My oh my, how quickly October came around this year! I know for myself, it came as quite a
surprise when I had to flip the page on my dachshund calendar in my office from
September to October. I thought to myself, “October already, how could it
be?” Besides, wasn’t it just July a few
weeks ago? I guess it’s true, as we get
a little older; time indeed starts to go by faster. Well, maybe time doesn’t go faster, but it’s
our perception of time is what changes.
I remember as a kid talking with my older aunts and uncles and cousins,
and how they would try to advise me to “hold on to my youth,” because soon time
would start to fly by. Oh, how
rebellious I felt in telling them, how that would never happen to me. I was going to “live each day to the fullest,
and make every single day count!” Well,
guess who was right? Yup, it was my
elders who actually knew what they were talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I still try and make the
most of every day however, it seems in doing so, one day just started to “fade”
into the next, which then began to “fade” into the week after the next, which
eventually “faded” into the current year.
Holy smokes, one day I was 20 the next I was 40 and now here I am a few
years older than that! The surprise is certainly
on me! But then again, I started to
realize that the surprise wasn’t just on me. It sure seems to me that many
people I talk to say the same thing. They
too believe that time feels to be going faster and faster. Well, “Farmer Tony” here, has his own
“theory” on why we perceive time as going faster. I don’t have an actual name for my theory,
and it’s not based on any kind of “scientific evidence,” but it’s just a good
anything else I have ever read about the subject. Anyway, here goes…
Since the dawn of man on this planet, things have moved
rather slowly. The time between when
humans were able to first create fire on a regular basis for cooking and
staying warm, and the invention of the wheel, was quite vast. Just like the
time gap between the development of a written language and the printing press
was vast. And it sure took a while for us to get from the horse drawn carriage
to the motorized horseless carriage a.k.a., the automobile. So with these and the countless other
examples that you yourself could come up with, one could conclude that up until
recently, the human brain was accustomed to the slow pace of invention and
“modernization.” By the mid to late 1800’s in this country, with its new
“fangled” inventions like the telephone, the phonograph, and locomotive trains
to carry passengers across the country, and with new “social changes” in the
works, like women who started attending
college, there were some who just
couldn’t handle this new pace of life.
With all these new changes, it would eventually lead some to the
diagnosis of neurasthenia. This
“nervous exhaustion” that people felt would sometimes lead to depression, and even
physical pain. Why? Simply put, because
life was now moving too fast for the brain to handle. So, skip ahead to the modern age. Instead of hundreds of years passing before
life changing inventions, the time between has shortened. I know just in my lifetime, I have seen
things like the obsolescence of the pay phone, to the invention of the cell
phone. And even with the cell phone, in just a few
years, technology went from a car mounted only phone, to the cell phone that we
all carry around in our back pockets. We
have gone from no internet in the early 1990’s, to people now reading news or
ordering groceries on Amazon via their smart phone or other connected devices. So
it would be safe to conclude that life has indeed sped up. As for our brains that were so accustomed to
all the slow changes in our world, well, from an evolutionary point of view,
we’re still trying to catch up with it all…which leads us to the idea of time
seemingly moving faster.
Anyway, for now it’s just a “working theory” on my part, and
I’m not sure how to scientifically prove it, but until I can, I still have to
work on a name for it. Maybe you can
help a farmer out on that one.
Anyway, remember to make the most of every day and live each
day to the fullest! You’ll be glad you did and maybe we can make time slow
down, even if it’s just a little.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in the groves, looking
at my watch.
-Farmer Tony