Time Dilation & Back to the Future (Post on aging: 3 of 3)

Wanted to share a friend's blog post which grew out of a conversation we were having a few months back, following on the tails of a separate post about aging that I made.  Below is Aaron's take (in full) about aging, as he turns the corner to the youthful age of 40.

The math of turning 40, Time Dilation and Back to the Future

by Aaron Fyke, originally pulished at http://www.aaronfyke.com/

First - Happy Canada Day!


Second, I'll be turning 40 pretty soon and it got me thinking about the phrase "middle age".  It's always been my observation that life is "speeding up".  When I was a kid, the time between Christmas from one year to another seemed to take an eternity.  Yet now, I struggle to remember that 1993 wasn't 9 years ago, but 19!  What's going on?


My theory is that we are terrible at tracking time.  Instead we can track "relative time".  When we are six years old, the time from one Christmas to the next is fully one sixth of our lifetime - in fact, given that, at age six, we may not have any memories earlier than age three, we could conclude that each year is fully a third of our existence.  However, once we reach age 40, each year is only a sliver of our total existence, and thus seems much smaller.  This seems to be the only reasonable explanation of where my 30s went in a blink of an eye.


So, I decided to model this behavior and see what I discovered.  I made the initial assumption that our memories start at age 5 and end, with death, at age 80.  I then figured out the relative length of each year, to determine how long each year feels to us.  The results are interesting:


Let's first look at the cumulative chart.  This example takes the relative age for each year.  By measuring the areas under the curve we can determine the age of equal "relative age", or the ranges of ages which should "feel" the same period of time, taking into account the apparent acceleration of the years.

This shows that the first quarter of our life is over by age 10, the second by age 20, the third by age 40, and the last quarter, by age 80 (which, if you think of the math, makes perfect sense).  If I think of my childhood, this also feels right as well.  My teenage years, which technically lasted as long as my 30s, were a lifetime!  My 30s, I believed, happened when I went out for lunch one day.


So, the horror that we can realize is that 40 is not middle age - 20 is!  By the time you reach 40, you've lived fully 75% of your apparent life timeline.  Even though you are halfway through your life, the remaining years will seem like the blink of an eye.


Another way to look at this is with this graph:

This lets us determine what age corresponds to the percentage of apparent life lived.  For example, as shown, the age at which you have lived 60% of your perceived life is actually 25.  On one hand, this is a clear call to enjoy your youth, on the other hand it shows that we've all been given the gift that our youth lasts a disproportionately long period of time - which is great if you had a good youth, not so great if you didn't.


Now, interestingly enough, these results are driven by the assumption that you have perfect memory of your life, and thus each minute seems progressively quicker than the minute before.  This leads to some interesting conclusions.  The first is that there is a real cost to memories - their cumulative effect serves to make your life appear to go quicker.  So, if at all possible, there's little point fixating and hanging on to bad memories.  Relieving them serves to slow down the perceived acceleration of time.  As well, there is possibly the saving grace that, as you age, your memory of earlier events starts to diminish.  This will put more relative weight in the later years and appear to slow time down.  Looking at the first graph, if you were able to forget the first 10 years of your life completely, then the effect is dramatic on shifting the relative weights of the later years.  Is it possible that there is some benefit to dementia and memory loss in your later years?  I doubt the benefits outweigh the dramatic costs, but it's an interesting thought.


This also leads to some conclusions about kids.  As I watch my kids grow up, I get to experience, vicariously, their experiences.  While overall life is zipping by for me, and they are growing up at an incredible rate (from my point of view), they also help to slow my life down by providing an external reference point to my life.  Time dilation may be part of Einstein's theory of relativity, but its also alive and well between two people at dramatically different points of their life.


So, as I round out the first 75% of my life, and I see that we are almost in 2015, the year at which Back to the Future will be as far from me as 1955 was for my Dad when the movie first came out in 1985 (and led him to say that he felt old!), I can really question the phrase that "life begins at 40".  If it does, then life sure felt like it took a long time getting started.  Enjoy every moment that you live, and savor every good memory you have.  Even if you live to 80, you're just not here very long.

Age 30 is really age 10 (Post on aging: 2 of 3)

At the milestone age of 30, I started to receive all sorts of "old man" comments from those younger than me, from my peers, and even, to a certain degree, from those over-the-hill!  I really don't understand if I'm in some way unique, and was given some sort of youth-serum earlier in life, or whether these folks just don't get it -- 30 isn't, in any way, old!  The way I see it, I spent roughly the first two decades of my life as a child, learning about the world around me*, and growing into the adult person that I am now.  After those two decades, I stood proud, an undergrad degree in hand, as a newbie to the game called "adult life".

Over the past roughly decade, I've finally been learning who I am (as opposed to who my parents raised), and who I want to become.  I'm just now about 10 years into my real, chosen life!  Even upon college graduation, I had many burdens relating to my career launch, social life, and financial vulnerability.  After a few years, I've had time to address and answer these challenges, and lift the burdens.  I feel like there's real breathing room, now that those basic needs are satisfied.  By no means has it all been hard work; I've had more than my share of purely hedonistic adventures, and I think I took appropriate advantage of each to contribute to the well-balanced person that I am now.

These folks just don't get it!  This life is the only one we have, and if they're not on a path they like, they had better sort it out quickly!

