The fact that 10 years ago is only 2016 is mindblowing to me. I remember going through school and thinking about how everything seemed to move so slowly. The 12 years I spent in school felt like such an amazingly long time, but now it feels like I blinked, and it’s been 13 years. I’ve officially been out of school longer than I was in it, but the last 10 years have screamed by at such an amazingly fast pace.

It’s not so much that I haven’t done anything in those years. I’ve actually built a pretty great life for myself. I got married, had kids, bought a house, got some dogs. I’ve renovated a house, rebuilt a basement, restored a car (partially), built a treehouse, built several fences. Survived COVID, managed to keep a real job, even bought a brand new car. On it’s own, each of those things were big tasks, and it felt like forever while I was doing them, but looking back now, My brain just compresses all of that time into one small little cube.

The terrifying part of all of this, is that time really started accelerating for me around COVID. I was working from home, I had purchased a new house and was working on renovating it. Every night after work, I would go to the house and work my ass off for hours doing backbreaking work. I remember thinking to myself “I can’t wait until this shit is over.” and “I fucking hate drywall”, and “I’m never installing wood floors again”.

During those times, I really felt as if time was dragging. It was in those moments of really difficult work that time seemed to tick by so slowly. If you read some of the theories as to why time seems to accelerate as we get older, some people would point out that novelty is part of it, and I don’t disagree. On the weeks where I do nothing but go to work, come home, make dinner, and go to bed, the entire week just disappears into the ether. Even though the work that I do can be difficult at times, and it can be annoying, or there can be interpersonal issues going on that make me dread having to be there, it still seems to shoot by.

There’s another theory about degrading mental capacity; but I don’t feel like that’s the case. In fact, right now I feel like I’m more capable and plastic than ever before. I learn new things at a level that I couldn’t fathom in school. It’s almost unfair, and I know that if I was dropped into an undergraduate class again, I would do incredibly well. I think that perhaps I haven’t hit that part of time acceleration yet.

What I think is really happening is that our brains are trying to focus us on what’s important. Before I had kids, I couldn’t fathom that I could handle changing a diaper, cleaning puke, or whatever else without puking myself. But as soon as the first one popped out, it just wasn’t an issue; in fact, the I don’t even remember half of the diaper changes that I’ve done - Why would you?. I think our brains are filtering out unpleasantness as well as novelty. Work itself is, by and large, unpleasant. You go somewhere and sell your time and energy. Anyone that believes that it isn’t pleasant is a liar, we all know that if an unlimited sum of money were to deposit itself in your bank account, driving an hour to submit some TPS reports is not going to be high on your priority list.

Because there are many parts of your day that are mundane or unpleasant. When you reflect back on them, it feels compressed, because you are losing all of the time that you spent doing things like driving to work, cleaning a toilet, changing a diaper, etc etc.

Now the interesting part is when you spent hours and hours doing a task that absolutely sucks. For example, I spent 2 months worth of evenings and weekends finishing my basement. At least a month of that was taping and mudding drywall. Extremely annoying, tedious, messy, difficult work. Every day I would go down and do a little bit more, but while I was working time would drag on and on. Even looking back now, I remember how LONG that time felt. In fact, that time felt much longer than almost 2 years since my daughter was born. I think in this case, it may have been two things that really made it feel long: Novelty and difficulty.

Why both? Well consider this. Since my daughter was born, we’ve done quite a lot together. Camping, hiking, museums, roadtrips. All of them were novel, but none were difficult as well as novel. Because of this, my brain seems to compress these. It’s not as if I thought they were pleasant, in fact, they were the most fun I’ve ever had, and I loved every minute of it, but as the saying goes, “time flies when you’re having fun.”

I think in order to make things slow down, you really need to find both novelty and difficulty together. You need to find new experiences and really, truly challenge yourself. Your reward for doing that? You get a little bit of time back.

There is a dark side to this though. Those months where I was doing my basement, I feel a black hole where my daughter’s life was. I don’t remember what we did together, or what she started doing. I’m sure I could go back, but trying to remember back to that time feels like it’s clouded in a fog. That is terrifying to me.

On one hand, I want time to slow down, on the other, I want to experience the things that I enjoy. Like everything in life, there’s a balance to find. There’s always a balance.