the weird thing about growing up

9 February 2020
9 Feb 2020
9 min read

the weird thing about growing up

it never feels like it’s really happening

bubbles

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.

lil iz 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:

Slowing down time in Phase 2 of life:

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.


why we judge ourselves so harshly

the saturday morning test