At this point, my basic adult 'needs' are met (and I feel poised to tackle the many more years of adulthood to come).  I have a small/reasonable financial safety net for myself, I have a resume that I'm proud of, a job that I love, side-projects that I'm passionate about, and a few established, positive-influence social circles.  While I've given up some absolute freedoms (location, etc.), as a result of making some important decisions, in securing these 'needs', I actually have more freedom than ever before in my life.  Thus, having just crossed the threshold into basic adulthood only 10 years ago, I would say to those calling me an old man: "You get off of my lawn - I've got an incredibly awesome life to attend to!"


* I still consider myself a student, and continually find new interests, develop new tastes, and hone my existing skills.  To me, it seems dangerous to consider my development finished; there's always room for improvement!

This year flew by -- but why? (Post on aging: 1 of 3)

Recently, I thought about this blog and realized that it's 4th birthday was coming up -- a day that passed without notoriety on Dec 24th, 2011.  Since starting to record thoughts and experiences here, I've traveled a bit, notably New Zealand and India, I've worked again at AeroVironment, where we made some successful electrical products, including the charger for the Nissan Leaf, and posted a few side projects.  All that to say that I feel like this blog is still a "NEW" project of mine, when in reality, it's years old.

As 2011 draws to a close, I get the same feeling that I do every year when reviewing National Geographic's Photot Contest or "Year in Review" lists - WHERE did the year go?  Year after year, time seems to fly by faster and faster, and until now, this miffed me.  Each day, hour, minute, and second is a prescribed length of "time" and should, therefore, always seem to take just as long as the past.  In reality, however, time is relative to each of us, and so the way we perceive time is not fixed.  What follows is recent realization on why this is.  Please note that I have extremely little background in biology, and would love some feedback on where to look for articles about what's actually going on; these are just my guesses.

{Image credit: hplusmagazine}

Living in a physical world, with our physical bodies and physical brains, there is a finite amount of "memory space" each of us has, more or less.  (One could argue that as our brain grows, the surface area increases as folds are created, thus giving us "more brain", though I think this is relatively small amount when compared with our growing encyclopedia of experiences and reference knowledge.)**   So, if we have a finite rolodex of space on which to store memories, in our second year of life, that 12 month period gets to write its memory down on roughly half of the rolodex space.  In the fifth year, that same 12 month period has to get pared down to fit in roughly 20% of the rolodex.  And by age 100, the very same 12 month period has to somehow get squeezed in 1% of our rolodex.

   

Graphic showing how the same info has to get squeezed into a smaller portion of your brain each year.

Conversely, the "filing system" that runs our brain (maybe in another sector of the brain?) realizes that it's got to keep a bit of "buffer" free to file new experiences into.  So in the first year, perhaps it decides to leave 50% of the brain free.  Then, over the course of the next year, as it fills up the free space, it realizes that it should not fully utilize the entirety of the space, and thus sets aside, perhaps, 50% of the remaining space, each year, until at age 100, there's only a small space left on the experience book-shelf into which memories can be written.

Taking a page from compounding interest, and other financial models, on how the dollars in your bank account are worth more than any future dollars you will ever earn, this very second, reading this blog, is the longest second of your remaining life.  Every single day, minute, and second will be successively shorter than the last.  (Kinda makes you wonder why you're still reading this, doesn't it?  Shouldn't you go do something nice for someone?  Or perhaps for yourself, you little hedonist!)  Granted, your previous second (reading the last paragraph was longer, and thus you could have accomplished more that second than this, but it's in the past, so stop worrying about it; it's out of your control now.

Qualitative representation of the value of each successive second in your life.

**Some people even go so far as to think that our human body longevity may be determined by our brain capacity; that our brain only has enough space for roughly 100 years of decisions, number of connections, and event/emotion memories.  However sad it is, I prefer to think that when it nears "fullness," our brain would simply re-write over sectors that had less important memories already on it.  Bye-bye, non-eventful 7th grade gym class experiences!

[UPDATE]

Thanks to big poppa of the Anderson clan for forwarding me the timely comic in the Sunday newspaper a few weeks ago.  Thanks!  And keep cherishing those moments!  Upcoming post about why age 30 has me feeling like a pre-teen!

Los Alcázares, Spain

At the beginning of September, I visited a small town called Los Alcázares, on the Mar Menor, in south west Spain.

Some friends and I had rented an apartment -- which was incredibly cheap, as it wasn't the high season of August (even in the first week of September, there were hardly any tourists around, and thus, rates were very low). We ended up speaking almost no English and entirely in Spanish, which was great. The tourists that were around were mostly retired Spaniards.


There are many old windmills still around which are pretty picturesque.
We also visited the healing mud baths up in Lo Pagan, on the north end of Mar Menor. Most of the other visitors were older and using the mud's healing powers on their joints, but we figured we could use a whole body medicinal boost. :-)


At the extreme south west of the Mar Menor, there is the Cabo de Palo, a peninsula with a light house on the Mediteranean, which has great snorkeling. It was a truly beautiful area and we made the most of our visit.
Finally, just up the beach from our apartment was a Kiteboarding area which was fantastic to relax at and watch, when there was wind!
The kiteboard school / shop also had an awesome lounge area to stay out of the sun, have a drink, and enjoy tunes. It was really inviting and relaxing, here's a quick video I shot when nobody was around: