Time travel, relative age, and expectations
I just finished Charles Wu’s mind-bender of novel, How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe. Well worth a read.
I won’t spoil the plot, but one of the key ideas of the book is that time (and navigating through it) is just as much a function of mental perception as of physical space.
Which got me thinking a lot about how who we are is as much a product of our own expectations about how old we percieve ourselves to be as of physical limitations.
Consider the vast number of 60-plus year old marathon runners who have somehow convinced themselves (and their bodies) that they’re not too old to run a 26-miler. You think you’re too old to run that distance? Think again.
Or consider how differently you would you act if you were 5 years younger, or 5 years older?
The thing about five years is that, while being a long unit of time, it isn’t long enough that it’s a significant jump in physical age. It’s mostly mental.
Which is to say that five years older doesn’t make you any more or less incapable of doing anything you could do if you were five years younger. And being five years younger doesn’t often mean it’s a better (or worse) time to start.
This is why some of your friends are likely younger than you in physical age yet act like their older, and vice versa. It also means that “relative age” is a somewhat unreliable indicator as to how you should make decisions about your future.
Just as there’s no right time to get married, there’s likely not an appropriate time to choose to take up other activities such as starting a business, taking up a new hobby, or making a career change.
Certainly physical limitations come up and I’m not discrediting them. There’s clearly a good time frame to have kids and start a family, or to start saving for retirement. All I’m saying is that making decisions about what you’re capable of doing merely because you’re a little older or a little younger isn’t a good strategy if you want a fulfilling life.
More often than not, it’s our expectations about how old we are that determine how we age and how we experience the duration of our lives, not the other way around.