Philosophy on Facebook # 14 - Time Flies: Pt 1

Wow its been about a week since i last posted. Times really flys and thats why I want to talk about it. We have all heard about the expression that time flies when youre having fun. Well im about to tell you guys why its only a half truth. Time does fly when youre having fun but doesnt always and it can also fly when youre having a pretty crappy day too. In fact your disposition and mood have no real effect on the way you perceive time. The reason why time seems to pass us by is because we dont pay attention to the actual concept of time and the time thats passing us by. We are less likely to pay attention to how the time is passing when we are being distracted so the expression was basically correlated to when you have fun because when you have fun you usually arent looking at the clock all the time. Day dreaming is one of the biggest ways i find that time passes because you basically lose all sense of reality and basically delve into your own world where time definitely doesnt function like it doesnt in the real world. Just think of dreaming when you sleep and how you really lose your sense of time because you are completely out of tune with real life.

You dont have to be having fun though to have time fly but you will definitely be more inclined to look at the clock and watch the seconds tick by if you are doing something unenjoyable. when you do something unenjoyable you just want to get out of the current situation youre in so you count down the seconds you have until youre home free. For instance, when you write an essay, especially at home when you arent constrained by the time restrictions at school and when have a multitude of distractions to take your attention away from the task at hand like facebook. You will more likely look at the clock if you are less devoted and motivated to do something like writing a paper. When you get into this state seconds feel like hours and hours feel like days because you just long to be somewhere else.

Procrastinators are very susceptible to this state because they choose something else to do and derail from their main goals. Most of the time these people then get to the last second to do things and are often screwed because of another unfortunate aspect of procrastinators. This is that in addition to waiting to the last second they also have a terrible sense of time. While they choose to get distracted and put their skills elsewhere they also arent good at judging how much time tasks will actually take to complete. This is what I call "time distortion" where you have no sense of the way time actually progresses and also the time that it takes things to get done. Procrastinators usually suffer both of time distortions effects.

I also want to talk about the whole concept of time itself. if you think about it, every single thing in existence is a time traveler. We are all traveling through time second by second into an unknown future. One of the coolest things I have learned is that time is a relative term. Did you know that people who travel faster in time are actually traveling through time slower than everybody else. What I mean by travel faster is by the actual speed you are going at any point in time. An example of this is when you are traveling through space at very high speed much higher than the speed of sound. If you travel through space for like 5 earth years and come back you will actually have aged less than people on earth. So you could be living in space for 50 years and come back and you'll find that some people who were your age could have possibly died of old age.

Another thing i wanted to talk about was why people have the feeling that their memories had occurred very recently compared to the actual time they took place. When people say they feel like something happened yesterday when it actually happened like a year ago it is because of their lack of attention to the time in between. The memories of the time in between isnt completely lost persay. its just at the time period this "yesterday" feeling occurs you cant recall anything that happened previously. The time in between just seems to get cut out and then an event that took place like years ago seemed to have happened the other day. Its just a crazy thing about how our memory works that i feel like nobody has any idea why it happens. That reminds me about that one time that i wrote my first blog post. Feels like yesterday. Oh wow how time does fly.

P.S. this is only part one. the next part about time is coming soon about humans perception of time in regards to the future

-Allan Nicholas