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Children and Helical Time – Ryan Moulton's Articles

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We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year. If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is, then we experience time logarithmically through our lives. Instead of middle age coming at 40 as linear time would suggest, in logarithmic time the midpoint of age 5 and age 80 is age 20. Childhood is one half of our life, and adulthood the other half. This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match. So how should this change how we live? Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The

We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “ no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam .” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year. If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is, then we experience time logarithmically through our lives. Instead of middle age coming at 40 as linear time would suggest, in logarithmic time the midpoint of age 5 and age 80 is

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