the weird thing about growing up
it never feels like it’s really happening
Time flies.
We’re told this so often when we’re young it almost washes over us — never fully registering in our minds until it strikes us that we really are growing up, and we ask: where did the time go?
In the first 25 or so years of life, everyone’s perception of you changes pretty frequently. Essentially, every 3–5 years you’re at a new “stage of life”. First, you’re an infant, then a toddler, then an adolescent, then a kid, then a tween, then a teen, then a college student, then a 20 year old, and then an “adult”, and from there — things stop changing so rapidly. We settle into ‘normal life’: working, hanging out with friends, working towards the next goal/promotion/big purchase we want to make — life begins to become more routine.
Time flies differently in these two different phases of life.
Phase 1: Growing Up
In the first ~25 years of our lives, we can barely keep up with the pace of everything changing around us. As soon as you can read and write, you’re expected to start figuring out what you’re “good at”, and focusing on those activities and subjects. Come age 16, you’re meant to pick your major and figure out what it is that “you want to do with your life”. Then in college, you are expected to be gravitating to the right opportunities, landing summer internships and beginning to build a foundation for your career. In Phase 1, we’re always working towards the next step, the next phase, always prepping and getting excited to be ____ (insert: 10 years old, a teenager, a high school student, in college!, starting a job, living alone, etc.)
When we’re always looking towards the next thing, time really flies. The years blend into each other and suddenly it’s 2020 and we look back and think wait, it feels like it was 2012 only a couple years ago! Before we know it, the phase of our life which feels like it has just started is suddenly coming to an end, and we’re already thinking about the next one. No time to waste! We must grow into this new identity people are expecting of us — we must become more mature, and we must have a better idea of what we’re doing and where we’re going with each successive year. We must keep growing.
This constant forward-looking perspective results in the years flying by, and us never realizing that we’ve actually become the “adult” our 10 year old self could never even imagine being.
Shout out to my mom for this cute garage signage
Yet, when we get here, we don’t feel all that different from our younger selves, and we certainly don’t have it all figured out. Sure, we’re more mature, have more experiences, better judgement, more knowledge, stronger opinions — but at the end of the day, we can look back at pictures from when we’re younger and remember what it was like to be that age, and it doesn’t feel all that far away. Yet, when we look in the mirror, there have clearly been a magnitude of years in between that moment and this one — we’ve “grown up” since then.
Phase 2: Being a Grown Up
Cue us entering the “grown up” phase — the one where we’re supposed to have it all figured out. During this phase, time starts swimming by us in a much more unique way. For many individuals, days begin to come more repetitive, routine, mundane even. You wake up, work out, go to work, come home, make dinner, watch some videos, maybe do something you enjoy, go to sleep and do the same — over and over. There isn’t necessarily another exponential curve of growth on the horizon for us, unless we make one ourselves. There’s no definitive “next step” in life — no college or summer break or new internship to look forward to. This is when life begins asking you to make the changes and gives you the responsibility of shaping your own path. There aren’t anymore big deadlines like college applications, or recruiting season, or graduation. Everything is now up to us, and life will only be as colourful as we make it.
When we’re younger, time flies because we can’t keep up with the changes and growth each big shift brings. When we’re grown up, life flies by because every day can be virtually the same.
It’s as if when we enter the Grown Up Phase, we’re expecting the same pace we always experienced growing up, but all the external excitement and change has halted. And so we just keep going through life, looking forward to the end of the day, the next weekend, the next project, without realizing that time is flying by and not much about us is changing. Since many of these days blur together and are not all that distinguishable from each other, we get to the end of the year, or three years, or a decade and think: how is it possible that all of those days passed?
When we reach adulthood: time flies because every day feels the same. There’s no way to keep track of them all.
It’s interesting to think that the reason time flies on either side of this partition in life is for polar opposite reasons. Initially, the rate at which life is changing is too fast to keep up with, but when we’re “grown up”, life itself often does not change in a significant way, resulting in days blurring into each other and becoming one massive amalgamation of time.
While we can never completely escape this feeling that time is fleeting, there’s a few ways to slow down life in each phase.
Slowing down time in Phase 1 of life:
- focus on staying present: we can only remember those moments where we were fully there.
- appreciate the little things: this helps solidify memories — for example, it’s easier to remember a setting if you noticed something small which was special about it (e.g. a vintage store-front which had a bright yellow sign in the middle of an old street in Italy, rather than trying to conjure up a “beautiful street” you once saw, with no specific detail to ground the memory in).
- journal: capture those memory-worthy moments — especially the small ones which are easy to forget. Your future self will look back on your notes with satisfaction and joy. Try to write about those memories as soon as they happen when they’re clearest in your mind.
- don’t rush life: enjoy those things you can only really do when you’re in a certain phase of life. Don’t pass up on too many youthful experiences because you’re too focused on the future or the next step. There’s obviously an appropriate balance, but the regret most people have at the end of their lives is working too hard and not letting themselves be happy —not the time they spent with people they love, nurturing relationships and cultivating experiences.
- don’t spend too much time planning for “the next step”: it’s easy to get caught up in the rat race — always trying to stay ahead, working towards the next thing, priding yourself on your “hustle” stamina. But doing this keeps you from so many amazing, ripe experiences only available now — with those people, in that moment, at that stage in your life. So go to the concert, go on the ski trip, get that coffee with someone — and colour code your grad school application notes later. It will get done if it’s a priority. Work fills up the time we give it.
Slowing down time in Phase 2 of life:
- change things up: take a different route to work, explore events happening in your city, see new artists play music, do something NEW. Often. It’s so easy for weeks to go by with no new interesting news to share with others. When someone asks: what’s new? Have an interesting answer. This will keep each day, each week and each year from blending together.
- treat every day like the gift that it is: if you wake up every morning and actually take a moment to be thankful for the fact that you have that day, it becomes a lot easier to appreciate those seemingly trivial day-to-day things we might not even notice — the stranger who holds the door for you even though you’re 10 steps behind, the first sip of a morning coffee, the old friend who reaches out and sends you something that made them think of you. (Read Neil Pasricha’s blog 1000awesomethings.com for more secretly awesome moments like this). Pay attention to those moments and feel genuine gratitude for them. This is what makes days feel unique when their skeleton is the same.
- push yourself to do something radically out of your comfort zone every year: I recently heard someone in an interview say to the interviewee: oh, you’re 24? 24 was the best year of my life. It made me think about how easy it is for a year of our life to go by and it not be memorable or unique in any significant way. Each year, do at least one thing which is radically uncomfortable or challenging: move to a new city, try a new job, join a new community, travel solo, learn a new skill and stick with it. Be able to look back and say: that was the year of X. Every year. It’s a good way to keep life from stagnating.
Time might move faster than what we can keep up with, but the most we can do is maximize each moment we find ourselves in.
Keep life interesting, and you won’t stop growing. Inject some of the excitement, change and growth we experience in the first couple decades of life into the rest of it. Life is such a blessing, and we should make as many memories as possible so that when we get to the end of it all, we can look back and be satisfied with how our time was spent — even if it feels like it all flew by in a flash.
Time is going to fly anyway, let’s make sure it does so for the right reasons.