slip sliding away

I lost April. I usually like April too, so it's sad that I lost it. At work today, a friend and I both tried to remember what had happened during April. It truly slipped by, unnoticed. And this got me thinking. We all remember how time was so much slower when we were kids. I would sob after Christmas was over because the wait for the next one seemed interminable. Forever. And in my defense, it really was a very very long time. When you are 8 years old, one year is equal to 1/8 of your entire lifetime. Or, if we make the assumption that the age of memory begins around age 5, one year chronological time to an 8 year old is approximately 1/(8-4) or 1/4 of her remembered life. That's a very long time. That's like someone telling me I had to wait for more than 10 years for something to happen.

And this got me to thinking about how time is really not an absolute measure. Time is relative, and our point of reference for time is the span of our remembered life, which constantly changes as we age. The one year wait period for the 8 year old me (1/4 of my life at that time) is only 1/39 of my remembered lifespan now. (I'm not lying about my age - I am retaining the assumption about 5 years being the age where memory begins).

So I wondered if I were to define a "relative age" as a measure of how absolute time changes as we age, how much of this relative time do I have left in my life? The years are spinning by faster and faster as we age - what percentage of my relative life have I lived?

So I came up with this:



Years as we normally define them are on the x-axis. (I did this on an extremely outdated version of excel and I couldn't figure out how to change the axis labels to show even decades.) Anyway, I assumed that memory begins at 5. Thus, 1 year for a 5 year old is equal to 1/(5-4)=1. One year for a 6 year old is 1/(6-4)=1/2, and for a 7 year old is 1/3, etc. I can then sum the relative terms to represent various lifespans, from 45 through 100 on this graph. The graph shows the percentage of your relative memory that you have lived as a function of chronological year.

The thick line is at chronological age 45, which I will turn in a few months. Even if I live to be 100, I have lived more than 80% of my relative age already.

It's interesting to think about childhood. We've lived about 50% of our relative memories by the time we're between 8-11. Childhood looms very large in our relative lives. Differences of a few years in children are enormously significant, while by the time you reach my age, the percentage lines really start to flatten out as the years whiz by.

This sucks.

I showed it to Gao just before I left work and his response was "Well shit, Jennifer." He thought for a while and then said "Since we're almost done, we should just do what we want. Go home and drink lots of wine."

I'm not drinking wine tonight, since I'm trying to restrict my alcohol intake to weekends. But it certainly makes you think. I started to realize life was not infinite somewhere around my early 30s, which coincidentally is when the slope of the lines starts to change more dramatically with chronological time.

I think I need to rethink how I spend my days. And maybe I need a vacation. A long one, both chronologically and relatively speaking.