525,600 Minutes

That Song from Rent

Hello Friends,

Today, we’re talking about time. And the brain. I know, I know, I bounce on these subjects like a toddler on grandma’s bed.

This one is little different.

When I was in college all those years ago, my roommate told me people experience time differently as they age. His theory came from math.

A year in a five-year-old’s life (1/5) is a larger slice than a year in a 50-year-old’s life (1/50). 20% versus 2%—each year becomes relatively smaller, percentage-wise, as we age.

Intuitively, though, regardless of the math, it didn’t feel right to me, because a year is a fixed amount of time.

It’s constant except for leap years, of course, which basically is just correcting for the fact that the Earth likes to do what it likes to do.

Anyway, one year is made up of seconds (exactly 31,536,000). And the second has been precisely calculated and standardized.

It’s the exact amount of time it takes for an atom of caesium 133 to absorb microwaves at a frequency of 9,192,631,770, obviously. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says so.

9,192,631,770 is a lot of digits, so one should suspect it’s rather precise.

NIST does this sort of thing. They count and weigh stuff, so a pint is a pound the world around.

One second is a constant.

To get it we blast microwaves at a blob of cesium and count. After a second on your old gym teacher’s stopwatch, we get that really big number—every time (excuse the pun). NIST uses a slightly more accurate stopwatch than Coach, but you get the idea.

Also, we derive a consensus about how long a second is by using International Atomic Time (TAI), where several really accurate clocks around the world “vote” on the time by generating “ticks”—each tick is an atomic second. It’s quite a thing for these folks; I mean, just imagine if one of their friends was 15 minutes late to the party.

And so, with all that in my back pocket, I felt pretty good when I had a feeling that Mike’s theory just didn’t make sense.

To suggest a constant amount (1 year) of a finite total (say, 80 years if you ask Oliver Burkman) would not be constant, seemed a flash of hubris. Just another excuse for a college kid to blow off his physics homework and YOLO in a bar down the street.

Then, years later (millions of minutes later), when I was living in Atlanta, I experienced my first Krispy Cream drive-thru event.

This was a new, transcendent experience for me, and an utter surprise.

On one of the major thoroughfares, Ponce de Leon Avenue, in Atlanta, there is a Krispy Kreme store where little donuts march along on a conveyor belt behind a huge street-facing window. Occasionally, they turn on the Hot Now sign.

At that moment, anyone in eyesight will drive straight for the drive-thru entrance, like sharks to chum.

I’ve crossed lanes and cut off school buses full of children to get in line and get my dozen donuts.

As you drive away and return to reality, before you know it, time dilation, you’ve eaten four donuts from your dozen quicker than you could count the change. You can’t even remember what they tasted like.

I think we can all admit that time flies when you’re having fun, or eating your secret desire, and we all know donut math or ice cream math or pizza math is way more complicated than time math.

Well, with sugar-crusted lips and a growing swirl in my stomach, something cracked in my “time is constant across your whole life” veneer.

Finally, last week, I actually found some science to support what my roommate had told me all those years ago. Apparently, we do experience time as moving faster, and consequently years get shorter, as we get older.

Apparently, it’s the brain’s fault:

…longer [and, therefore, fewer] neural states within the same period may contribute to older adults experiencing time as passing more quickly…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

And to that, I can only say, “That sucks!”

It’s another one of those things that comes with age, like hemorrhoids and surprise urine dribbles; by the time you figure out why it’s moist down there, it’s too late.

Sorry, Mikey—you were right, as usual.

Then again, thinking about it… it probably makes sense. Our brains get more efficient as we age because, by the time we’re old, we realize some shit is just too boring for us to have to pay attention to.

Happy reading, happy writing, happy donuts,

David