Contents
We know that our life is “only a moment between the past and the future.” But can we truly feel it? We are disturbed by the feeling that time flies and slips away, overtaking us and our desires. We want to understand its laws, to live in harmony with it – after all, we simply will not have another.
On July 16, 1962, speleologist Michel Sifre descended into the Scarasson cave on the border of Italy and France. At a depth of 115 meters underground, he set up a camp equipped with everything necessary: a tent, supplies of water and food, a light source and a telephone for communication with the surface, where his colleagues were constantly on duty. If there was one thing missing from the camp, it was the clock: the purpose of the experiment was to find out how the perception of time changes if there is not even a hint of day and night. In the cave, Michel Siffre read a lot and exercised regularly. He called up colleagues, saying that everything was fine. From time to time he counted out loud to 60 and 120 to remember how long one or two minutes last, and based on these ideas he counted the days. When supplies ran low, Sifre made it safely into the light and, greeting his colleagues, announced that he could not expect to hold out until 20 August. Colleagues looked at each other: on the calendar it was September 14th.
Read more:
- Why is time running fast
cave effect
Since then, the experiment has been repeated in a variety of conditions and has consistently confirmed: in the absence of a change of day and night, we lose the sense of time, “stretch” it. This means that our subjective time is cyclical. For thousands of years, the way of life of a person and even the physiological processes in his body obeyed the rhythm of the change of day and night. And therefore, deprived of natural landmarks, we easily lose control over time. It is useful to know this, if only because this knowledge is actively used, for example, by the owners of mega malls and casinos. “Try to find at least one window in the casino,” says psychologist Yevgeny Osin. “Or find a source of natural light in a vast supermarket. Almost certainly nothing will come of it. And when we lose our natural landmarks, we forget about time.” And instead of the hour allotted for shopping, they can spend four hours. And avid players stay in the casino for days. And when they claim later that they thought they played for a very short time, they are probably hardly lying. The concept is extensible
Imagine that you are waiting for an important meeting somewhere in a boring office. The phone, as if to sin, is discharged, there are no magazines with you … Half an hour in such a situation can drag on for an eternity. And if you leave the office for lunch and meet good friends in a cafe, half an hour (or even much more) will fly by in an instant. This amazing unevenness is one of the main mysteries in the perception of time. Perhaps the point here is the saturation of the period of time with events and impressions. “If on vacation we only move to the beach and back for two weeks, then upon returning it will most likely seem short,” explains Evgeny Osin. “And if the same two weeks are filled with interesting trips, acquaintances, adventures, then the vacation will be remembered as surprisingly long.” Meanwhile, if we perceive vacation time from the inside (while we are in it), the first one will surely seem longer, with a well-trodden path from the beach to the hotel, and the second one will rush offensively quickly.
Another striking manifestation of the unevenness of time is its acceleration with age. As a child, three months of summer vacation seems like an endlessly long time. For an adult who is immersed in work and family affairs, the trimester can flash by completely unnoticed. And older people sadly note the imperceptible flickering of years … “When a child is five years old, then a year is one fifth of his life,” Evgeny Osin comments. “And it is clear that this is a huge time. And at the age of 60, one year is already a very small part, and the experience that can be gained during this time is also very small compared to what has already been accumulated. At the same time, it is interesting that, while evaluating the length of each specific moment of time, young people nevertheless tend to consider it more fleeting – perhaps this is due to the speed of metabolic processes in the body. “In one of the experiments, participants were asked to determine when, in their opinion, three minutes would pass after the sound signal was given,” says the psychologist. – It turned out that for younger subjects, three minutes ended earlier – after about two and a half. And older people reported that three minutes had passed when in reality they had almost four.”
Joy of the moment
Contemplate, reflect or savor the moment – we can learn to live more consciously what is happening to us here and now.
