What Makes Your Year Fly By? Doesn't Time Always Move At The Same Speed?
A letter from Nullman
Dear No One,
How fast has the year gone by for you? It’s August, we’re over seven months into 2025. Has the time flown by?
Most people ponder for a moment before answering. I’m fascinated by this ponder. What are they doing? How are they measuring the speed of time?
It’s interesting philosophically (like is time the space of memory?), but also I literally don’t understand what they are doing.
Maybe they’re combing through the months in their memory and seeing if any big events come to mind.
Hmm… Nothing really happened in January… Oh! Big promotion in February and – oh yeah! – I also broke my leg that month. Man, so much happened in February, and that was at the beginning of the year! I guess that, so far, 2025 has gone by…
Gone by what? How would a normal person end this sentence?
I think maybe he’d say “slowly.” Right? Because all that happened in February, which was at the beginning of the year. And the beginning of the year was…a long time ago.
So much has happened since February! Was I even born then? Like I moved, went to Mexico – there was that whole thing with Pam’s boyfriend and the drama. Got a new car. Time moves slow!
Here he’s estimating the speed of the year by trying to remember how much has happened since February. Several big events later in the year immediately came to mind, so February feels far away and the year long.
Plausible, but the same exact logic works in reverse.
Damn, all that happened in February?? I feel like I just got that promotion! My leg still sucks! Crazy, it’s been almost half a year since then. Time moves fast!
Although he’s still anchored at February, he’s remembering how much has not happened since then. What determines whether he focuses on what has happened between February and now versus what has not happened?
Maybe he’s measuring the speed emotionally and not mentally. The speed of time is not based on how many events do or do not come to mind, but by the feeling of something’s age.
February feels like it just happened, so the year must be going by quite quickly!
Is this a thing? Can people just feel the age of a month? I can’t!
Even if it is a thing, how do they decide which month to feel the age of in the first place? What if they went in reverse chronological order and started with July instead of January? What determines their starting month?
Wow, it’s already August, and I can’t even remember last week! Or last month, for that matter. Last month, let’s see, that was July. Whoa, July feels like so long ago… That must mean 2025 is going by super slow!
If someone can feel the age of February or July, what is stopping them from just directly feeling the age of 2025?
Maybe nothing is, and that is actually what people are doing. Not thinking about anything, not mentally cataloging the months, just taking a moment to feel the age of 2025. Whatever that means!
If that’s it, then I’ll never be able to measure the speed of time because I lack this mysterious capacity to sense it directly. I’ve heard this described as “time blindness.”
This idea compounds my confusion because it implies that people without time blindness have time vision. What would it mean to “see” time? Help, I’m lost in the metaphor!
Usually, when people ask me how fast my year has gone by, I say that, for me, time always moves very slow. Of course, that’s impossible. If time always moves at the same rate, then it can’t possibly move faster or slower.
My answer reduces to “Time moves for me,” which completely fails to address the actual question. When someone asks me about the speed of my year, they must be assuming that some of my years are faster than others. Otherwise, their question would be absurd, as any answer would be completely meaningless.
It’s the best response I have, though. I arrived at it by extrapolating the speed of my day. If my days are long, then my years must be long too.
Here I encounter the same paradox, just at a smaller scale. How can any one of my days qualify as “long” if all are the same length?
Comparative terms like “longer” and “shorter” only apply to sets with different elements. If all the days in my year are equally long, then they are all equally short too.
Honestly, my best guess is that, in most situations where people compare the speeds of their years, they are simply bullshitting each other. Here, I mean bullshitting in the technical sense of saying something without any thought or concern as to whether it is true or false, which is different from lying.
In other words, I suspect that people are just making sounds at each other to pass the time. It’s like when a cashier at a store asks how I’m doing. My reflexive “Pretty good” is me bullshitting them.
I don’t care whether my answer is true or not because I know that they weren’t really asking. Their question was bullshit, too. Maybe we are just saying “Hi’ in different ways over and over again because it’s ruder to be silent than to bullshit people.
Yours,
Nullman