In the past couple of months, I spent a lot of time asking questions to Chat GPT - an AI software that has incredible powers in answering questions using language. This has helped me a lot in figuring out things, especially about things that you don't know how to google.
So if I have questions about phenomena that I have experienced, but can't find the right words, I will use this Artificial Intelligence to explain if there is a word for a phenomenon and then ask why I might feel a certain way, why things are the way they are, or to explain in simple words what a certain mental concept is like.
One thing that has fascinated me for a very long time is the concept of time itself. The way in which we perceive the passing of time, and how an event can feel "like yesterday" but still be decades away in the past.
There are many powerful implications when it comes to the passage of time. Especially in combination with the power of human memory. There is a concept that Chat GPT explained to me as "temporal orientation" or "temporal" awareness, which describes a person's ability "to place events and memories in chronological order and to understand the passage of time."
Some people seem to be able to assign certain memories to a specific calendar year from very early on, but to me, it really started when I was 12 years old. That was the year when I became strongly aware of time, the year I was in, and the ability to reflect on a year that has passed and take mental notes of some of the more meaningful events that happened. That was in the year 1995. Of course I do have memories from before then, and I can assign SOME memories to specific years, but most of the time these memories are assigned to a year by some sort of association. For example: It mus have been the year 1994, because I was in 4th grade and I had that teacher, so it had to be that year.
But from 1995 on, I no longer had to construct a memory from these circumstances, I could just remember the events themselves.
One thing that has amazed me since the age of 12 is how time passes and how the perception of time passed changes over time. When I was 12 years old, an event from 1982 would have been 13 years ago, one year before I was born. As I am writing these lines, an event from 1982 is now between 40 and 41 years ago.
It feels strange because, while there is a grey mist surrounding my earliest years, I can at least recount many of those 40 years. I can come up with logical explanations as to why 40 years have passed since an event, and why it was "only" 13 years ago when I was 12 years of age. But when I think back now, 13 years seems like a laughable period of time. I think back 13 years and believe it was yesterday.
Another amazing thing about time: It is very impactful. 10 years are an enormous amount of time that impact many things in life. 10 years is an eternity in investing. You could 10x your money in 10 years without gambling, if only you invest in a fast-growing company that is not too massively overvalued when you start investing. 10 years can also make a huge difference to your looks, although there are periods in your life when your looks won't change much within 10 years at all, but other times your physical appearance will have changed drastically. So not only do 10 years matter, it also matters which 10 years you are talking about.
To some degree, it can even be scary to think about the passage of time. To give some examples: When I was a child, Christina Ricci played a young Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family movies, and now she plays an adult woman in the new Netflix series about Wednesday Addams. Aaron Carter was a child star as a singer in the late 1990s, and last year he died as a drug addict in his mid 30s. Or think of child actors such as Edward Furlong or Macaulay Culkin who are now more or less run-down middle-aged guys with mental health problems.
It leaves you wondering: Where am I going?
One of the weirdest thing, I suppose, is that fact that we (at least some of us) are very focussed on the past, but don't think too much about the future. I can't recall ever asking myself "where will I be in 2020?". The only thing I ever remember was thinking about the year 2000. But that was only because of the turn of the millenium.
What is also crazy is that I have had this blog since 2005, so I have a long library of blog entries to look back to.
When I make my "end of year posts", I only refer to an ending year,usually not a series of years. But in reality, I often think in decades. So when I am in a year, I think back to myself and ask myself the question: What happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago? Even before I was born.
So different things will come up in my mind: Childhood video camera footage, Sega video games, having to do a school internship, have trouble at work a decade later, and so on. Different stages of life, all connected by being on a year with the same number at the back.
And that's how all the memories rack up.
By the way, one of my biggest regrets and also my biggest pieces of advice if one had a child: Make them start a journal. Don't let that opportunity go to waste. You don't have anything left if you don't write down memories.
Other things relating to time would be to record things on video from an early age (video quality is better than ever) and to start investing very early, even on behalf of a child.
Time is very precious.
