It’s a quarter way through this century. How did that happen? It feels like five minutes ago that I put down my Nokia phone and was wondering should I use that new Google thingy to find out why hanging chads are important.
It is strange and baffling how, as the years pass, your perception of time changes; or mine does anyway. Occasionally, I have to look through my phone to find a particular picture, and I’m astounded by how long ago the picture was taken – and how many other pictures have been taken in the intervening period. Just how much life has been lived. (I’m also struck by how many pictures on my phone are of electricity meter readings, wine and biscuits).
There are all sorts of theories as to why time seems to speed up as you get older. One is that a year seems a long time when you’re 10 – it’s one-tenth of your life, but not so much when you’re 60. But do we go around making constant proportional calculations? There are other ideas to do with the speed of our metabolism or our body temperature. Or it could be a diminishing amount of novelty. Young people, bless them, often feel they are the first to fall in love, discover a band or take on a political conviction. But as you age, as life becomes inevitably more humdrum, you take in less information, skipping all the bits you’ve experienced before. Time seems to speed up.
Couples who have been together for decades can objectively tell that their partner is older, yet they can also see the younger version
This makes sense. But often, something else is going on that contradicts that. Generalisation: people – say in their 50s – often don’t feel their age, or at least they regularly forget it. It’s like their temporal self-awareness got stuck in their mid-to-late 30s and they still see themselves as that age. And they can see it in their peers too. Couples who have been together for decades can objectively tell that their partner is older, yet they can also see the younger version.
I meet friends whose version of my life seems to be completely different to the one I recall
Television infidelity is apparently a real thing and can be a major cause of door slamming
Daughter Number Four has been sucked into the slimosphere. We naively enabled it
At Newstalk, Ciara Kelly gets righteously annoyed
And while older people can often feel younger, you often hear people in their late 20s panicked by the prospect of entering their fourth decade. They feel older than they are.
If you are in the older group, the good news is that you won’t feel it until the metro to Dublin Airport is completed. (Presumably, it will have wheelchair access.) But the chances are you won’t remember when construction began. Our brains are engineered in such a way that we simply can’t remember everything. There is instead a process where the brain sifts through experiences and makes judgments on them: what’s useful, it retains. What’s not much use, it jettisons.
This also makes sense. Back in the halcyon days of hunter-gathering, it was how we learned not to go into big scary caves or avoid large animals with even larger teeth. Even today, some of our more instinctive responses – such as disgust – are based on those ancient lessons.
There are all sorts of things I remember about my childhood, my parents, my children. There are many things my children tell me I wish I remembered
But as for all the other memories we retain (or don’t), the selection process seems to be completely random. I can meet old friends whose version of my life seems to be completely different from the one I recall. I can share memories with them and they all look at me, blank-faced. Like I just made them up. Then I start to worry that perhaps I did.
There are all sorts of things I remember about my childhood, my parents, my children. There are many things my children tell me I wish I remembered. I treasure those memories, of course, but don’t know if I would define them as useful. Useful memories would include not buying a blue jumper because you remember you already have one. Or one that prevents you from repeating yourself. When I looked it up, I discovered that I wrote a similar column to this four years ago. Happy 2021.