Time Compression - How old age affects the memory

After the last few posts, I thought some lighter reading would be good.

Recently (OK not so recently, a few months ago, I broke up with the gf in question), I was talking to my girlfriend (like I sad, after more than a year and a half we've stopped being a thing and now we're just a thought) about how things have changed over the years (ibid).

I had just turned fifty-four and she was forty-eight (and looking so good for it) and we are both pretty active individuals. One day we were talking and got into the area of how reality seems different now from when we were younger. And so the concept of Time Compression as an element of subjective experience came up.

OK, really, this is going to be lighter reading; or shorter, anyway.

First let me say, I don't party that much anymore. I kind of got that out of my system years ago. Well, OK, sometimes its fun to get a little wild, but now I want a day or two for recuperations. Reparations?

The perception of Time compressing at certain times is for anyone. During say, a traumatic event, Time appears to change the speed at which it appears to pass. Doesn't it? Haven't you noticed that? Or could consider how athletes say that during a competition they experience a slowing down in their experience of the event, allowing them to make decisions more quickly, or to experience the event more clearly as it unfolds.

It would seem the same kind of thing happens as you get older. Only instead of things slowing down, they appear to speed up. Seems backward doesn't it? When I was younger, all I wanted was for time to fly past. Now that I'm older, I would have little problem with things slowing down. Not really interested in getting to the end of this ride so much anymore. Weeks that used to drag by when I was a youth, seem to speed by now in a flash and for me are most noticeable by the rapid passage of weekends: its Monday, its Monday again, now its Monday yet again! Damn! Where'd that weekend go!

As a post high school youth, my friends and I were always dying to get to Fridays and the weekends' partying. Sometimes we were so anxious to party that we'd go out on a Thursday night, then suffer through Friday at work, and not really want to go out once Friday night actually hit (this was after some serious Thursday night partying).

Friends would stop by Friday night saying, "OK! Let's go, we're ready!"

And sometimes I'd just have to say, "No! No more! I can't party tonight, I'm so burned out from suffering through all day today at work!"

All this was a little foreign to my girlfriend's experience as she didn't have this kind of party mentality growing up in Vietnam and because she had children so young at eighteen right after arriving in the US. So she never got to experience the single lifestyle in her late teens and through her twenties.

But for me, being the crazy white boy I was, in those years I'd have days where I would be down, or feel bad, usually it seemed, as we neared the week's end. I had no kids or spouse to tie me down back then (so barring Thursday night stupidities), I would go out with my friends. We'd set prefunction at home, hit someone's place, hit a bar (when we were old enough to, or found a bar that would take our fake IDs) and just go out to get drunk (or nearly so anyway, or as close as possible, or as my older brother likes to say, "Getting drunk is all too much fun, but Being drunk, not so much").

Then of course, I'd feel bad the next day (a bad syndrome known as a hangover for the uninitiated and for the initiated, well, pretty sure you really aren't interested in even talking about it). But it was always a kind of "feel bad" that was far away from that next Friday night's partying.

Thoughts of, "I'll feel bad tomorrow, just didn't seem to matter to me as much". And as always, that hangover made my life seem so much better because, anything is better than this stupid hangover! Very life affirming in some ways.

So now that I'm older and although have those same bad feelings (emotive crap) from time to time, getting drunk just isn't as much fun for some reason as it once was and regarding that, time really does seem somewhat compressed to me. Perhaps, because I've lived so much of it by this time in my life. Or perhaps because the ensuing hangover, at least in my mind, seems always to come much too quickly. Its simply seems too close to the "getting drunk" so that the "having been drunk" just doesn't really make it worth even doing anymore.

Still...once in a while, it certainly IS worth it to go out, have fun with friends or new acquaintances and maybe have one too many drinks. Then its such bliss to sleep in the next day and if affected with the appropriate partner, it can be somewhat enjoyable (OK it was ALWAYS that way); then to get up and wander around blearily in your bathrobe, grinning and groaning through the morning's coffee.

Yes, Life is good sometimes.

I guess my only complaint at such a time, would be that your bathrobe is simply too small for me to fit into.

Tomorrow's Blog: God or People: Should God come first in His Religion?