It's not just your imagination: time really does move faster as we get older. Research shows that, from middle age onwards, we steadily fall behind the clock. For a senior citizen, half an hour zips by in fifteen minutes, so actual clock time seems to be moving faster and faster.
This sense of vanishing time is made all the sharper by the beginning of Daylight Saving Time. A whole hour evaporates in a flash, although it seems like only the day before yesterday when you set the clocks back for winter.
This twice-a-year resetting of the clocks is a great waste of time in itself, especially since clocks and watches became so complicated. It used to be so easy. Wristwatches could be changed by pulling out the winder button and twirling the hands into position. But now, resetting the time requires a degree from MIT, as well as an uncommon degree of physical dexterity.
Daylight Savings Time puts a strain on our closest relationships. Morning people love it because it gives them an excuse to get up even earlier. Night people hate it because it forces them to face the dawn in what ought to be the middle of the night. Morning people invariably marry night people, it’s one of those inexorable natural laws, so this does nothing for domestic harmony.
Why do we torture ourselves like this? It's all self–deception. We can't save daylight, any more than we can save time. Barring some massive disruption in the solar system, there will be exactly as much daylight as there ever was, and time will keep ticking along at a steadily accelerating rate.
Our obsession with clocks and clock time is all the fault of a mad Dutch mathematician, Christian Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock back in the 1600s. Once time could be mathematically measured, everybody wanted to know exactly what time it was all the time. Public clocks were set up in every city, then pocket watches and wristwatches allowed us to carry time around, so we would know when to commence the cocktail hour, eat, sleep, wake up, and complain about other people not being on time. Clocks rule our lives, and it’s not a benevolent despotism. In fact clock time has nothing to do with real time, as we rediscover whenever we have to wait for a train or a deli sandwich.
My father's hobby was repairing clocks. The family home was full of them, all ticking away at slightly different rhythms and showing slightly different times. He would disembowel them on the kitchen table, picking his way confidently through hundreds of tiny wheels and springs, in a passionate but always-doomed search for perfect accuracy. So I learned at an early age that clock time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein suggested that, if only we move fast enough – close to the speed of light – time will actually slow down. But what chance do we have of reaching the speed of light – 186,000 miles a second – way over the speed limit? The clocks are gaining on us. They just gained an hour in a single weekend, and all of them are going faster and faster.
Copyright: David Bouchier
