"Where All the Time Went"
by David Cain
"Time always feels like it’s speeding up, but you might feel like time has been going exceptionally quickly these past few years. The first few days of a new month quickly become the 11th, then the next day it’s the 23rd, and then your credit card is due and it’s a new month again. It might also be hard to remember, when people ask, what you did with those weeks and months. “Oh, I’ve just been, uh, working and stuff, I guess” you might say, when you bump into an acquaintance at the grocery store.
For some of us, the 2020s have also come with a certain lingering mental fog, or poor memory, which is another reason it can be hard to generate an interesting report about what you’ve been up to. Naturally I have a theory about this, maybe even a cure. The hypothesis I’m about to share is not entirely crackpot - there is some scientific evidence behind this, but I’m mostly going off of my own intuitions here. Tell me what you think.
Basically, I believe the time acceleration and mental fog are mostly symptoms of the same problem: a lack of a certain life ingredient that suddenly became rare, virtually overnight, about four years ago. This ingredient is much more available now than it was then, so the problem can be remedied, but you do have to go out and get it.
As I write this, we just passed the four-year mark since the coronavirus pandemic blew everything up, beginning on that surreal week in March 2020 when they canceled the NBA season and told us to immediately stop touching our faces. In the following days there were mass closures, layoffs, and drastic new rules for everything. Each day of that month there was a new development, and each day our lives changed. As many have said, it felt like the longest month in history. Then the “new normal” set in, and the pages started flying off the calendar. The next four years went by in what felt (to me at least) like about eighteen months, and here we are.
People have always remarked that time seems to speed up as you age, which I’ve written about before. The sense of time accelerating is usually explained away with the idea of proportionality - a year to a one-year old is a lifetime, while to a centenarian it’s 1% of a lifetime.
I don’t buy that explanation. Time’s apparent “speed” changes with conditions, as we’ve all experienced. A week spent in a foreign city feels much longer than a routine week spent at home. In an unfamiliar place everything is novel, so it has to be engaged with more care and attention. In order just to manage everyday tasks, such as buying lunch or crossing the street, your mind has to do a lot more than it does at home. More details must be noticed, evaluated, and marked by memory for later. Less of what you experience can be navigated by habit or reflex, so you can’t spend much of your day preoccupied with your familiar and repetitive thoughts. Such a week simply can’t pass by unnoticed and unremembered.
In other words, periods of time that contain more novelty and variety pass slower and leave bigger, brighter memories. That’s why the more “foreign” the destination city is, the longer a one-week visit feels. An American tourist could walk down Dundas Street in Toronto while entirely preoccupied with their usual thoughts about home and work, remembering little of the experience; walking down Bangkok’s Khao-San Road while barely noticing it would be almost impossible.
The reason time seems to speed up over the years is that novelty naturally declines as we age. Life’s elements become increasingly familiar and routinized. You take fewer risks, become less adventurous, move house less often, change jobs less, meet fewer people, stay home more, and so on.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. When the pandemic emergency was declared, we were at first catapulted into the unfamiliar. Over only a few weeks, we had to adopt all new ways of living, working, socializing, sanitizing, entertaining ourselves, and thinking about the world. That few weeks felt very long and was very memorable. This is what happens when novelty spikes.
After that, novelty plummeted. Lockdown quickly made life very samey. There was so much less we could do, physically and legally. We interacted with fewer people, moved around less, and canceled new endeavors. We stayed much closer to home, in every sense.
For some of us, this sameyness came along with a certain mental fog: cognitive dullness and poor memory. People have suggested many explanations for it: too much screen time, additional stress, long-term effects of the virus itself, culture-war-induced despair, lack of exercise, and others.
It might be partly those things, but I suspect much of it is just what happens when variety and novelty disappear from life. A mind that is essentially being prevented from encountering new people, spaces, and sensory experiences isn’t going to remain at its sharpest. Under my pet theory, as the variety and novelty of day-to-day experience go down, mental sharpness declines with them, while time seems to speed up. If you graphed the last five years of this phenomenon, it might look like this:
My layperson’s grasp of the science behind this relationship is that novel experiences induce dopamine release into the hippocampus, which triggers the formation of memories. That makes evolutionary sense: if you discover something useful, like the location of a food source, you want to remember it.
There are two kinds of memories, however: semantic memories and episodic memories. Semantic memories are about factual information. Reference material. What color grass is, what temperature paper ignites at, what the flag of Italy looks like. This is information anyone could know, and exchange with others.
Episodic memories are the autobiographical ones, and they’re stored in a different place in the brain. These memories concern what happened in your life, as it relates to you: that you rode a gondola in Venice, that you gave birth to a baby girl, that you studied ancient languages, that you once saw James Gandolfini at a restaurant.
According to the study linked above, episodic memories form as a result of distinctly novel experiences — ones that “bear minimal resemblance to past experiences.” When the mind encounters a whole new category of experience like this — as a result of trying rock climbing, meeting new people, or walking unfamiliar streets — it encodes a lot of new information, and changes something about who you feel like you are. It adds to your story. You now feel like a person who has climbed granite slabs, knows Wendy G, and ate street food from a paper cone in Bangkok.
If you’re living a more routine and constrained life than you did five years ago, perhaps absorbing a lot of content and information but having fewer distinctly unfamiliar experiences, you’ve probably been forming fewer episodic memories. Consequently, life during that time might seem thinner and less significant in retrospect. It will seem to have gone by faster, and will be harder to recall. It might seem like you just got older and little else changed.
Most of us probably still haven’t made it back to pre-pandemic levels of novel experience. For many people, life got permanently smaller and less varied, with a smaller social circle, fewer events attended, less travel, less going out, less genuinely new material encountered by the mind. You may have become more cautious, more routinized, more of a homebody, and stayed that way. I know people that haven’t even gone to a restaurant in four years.
The remedy then, if you feel like time’s going too fast and the mind is foggy, is to try to get the variety level back to where it was, or as close to it as you can. That could mean reconnecting with some people, meeting new people, attending events, traveling, moving stalled projects forward, or taking on entirely new ones. Anything but the same things you’ve been doing.If my hunch is right, you just need to get life back to a state where new experiences happen regularly again, and then the weeks and months will be unable to slip by unnoticed."