“To develop this ability, you can, for example, use the technique of “savoring the moment,” suggests psychologist Yevgeny Osin. – Buy yourself a gourmet cake or fill your bath with your favorite scent. And, without being distracted by thoughts on anything, completely immerse yourself in the current moment. Of course, this does not mean that you need to forget all the affairs and responsibility for the future. It is only necessary to feel what we do not notice in a hurry – the joy of the present. “As paradoxical as it may sound, time flies and disappears without a trace if it is not dealt with,” writes philosopher Cynthia Fleury. “Relationships with him require constant work. Existential time – a time of contemplation and reflection, allows you to realize the transience and at the same time the eternity of the present moment. As a result of such reflections and analysis, the present is filled with meaning.
*VS. Fleury “The End of Courage” (Fayard, 2010).
Present continuous
There is no such grammatical form of time – the present continuous, which is happening right now – in the Russian language. But there is, for example, in English. But Australians who speak Kala Lahaw-I grammatically distinguish between the distant past, the near past, and today’s past. However, any language gives us the opportunity to see the “humanized” time, which reflects our picture of the world. We perceive time as space – and therefore we say “on the threshold of the century” or “deadline”. We consider it a limited resource: it can be spent or saved, lost or taken away. We talk about it as a moving object: it can fly, run, leave or stop. Language time is linear, but can be directed not only from the past to the future, but also vice versa. In the first case, we move along the time axis, moving away from the past (the most difficult is left behind) and approaching the future. In the second, we are standing still, and events are approaching us from the future (the hour of departure was approaching), and then, bypassing us, they are removed to the past.
Ksenia Kiseleva
At the pace of stress
In the 1980s, psychologist Robert Levin conducted research on the pace of life and attitudes towards time*. His assistants traveled all over the world, measuring, for example, the speed with which passers-by overcome the same distance; the time it takes to purchase a stamp from the post office; the accuracy of clocks in offices (as a result, not only Tokyo and New York, but also many European capitals, where we used to consider life calm and measured, were among the “fastest” cities). Levin repeated his research every few years. And the last, in 1999, recorded that the pace of life has increased almost everywhere on the planet.
In a sense, this means that time flows faster and faster from century to century. “The acceleration of time, despite the subjectivity of this very idea, is quite real,” says neuropsychologist Marc Schwob. “The course of the present time has nothing to do with the course of the past. Our ancestors, who lived for centuries by agriculture, spent the whole summer in labor, and in winter they could afford to relax a little. Now we work in the winter and rest in the summer. They went to bed at sunset, and we work late into the night with electric light. But for evolution, this is negligible. And the need to adapt to new living conditions inevitably leads to stress. The stress hormones, cortisol and catecholamines, are being produced by the human body today in increasing quantities and cause the need to hurry and a sense of the rush of time.
Modern means of communication have also somewhat “spoiled” our relationship with time, says anthropologist David Le Breton: “The intrusion of the outside world into our inner world has disrupted our habitual way of life. Each of us has several social roles, and before the course of life allowed us to change them smoothly. Now everything is mixed up: in the middle of a meeting, a loved one, an old friend or a family member may call us. And at the time of the date – the boss or an employee from the bank. And this fragmentation of existence inevitably speeds up the passage of time in our consciousness.
Robert Levin, by the way, was surprised to find that time in Stockholm or Zurich flies almost faster than in New York and Tokyo. After all, it is believed that Sweden and Switzerland live slowly. Levin offered this explanation: Europeans maintain a very high pace of life during working hours, but after work they sharply slow down. And they know how to “slow down” time, savoring every free minute. But the Americans and the Japanese, once pressing the gas, are no longer able to slow down. And, apparently, we chose their path.
Back or to the future?
