Time

And: "How old are you in your head?"

July 20, 2024 was the 39th anniversary of the day an immature hayseed from Vermont with a fondness for loud guitars and cheap beer met the love of his life on West 21st Street in Manhattan. When I thought about all the time that has passed since that fortuitous day, I realized something that seems utterly impossible but which math informs me is true.

As of late April 2024, I have lived in Canada longer than I lived in New York City.

NY City: January 3, 1987—August 29, 2005: 6,814 days (18y, 7m, 27d)
Canada: August 31, 2005—August 8, 2024: 6,918 days (18y, 11m, 9d)

(I didn’t count the day we drove north as a day in either place.)

Time is strange in myriad ways (as Dylan notes, it both “passes slowly” and “moves too fast”). I recall certain things from our first year in Ontario and they seem quite a long time ago. But other things from the same period, and even events from New York, feel much more recent. Thinking of the spans of time we’ve had our eight dogs doesn’t help in sorting things out. And then there is the disconcerting and disorienting issue of time having sped up to the point where entire months and years zip by without much notice.

Here is an article about something I’ve thought about for a long time. Turns out it’s a thing with many, if not all, people.

The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic, February 23, 2023

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. . . .

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. . . .

But “How old do you feel?” is an altogether different question from “How old are you in your head?” The most inspired paper I read about subjective age, from 2006, asked this of its 1,470 participants—in a Danish population (Denmark being the kind of place where studies like these would happen)—and what the two authors discovered is that adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age. “We ran this thing, and the data were gorgeous,” says David C. Rubin (75 in real life, 60 in his head), one of the paper’s authors and a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University. “It was just all these beautiful, smooth curves.”

Why we’re possessed of this urge to subtract is another matter. . . .

I will be 61 in October . . . 35-40 in my head generally, at times much younger.