More Time

We manipulate time. All the time. Even early man could think about tomorrow and yesterday and communicate those ideas with those around him. He planned for winter. He drew pictures on the cave walls of past exploits. He told stories around the fire, people memorized those stories and told them long after the death of the author. Eventually we invented writing and were able to hold these ideas for generations and compile them for others to read.

It has become a form of time compression. When you read a book or see a movie, you essentially enter a time machine. You compress time. You feel as if you have lived a large part, or sometimes an entire life of some character other than yourself, and in a relatively small part of your personal time.

We can go to places and times we could never actually go, live the sort of lives we wouldn't, shouldn't and couldn't live, and all, in so short of time that we couldn't possibly have had time to do so in the course of our actual lives.

There is a Twilight Zone episode from the 1950's where an old man has a 'special' radio that plays radio programs from his youth. None of the other old people hear it and we are never sure if it is the radio that is magical or if the man is simply mad. That's the plot. Can you imagine a time when a re-run was something spooky? When everything on mass media was the first and only time you were going to experience it? No copiers, scanners, tape recorders, VCRs, CD burners, Tivos, MP3s.

Of course there were books, and movies and paintings even then, but there was a time when they didn't exist either. You experienced life from your own point of view, and anything else was hearsay. That's why old people were more useful than they are considered today. They knew stuff you didn't. They had no one to call them liars. Other than other old people of course.

There is a price for all this time compression of course. What we exchange is the normal physical worlds time. The way the animals experience it, or so we would assume. It's a bit like relativity. In Einstein's famous thought experiment where the man is traveling at near the speed of light and his time experience is different than the man who is not doing that. If you are compressing time in one of the many many ways we have of doing it, it's a little disconcerting when you stop. When you come out of a movie which was very sunny and it's dark when you come out, it makes you feel funny doesn't it? Especially when it was day when you went in. Getting off a plane and experiencing jet lag is another. You are not where you by rights should be, you've cheated time and you have to find your place in it. Catch up. We like the speed of it. We flip channels madly to go from world to world to world to see how fast you can comprehend that time and place just to move on to the next. We like to phone and text and email and watch TV all at once, bombarded with information on every front to test our ability to make sense of it all. You're missing some of it, but you're experiencing more than one life at once, getting more than your share. Much more than we were designed for.

You can stretch and distort time in small ways all the time, but they add up. If you drive to work, which doesn't seem far, to us, but chances are it would have taken you all day to do it without the car, and while you are doing it, you listen to a book on tape and experience a large chunk of someone's life as if you were there, and then when you get to work you talk to someone in another state on the phone, email someone on the other side of the world who you've never actually met yet is nevertheless a good friend of yours, you can find that you've been operating in your time machine for hours.

That's why when you finally decide to go to lunch you can be totally surprised that it's raining. You weren't in real time, you were in your own personal relative time. You didn't see the clouds form in the west and slowly come towards you. You didn't watch them and judge the distance and speed all day and determine that it would probably be raining by noon. You missed all that. But many more hours have passed for you. You know about the hard years spent by the person in your book while he was in prison, and how many yards of fabric they have in Delhi that your company needs, and how John's son passed his Eagle Scout test, and that you'd better pick up whole wheat bread on the way home, but you missed the rain. You gave up the rain to live many lives within your own. People are want to say that the modern world is more fast paced than previous times. It is more to the point that we live more lives in the same amount of time. It's about quantity rather than speed. Are you the same person online that you are to the people at a family gathering? Are you the same person even to different groups of friends or different groups on the internet? You get to be more than one person. In a small village, you had to be one person because everyone you knew, knew everyone else. Now you don't. The quantity is staggering and always going up. Who knows how many more lives we can stuff in our brains?

The Spud