I may have to get divorced: this happiness stuff makes time go too quickly

Wednesday, 2nd January 2008

Has any scientific research been done into why time speeds up as you get older? Christopher Fry once remarked on this, pointing out that ‘after the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes’. It may well be a problem that could easily be corrected, like short-sightedness. I can imagine a future in which GlaxoSmith-Kline produces a pill that slows everything down. As you get older you would gradually increase the dosage until, in your final years, time would creep by at a glacial pace, much like it does when you’re a child.

Then again, judging from how bored most of the residents in nursing homes are, this drug might not be a huge seller. It is one of the paradoxes of life that whenever time does slow down you desperately want it to speed up. For instance, of my many parental duties, the most irksome is having to get up with the kids on a Sunday morning. This means dragging myself out of bed at around six and then spending an hour watching Wah Wah Wubzzy before Match of the Day is repeated on BBC2 and I can exile my children to the nursery. That hour stretches on for an eternity, often seeming longer than the rest of the day.

As a general rule, the more you’re enjoying yourself, the quicker time passes. I recently watched a Channel 4 documentary on men who are addicted to pornography and one of the more curious aspects of this disease is that the people in its grip can spend up to six hours at a time in front of their computers staring at an ever-changing array of lewd images. In effect, their lives disappear into black holes as they engage in mindlessly repetitive behaviour. To explain this, the programme wheeled out a psychiatrist who speculated that it might be because the brain produces an excess of dopamine while the addiction is being fed. This means that the victims aren’t fully conscious. The frontal lobes have shut down, much like they do during sleep, and six hours can pass in the blink of an eye.

Could there be a similar explanation for why time speeds up as we get older? I often complain about the miseries of being a middle-aged father-of-three, forced to live in Acton and drive a Vauxhall Zafira, but the truth is I’m probably happier than I have been at any other time in my life. This is undoubtedly because getting married is a tried-and-tested way of reducing stress. In a book called The Case for Marriage, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher point out that 90 per cent of married men alive at 48 will still be alive at 65, whereas only 60 per cent of 48-year-old single men will make it to retirement age. Married men are half as likely as single men to commit suicide and single men drink twice as much. Perhaps most alarmingly — at least for bachelors — a married man with heart disease can expect to live an average of 1,400 days longer than a single man with a healthy heart.

The French author Henry de Montherlant famously said that happiness writes white and it seems to have a similarly bleaching effect on your sense of time passing. Instead of measuring out your passage on this earth by looking back at a series of life-defining events, you have difficulty recalling anything significant ever happening to you. Happy experiences don’t stick in the memory the way that unhappy ones do. Your life becomes a blur. Zzzhhoom.

Clearly, the only way to get time to slow down is to shoehorn some pain and suffering into your life. Perhaps my New Year’s resolutions should be to get divorced, become estranged from my children and move to a bedsit in an even more unfashionable part of west London (Harlesden?). At least that way, 2008 might last longer than five minutes.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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Alexander

January 9th, 2008 7:29pm Report this comment

I think that the answer is rather simpler than you imagine. The older you get, the fewer truely new experiences you have on any given day. I spent two weeks visiting a friend in Japan. Almost every taste, smell and sound was different than anything that I had experienced before. Time slowed down drastically -- to the point that it was difficult to remember what I'd seen and done in the morning. The last time that I remember feeling like that I was seven or so.