A subject that’s fascinating to me is “time” and it’s something I’ve been closely monitoring lately. Specifically the concept that time is possibly moving faster, but how is that even possible? We are consumed by time with clocks, watches, and scheduling. At school or at work everything we do daily is precisely driven by time. 

They have even said in recent years that our attention spans are now shorter. I agree with that because we are eerily tightly woven with electronics and technology. Smartphones and computers have created a more fast-paced world for us. So even though you are sitting in a chair staring at a screen not moving, the content and information you are consuming through the screen is coming at you fast. Just about every other move we make these days is influenced digitally. Swipe, click, read. When you put into action these three movements your brain is moving at a rapid pace which in turn has tweaked our attention span. 

Can you believe they actually changed the historic game of baseball and bent the rules to force the pitcher to throw the ball within 15 seconds? There’s now a pitch clock! The game has to move faster in this era to accommodate our attention. Baseball rules are like the Constitution – forever ingrained into America and don’t just change. So for them to add a pitch clock to move the game faster is an incredible sign of the times. In NBA Games when a player shoots free throws the TV broadcast squeezes in advertisements in between the players shots. Just like a baseball pitcher, there’s apparently too much time of dead space I guess? Which again shows you stillness is hard to come by these days with waves of information overwhelming us. Even songs are now shorter. In years past typically the standard is for a song to be 4 minutes in length. Now songs are 2 to 3 minutes. Again, another example of how “time” is moving shorter and faster. 

When I was a young kid in the 80’s I can remember my grandpa’s house vividly. I would go hang out there in the summer days while he watched me. His house was so quiet. He had a TV, but it was never on. The only noise that would fill up the house was a real tall grandfather clock with the pendulum swinging back and forth and hourly bells ringing. For entertainment we would play board games like checkers, Connect 4, or card games like goldfish. The pace of life at that time was slow and quiet with no distractions. The mind was working naturally, our thoughts were pure without being consumed by being engulfed with electronic devices. When I sat at the dining room table for lunch waiting for him to make my favorite tuna fish sandwich, there would be phases of silence and this was perfectly comfortable. No TV, no phones, no computers. There was however the newspaper, magazines or books in his house. Specifically Britannica Encyclopedias! These days we can Google anything in the world within 10 seconds and seek the answers. With Encyclopedias it was a slow process compared to our current way of life. But it was healthy because we were exercising our whole thought process more naturally. Just the simple act of flipping the pages of a newspaper compared to swiping on a phone seems so comforting to brain activity because of the slower pace. 

When we factor “time” into all this I think we can all agree that it sure feels like it’s currently moving faster. What I mean is the clock hands are not rotating more rapidly, but our perception of time is moving exponentially faster due to the lifestyle of the technology age. Let me add another layer to this. We have over 7 billion people populating the planet, so that means there are billions of people’s lives all plugged into technology. WE ARE ALL MOVING FAST. We are literally part human, part artificial intelligence at this point. As a human race, as a collective consciousness we are all strung together. We have one foot on earth and one foot in the digital world and this I believe is the cause of our perception of time feeling faster.