely to be a thing that I can fix, even if it is an internal mental quirk, should I not at least endeavor to be aware of it, in the interest of learning from past mistakes?
So, what’s the story with my sense of time?
One of the conversation I remember most vividly of my childhood was about how long an hour is. It was a sunny afternoon late in the school year, and my mother was picking my brother and I up from school. A friend of mine invited us over for a play*, but my mother stated that we had other things to do and places to be.
*Lexicographical sidenote: I have been made aware that the turn of phrase, “to have a play” may be unique to Australian vocabulary. Its proper usage is similar to “have a swim” or “have a snack”. It is perhaps most synonymous with a playdate, but is more casual, spontaneous, and carries less of a distinctly juvenile connotation.
I had a watch at this point, and I knew when we had to be elsewhere, and a loose idea of the time it took to get between the various places, and so I made a case that we did in fact have time to go over and have a play, and still get to our other appointments. My mother countered that if we did go, we wouldn’t be able to stay long. I asked how long we would have, and she said only about an hour. I considered this, and then voiced my opinion that an hour is plenty of time; indeed more than enough. After all, an hour was an unbearably long time to wait, and so naturally it should be plenty of time to play.
I would repudiate this point of view several months later, while in the hospital. Laying there in my bed, hooked up to machines, my only entertainment was watching the ticking wall clock, and trying to be quiet enough to hear it reverberate through the room. It should, by all accounts, have been soul-crushingly boring. But the entire time I was dwelling on my dread, because I knew that at the top of every hour, the nurses would come and stab me to draw blood. And even if I made it through this time, I didn’t know how many hours I had left to endure, or indeed, to live.
I remember sitting there thinking about how my mother had in fact been right. An hour isn’t that long. It isn’t enough to make peace, or get over fears, or get affairs in order. It’s not enough to settle down or gear up. This realization struck me like a groundbreaking revelation, and when I look back and try to put a finger on exactly where my childhood ended, that moment stands out as a major point.
That, eleven years ago, was the last major turning point; the last time I remember revising my scale for how long an hour, a day, and so on are in the scheme of things. Slowly, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with longer time scales, but this hasn’t really had a massive effect on my perception.
Over the past half-decade there have been occasions when, being sick, I have seemed to “lose” time, by being sick and not at full processing capacity as time passes. Other occasions it has been a simple matter of being a home body, and so the moments I remember most recently having seen people, which are in reality some time ago, seem to be more recent than they were, creating a disconnect. But this has always happened as a consequence of being unwell and disconnected from everyday life. In other situations, time has always seemed to match my expectations, and I have been able to use my expectations and perception to have a more intrinsic sense of when I needed to be at certain places.
In the past few months this perception seems to have degraded. Putting my finger on when this started being a noticeable problem is difficult, because much of the past few months has been spent more or less relaxing, which in my case means sleeping in and ignoring the outside world, which as previously noted does tend to affect my perception of how much time has passed. The first time I recall mentioning that time had passed me by was in May, at a conference. I don’t want to give that one data point too much weight, though, because, for one thing, it was a relatively short break in my routine, for another, it was a new conference with nothing to compare it to, and finally, I was jet lagged.
But I definitely do recall mentioning this feeling during the buildup to, and all throughout, our summer travels. This period, unlike previous outings, is definitely long enough that I can say it doesn’t fall into the category of being a homebody. Something has changed in my perception of time, and my sense of how much time I have to work with before scheduled events is degraded.
So what gives? The research into perception of time falls into the overlap between various fields, and is fraught with myths and pseudoscience. For example, it is commonly held and accepted that perception of time becomes faster with age. But this hypothesis dates back to the 1870s, and while there is some evidence to support a correlation, particularly early in life, the correlation is weak, and not linear. Still, this effect is present early in life, and it is plausible that this is part of my problem.
One point that is generally agreed upon in the scientific literature regards the neurochemistry. It seems to be that the perception of time is moderated by the same mechanisms that regulate our circadian rhythm, specifically dopamine and a handful of other neurotransmitters. Disruptions to these levels causes a corresponding disruption to the sense of time. In particular, it seems that more dopamine causes time to go faster; hence time seeming to pass faster when one is having fun. This would explain why the passage of time over my vacation has seemed particularly egregious, and also why jet lag seems to have such a profound effect on time perception.
Both of these explanations would go a ways towards explaining the sensorial discrepancy I find. Another explanation would place blame on my glasses, since eye movement seems to also be tied to small-scale passage of time. Perhaps since I have started wearing glasses in the last couple of years, my eyes have been squinting less, and my internal clock has been running subtly slow since, and I am only now starting to notice it.
With the field of time perception research still in relative infancy, the scientific logic behind these explanations is far from ironclad. But then again, it doesn’t need to be ironclad. For our purposes, the neurobiological mechanisms are almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is that the effect is real, that it isn’t just me, nor is it dangerous, and that there’s nothing I can really do about it other than adapt. After all, being blind without my glasses, or giving myself injections of neurotransmitters as a means of deterring procrastination might be a bit overkill.
What matters is that I can acknowledge this change as an effect that will need to be accounted for going forwards. How I will account for it is outside the scope of this post. Probably I will work to be a bit more organized and sensitive to the clock. But what’s important is that this is a known quantity now, and so hopefully I can avoid being caught so terribly off guard next summer.
Works Consulted
Eagleman, David M. “Human Time Perception and Its Illusions.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 18, no. 2, 2008, pp. 131–136., doi:10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.002.
Friedman, W.J. and S.M.J. Janssen. 2010. Aging and the speed of time. Acta Psychologica 134: 130-141.
Janssen, S.M.J., M. Naka, and W.J. Friedman. 2013. Why does life appear to speed up as people get older? Time & Society 22(2): 274-290.
Wittmann, M. and S. Lehnhoff. 2005. Age effects in perception of time. Psychological Reports 97: 921-935.
