Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Time is not a static variable

Written after surviving my wife's friend's 40th birthday party...

After the age of, say, 30, parties have a vestigial quality to them, much like male nipples. You can’t drink enough to make the small talk tolerable given the strict driving under the influence laws.

And although I'm not sure Chesterton addressed this problem specifically, he did argue for a “democracy of the dead”, meaning that we shouldn’t just assume that past cultures are foolish given that, over the course of millennia, they've often discerned what works and what doesn’t.

And ancient peoples had an intuitive wisdom such that they understood sitting around and struggling to find an interesting topic of conversation was not the best use of their time. Instead, they gathered and danced in circles around fires to the beat of a drum. They were enjoying the high of the endorphins of the dance or losing themselves in the beat of the drum. Gatherings were a vital part of the bonding of their communities, but let’s not kid ourselves - they were all getting something out of it.

The problem of parties past the age of 30 would hardly be worth mentioning but for the generally acknowledged fact that time accelerates as you get older. (Since I have experienced this myself, it must be true). This is both good and bad - good during work days, bad during vacations or weekends.

The “time inflation” coefficient might be assumed to be five percent a year, which means that the 48-hour weekend you get when you’re 20 years old is equivalent to a 30-hour weekend when you’re 35*. This is shown even more dramatically on vacation – a 3-day vacation at 23 is equivalent to a 5-day vacation at 37 years of age. Employers understand this, so they gradually bump up the vacation time available to you. But make no mistake – although you are gaining vacation time you are really barely staying even due to time inflation.

But to be serious for a moment, I do have to constantly remind myself that time is a gift and privilege - not a right - and that it is God's, not my own.

* -all figures extremely approximate. I don’t have time to figure present values.