A Little Temporal Perspective

I recently turned 20, which means that I officially belong to a generation which has experienced a fifth of a century. I have memories of things which no longer exist, in any capacity. With this age comes a sense of experience and authority, a feeling of having been there and done that. I think, however, that the strategy I've used to cope with the ever-flowing tide of time is pretty effective.

I always try my best to remember that every second around the world dozens of people are dying and being born, and that there really is nothing special about the generation to which I belong. While my position in the timeline does affect the knowledge I have access to, it does not affect my overall attitude. I remember that one day, I'll be 50, and I hope that I'll be treated with respect then, as I hope I will when I'm 70. Time is an inevitable and unavoidable process, it's slow but it does create a divide between the people born then and the people born now, which I've always found to be a somewhat futile and meaningless conflict. Everyone who's "up to speed" now will in 30 years look as ridiculous as the 90s executives with their brick phones, and on and on ad infinitum. The best we can do as a species, I would say, to retain our sanity, would be to recognize how similar people who came before us are to ourselves. How, by and large, the human condition hasn't really shifted in millennia. 

It's said there are observable instances of temporal distortion. Say, for instance, to a mayfly whose lifespan constitutes five minutes for females and two days for males, they live the equivalent of years in what we're able to pick up, that their short lives from our perspective are merely a result of their enhanced metabolism, that to them we appear like motionless, incomprehensibly slow giants. Likewise, to the tortoise, who conserves its energy and lives up to 150 years, we move much too fast, like hyperactive rabbits. In its eyes, it moves at a normal pace and lives through a time that we might consider reasonable. 

The overall point in this thought experiment is that time is subject to perception. Things like sleep and altered mental states already shift our perception of time. No human's brain is as accurate as an atomic clock, and we are notoriously awful at measuring time using only our heads. The average person cannot tell the difference between seven minutes and ten minutes without counting, and even then we're not the best at measuring what a true second is. Time may very well be a universal law, yet for us it is always subject to interpretation. While it impacts our perception of the world and people around us heavily, I believe it's very important to maintain a sense of temporal perspective and remember that the moment you currently occupy will eventually end, and that nothing is permanent. It can be a sobering realization, though I think it is at the end of the day a necessary one to achieve, and if properly taken into account, people are capable of outliving even their own mortality.