Tempus Fugit

The subjectivity of time As children, we all remember when time stretched ahead and seemed both limitless and languid. Whether it was the long summer vacation or a keenly anticipated event, time seemed to have a more leisurely pace. But as we get older, time seems to accelerate. We catch ourselves thinking how a year can have passed so quickly—where has the last decade gone—it seems like only a moment since I was starting high school. Associated with these thoughts is the dawning realization of ratios—the ratio of time lived to time to come, the ratio of time you’ve been working to the time left until retirement, and even the ratio of your time in a subject area to its age. The subjective sense of time plays other tricks too. I remember clearly as a 15-year-old standing in a small market town in the middle of rural England and impressing on my mind that image and the thought that one day I would look back on this moment and I would be 30 years older and living in the 21st century. It all seemed impossibly remote then, but it seems a moment ago now. What’s responsible for this flight of time, this headlong rush into the future? Is it all in the mind? Situations in which we become mentally absorbed accelerate the flow of time. Perhaps the technology we surround ourselves with is also partly to blame. The pace of events was certainly slower when I was a child—no email or faxes, mobile phones, or round-the-clock news services. Information overload and the constant demand to respond immediately can add to the sense of time becoming a scarce resource. However, I suspect this is part of the human condition. We’ve been lamenting the rush of time since the beginning of time. In the fourth century BC, Aeschylus wrote, “Time in his aging overtakes all things.” Eight hundred years later, we find this in the Haggadah of the Palestinian Talmud: “Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree, but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight.” What can we do about it? I can offer several ingenious solutions. In Catch 22, one character’s secret of immortality was to contrive to be terminally bored all the time. For him every minute was an age, every hour an eternity. Perhaps that’s not so attractive! Other people think life extension is the thing. More life might seem attractive at first blush—as long as it’s quality time. As we rush through life, we notice time’s effects: not quite as fleet of foot, unable to hear quite as well, can’t focus on the fine print. There are those who put their faith in cryogenics—who freeze heads and bodies. Others spend lives on vitamin supplements, reduced-calorie diets, and whole panoplies of tonics and treatments, techniques and methods. For some, much of AI’s appeal is the hope that it will offer improved quality or even quantity of life—whether it’s microrobots scouring your body and performing delicate surgery, cognitive prosthetics to help your memory, or even downloading yourself onto a hard drive for posterity! The attraction of hard drives escapes me, I’m afraid. I have the sneaking suspicion that some people are so preoccupied with extending life that they’re no longer living it!