Time is My Friend

Time is a big deal because it’s the one truly non-renewable resource – the only thing you can never get back or make more of. It’s finite and uncertain. You don’t know how much you have. Could be 80 years, could be 80 days. This uncertainty creates urgency and forces us to make choices about what matters most. Every “yes” to one thing is automatically a “no” to something else. Some say that it’s the currency of life itself. Everything you value – relationships, experiences, accomplishments, learning – requires time. You can’t have love without time spent together. You can’t master anything without time invested. Even money, which we often chase, is really just a way to buy back time or experiences. And here’s the thing about time…stories like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button notwithstanding, time only moves in one direction. You can’t pause it, rewind it, or save it for later. The moment you’re in right now will never come again. Your kids will never be this age again. Your parents won’t always be here. That makes every moment both precious and a little bit heartbreaking.

Time is also tied to identity and regret. We measure our lives in time – “when I was younger,” “by the time I’m 40,” “if I had more time.” We judge ourselves by what we’ve done with our time, and our deepest regrets are usually about time wasted or time we can’t get back. It’s also the great equalizer. Everyone gets 24 hours in a day. Jeff Bezos can’t buy more. Not even Donald Trump can beat back time, though I’ll bet he will try. A genius (even a stable one) doesn’t get extra time to spend. It’s the one area where we’re all playing the same game with the same rules and the same limitations (more or less).

Time is always on our minds from the youngest age, but I think time becomes an even bigger deal as you get older and start to feel like it’s accelerating. That’s not entirely a random or accidental thing. There are several reasons why time seems to accelerate as we age. There is what is called the Proportional Theory of Time. When you’re 10 years old, one year is 10% of your entire life – that’s huge. When you’re 50, one year is only 2% of your life. Each year becomes a smaller fraction of your total experience, so it feels proportionally shorter. Summer vacation at age 8 felt endless because it was a much bigger slice of your known existence. There’s also the “Novelty Effect”. When you’re a kid you are constantly experiencing things for the first time – first day of school, first bike ride, first heartbreak. Novel experiences create rich, detailed memories and make time feel fuller. As adults, we settle into routines (some might say ruts). We have the same commute, same job, same weekend patterns. When you’re on adult life autopilot, your brain doesn’t encode as much detail, so weeks blur together. Your brain tends to remember the unusual, not the usual. You remember the two-week trip to Europe in vivid detail, but not the 50 identical Tuesdays at the office. When you look back, time seems to have passed quickly because there aren’t many distinct memories marking its passage. This helps explain why we humans like to celebrate our milestones. You may not remember the fifth Thursday in January in 1964, but you certainly remember your tenth birthday. And a year with lots of new experiences feels “longer” in retrospect than a year of routine.

There’s also evidence that our internal biological clocks actually slow down as we age. Children’s brains process more information per unit of external time, making time feel slower to them in the moment. That’s much less the case as you get older and your synaptic system slows. Perhaps its as simple as the fact that as we age there is simply less future for us and more past. As you age, you have more to look back on and less to look ahead towards. This changes your perspective – you’re spending more mental energy reflecting backward than anticipating forward, which can make the present feel like it’s slipping away faster. The cruel irony is that time speeds up precisely when you realize how valuable it is. That’s why people are always telling us to “slow down and be present”. Deliberately creating novel experiences and paying attention in the moment can help counter this sense of acceleration… at least until you start losing people and realize viscerally that time really does run out.

As to whether time is your friend or your enemy, that may depend on where you are in life and what you’re experiencing in the moment. Time can be a friend when it heals wounds, builds expertise through experience, deepens relationships, and gives us perspective on things that once seemed overwhelming. It’s a friend when we’re savoring good moments, when we’re compounding our investments or our knowledge or maybe when we’re watching something we’ve planted finally grow. But time can also feel like an enemy when you’re watching it slip away, when you’re losing people you love, when your body reminds you you’re not as young as you once were, or when you feel you haven’t accomplished what you hoped to by now. It’s an enemy when we’re in pain and the minutes drag, or when you’re running out of it for things that matter.

I spent a moment thinking about how we use our time. The average person (say, one who lives to 80) spends their lives something like this:

Sleep – The biggest single chunk of our time in life is spent sleeping. Roughly 8 hours per day throughout life, though babies and young children sleep more, and this decreases slightly in old age. That comes to 24-27 years of your life.

Work – For someone working full-time from roughly age 20-65 (45 years), spending 40-60 hours per week including commute. This is about 90,000-140,000 total hours of your waking life. That’s 10-16 years of your life.

Watching TV/Screens (a relatively new human use of time, but a very consuming one) – Americans average 4-5 hours per day of screen time (TV, streaming, social media). This has increased dramatically in recent decades. In fact, I would guess that I spend at least 5 hours per day on average, so something like 17 years of my life.

While some of that screen time might be a valid learning experience, I would suggest it’s mostly entertainment and that real Education takes up a much smaller portion of life. They say that K-12 is about 15,000 hours in the classroom. Add college and graduate school, and you’re looking at roughly 4-5 years of actual classroom/study time.

Those four activities alone take up 65 of our 80 years. That leaves 15 for some combination of eating, household chores/errands, personal care and socializing/recreation/play/religion/volunteering and the miscellaneous activities of life. I’m not sure I like parsing my life in that manner, but it would be hard to deny the way we spend our most valuable resource.

I think the wisest approach to time might be to recognize that time is a neutral element that is neither friend nor foe. After all, it’s just the medium through which we live. The “friend or enemy” part comes from how we choose to spend it and how we frame our relationship with it. Someone who makes peace with time’s passing, who focuses on what they can do with the time they have rather than mourning what’s gone, tends to experience it more as an ally. It becomes an important life choice. I, for one, choose to think that time is my friend…and I’m sticking to that.