Time Is Flying.

Is it just me, or is my brain editing the footage?

Lately, I’ve been almost shocked by the sheer velocity of the calendar. Admittedly, I’ve had trouble living in the here and now for as long as I can remember. I’m always looking forward — to the next trip, the next project, the next whatever. But the older I get, days, months, and seasons don’t just pass by. Time is literally accelerating.

It got me thinking: is this acceleration because my subconscious is simply filtering out all the stuff I’ve already — more or less — seen, heard, and experienced in one version, variant, or format or another?

Turns out my intuition hit the nail right on the head. Cognitive neuroscientists call this the proportional theory combined with perceptual novelty mapping.

When we are young, the world is a torrent of first-time data, forcing the brain to create massive, uncompressed memory blocks. As the decades stack up, the brain becomes a master of predictive processing. It begins to treat the world like a familiar film, editing out the predictable repetition to save metabolic energy. When fewer unique anchors are logged, your brain retroactively perceives the passage of time as a blur. I’m not actually losing time; my brain is just compressing routine files.

Now for something entirely different.

I’ve noticed a pattern among a few older people I’ve met recently. Men and women alike. Some of these folks seem a little too preoccupied with talking about vintage accomplishments, ensuring that anyone willing to listen gets an earful of their unbridled and unapologetic grandiosity.

Is this a way of ensuring that their legacy is secure?

Turns out this behavior is a classic psychological defense mechanism. It maps directly onto the work of German–American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who formulated his lifecycle framework at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1940s. Erikson identified the final stage of life as a conflict between Integrity versus Despair. As the internal clock speeds up, an existential anxiety about irrelevance can creep in. For those who lack a quiet, internal acceptance of their life story, broadcasting past achievements becomes a form of social armor — an externalized effort to secure a legacy because they are terrified of being forgotten.

Moving Forward

I sincerely hope I don’t get my wheels stuck in muck like that. Once I am finished with my book project, Before I Forget, I intend to move forward with my fictional writing projects that I started up during the pandemic.

My hope is that by pivoting to fiction I will remain forward-facing, keeping my eyes on the next horizon rather than demanding validation of my vintage accomplishments.

By the way.

What’s not to like about Stockholm in the summertime? It’s so incredibly slow, relaxed, and casual here now. I really love it.

Now: the photo above.

I captured this ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) image yesterday in Sörmland during a wonderful family gathering in what can only be described as “peak” Sweden — the time of summer when rural landscapes, more or less unchanged for millennia, are almost surrealistically lush and beautiful.

Clearly, no photo can convey or capture what all my senses felt yesterday evening. So, I preferred to “paint” my emotional experience with my trusty X100V.