Pearls: Where does the time go?

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

More time has passed than you thought. I have learned this to be true for so many things.

Your five-year-old refrigerator actually just eclipsed the decade mark. That conversation you had at the Post Office three or four weeks ago happened in late February. Your favorite shirt is older than the first-year teacher at the local elementary school.

Time just baffles me. It moves consistently. The standard unit measure of the passage of time is the second, and it is from this unit we derive minutes, hours, days, and years. I know you know this, but consider: time may just be the most accepted, universally used means of measuring anything in all of the world, but our perception of it is just as inconsistent as the second is consistent.

Your favorite show is half an hour long, but it feels like it’s over almost as soon as it has started, but 20 minutes of a Sunday sermon can feel like it takes an hour. Or vice-versa, depending on how interested you are in the content of each.

Time is tricky. If your phone has the feature where it tells you each week how much you have used it, there’s a pretty good chance you see that number and say to yourself, ‘No way!’

So I think a tend is emerging here. Entertainment gives us the perception that time is passing more quickly. Obligation gives us the opposite perception: that time is dragging its feet.

I suppose keeping in mind that statement – likely a conclusion each of you had reached before reading my two-cent analysis – we may begin to ask ourselves questions with farther-reaching implications.

If a teenager has a daily phone usage of 7 hours (and some do – check your kid’s phone if you’re curious), that’s nearly half of his or her waking hours. If the usage exceeds those numbers, I can about guarantee you they’re happening at 2 a.m., and any fool who thinks a teenager can trade a night’s sleep for entertainment and thrive in life needs his parenting license revoked.

So our perceptions of time cause entertainment hours to be more pleasurable ones spent. Our brains love a good break, and smartphones have coaxed us into taking hours of break each day, all the while lulling us into believing our 90 minutes of scrolling was really just 10-20 minutes.

The reality is that it will take your kids the same amount of time it took you to get to 18 years of age. The perception of time, however, factoring in the hours, days, weeks and months they’re losing in their devices, has shortened their childhoods significantly.

And just as tragically, you and I aren’t noticing it until the years are gone, because we are equally prone to entertainment addiction on our phones.

I am not suggesting we return to performing heavy outdoor labor from sunup until sundown to lengthen our perception of time to its fullest. I am not even suggesting we throw out our smartphones.

What might be the most practical answer is one that would solve virtually any problem of the modern world, if you and I had the discipline to use it. The answer is that we approach the use of our devices – and our children’s use of theirs – with the full understanding that time is precious, and that time spent phone-in-hand passes quickly.

Life is short. Take that weekly screen time report that so many of you get and multiply it times 52, for weeks in the year. Then take that larger number and take it times how many years you think you have between now and the end of life. That number is your gift, if you’re blessed enough to live out the years you have predicted. It’s a gift: it’s time that you have thus far handed to Apple or to Samsung or to whomever – and you paid them for the privilege of abbreviating your perception of time.

Take it back. Use the phone when you need a communication device. The vast majority of the remaining hours per week, per month, per lifetime will return to you. And maybe time will just pass a bit more slowly, freeing up moments to smell the roses, or visit in person those folks whose lives you only know now from social media. Doesn’t that sound like a better use of all of our time?

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.