Who doesn’t know the desire to stop for a while, take a break, lie in bed to your heart’s content or sit in a restaurant with friends? But what do we usually say to ourselves? “Now is not the time, we need to finish the report, have time for negotiations, put things in order in the house. Here I will manage all this – and then … ”And then new negotiations begin and a new report is in time. We constantly put off into the future moments of joy and pleasure that we might experience in the present. Let’s wait for a vacation, buy a bigger apartment, pay off a loan, raise children, retire… “In Western culture, people tend to live in the future, and as the pace of life increases, this trend intensifies,” says Evgeny Osin. We are so preoccupied with tomorrow that we simply do not notice today. And we suffer from this: future joys have not yet come, and the past ones have already passed. But all the good things that can happen to us are happening right now.”
However, the opposite option is also possible: life in the past. As a rule, older people “resettle” there, tending to believe that most of their lives, and therefore the joys that have befallen them, are already behind them. “The past can and should serve as a positive resource that supports us,” Evgeny Osin continues. – The memory of pleasant events, happy moments of life gives us strength, and if we do not have them, then life turns pale, we lose support. But living only in memories means denying yourself the very opportunity to experience joy now. Focusing on the past after tragic events is especially dangerous. We fall into the trap of painful memories, constantly returning to them and unable to do anything about it. In such a situation, the help of a psychologist is definitely needed: in order to truly experience a traumatic event, to extract some experience from it, to complete it – and finally start living on.”
good angle
The best relationship with time is one in which we find support in the past, do not forget about the future and live fully in the present, according to Evgeny Osin and his British colleague Ilona Boniwell **, who studied the relationship between the time perspective and the subjective well-being of everyone of us. People who achieve this balance have the highest rates of happiness and life satisfaction.
Our time is not only the days and hours we have lived, but also what is happening around us, and in this sense, “times do not choose.” However, for those who think that he has the wrong era, there is good news. “With the development of mankind, the tasks become more difficult, the requirements are tougher, which means that the stress is stronger,” says Evgeny Osin. “But each new era offers new ways to solve problems and cope with stress. You just need to find these new opportunities and correctly evaluate them. Anthropologists can, of course, blame mobile phones for making it difficult for us to combine different roles. But we must not forget how many gray hairs were added earlier in the parents after each late return of their children. Our age is generous not only for stress, but also for the opportunity to overcome them. And the best thing to do is to make the most of these opportunities by building your relationship with your time. Because, as you know, we won’t have another.
* R. Levine «A Geography of Time: on Tempo, Culture, and The Pace of Life» (Basic Books, 1998).
** I. Bonivell “Keys to well-being” (Time, 2009).
About it
Time Paradox Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd
The creators of the most authoritative theory of the perception of time present its main provisions in a visual and fascinating way. (Speech, 2010).
Valentin Erofeev, 25, watchmaker “I learned to appreciate him”
“As a child, I had a passion: I disassembled and reassembled everything that came to hand. In a barbaric way, my father’s cameras were first studied, then his watch. Soon I had my own – transparent, and then I could observe how they work. The mechanism, closed from the outside world, with its ticking life, fascinated me and seemed to be something mystical. A few years ago, I set out to find a suitable watch for myself, found nothing and … made it myself. Then some more. And then it became clear that there was no turning back. What is called time, for me, is tightly connected with the mechanisms that measure it. In fact, the clock creates it. Previously, they were the only keepers of time. They stood in specially designated places, under glass domes, as a great value. Modern man needs them for other purposes. Sometimes it seems to me that we subordinate our whole life to schedules and schedules. Before, I also lived like everyone else – constantly checking the clock. But now everything has changed: I managed to build my life so that I did not have such a need. As soon as I gave up the pursuit of time, I became much easier and freer. I look at the clock only in the morning when I wake up, and in the evening. Sometimes more often when you really need not to be late. I like to feel completely independent of the numbers on the dial. But, of course, not from time to time. By constantly working with the clock, I learned to appreciate it. I realized that it is irreversible, that there will be no second chance, there is only one attempt … You can work for many hours on a detail and in an instant spoil it with a sloppy movement.
Recorded by Julia Varshavskaya