How long do I have left to live ? I don't have a fatal disease, I'm not into dangerous sports, and I haven't written any novels which might offend a fanatic. I'm not a mercenary, or a smoker, or a heavy user of mobile phones. I'm not obese, I eat plenty of vegetables and my heart is in the right place. I'm talking about the natural human span - three score years and ten, give or take a bit. Let's be optimistic and give 10 - let's say I'll die quietly on my 80th birthday.
So how long do I have left ? Well - I'm 36 and 3 months; that's 36.25 years according to your quaint decimal system, so it's simple: I have 43.75 years left. 525 months ... 15 968 days ... 15 978 days allowing for leap years ... Slightly more life than I've had so far. Wahey !
But there's something simplistic about that analysis; it's not subjective enough. I seem to remember that when I was younger, the years seemed longer, the days seemed to pass more slowly, and even the hours seemed like serious chunks of time. When I was a child, I couldn't encompass a year in my imagination; I couldn't wait until tomorrow, and an hour was an awfully long time. Subjective time is passing faster as I get older. The years I have left are smaller than the years I've already had. I don't really have as much experience to come as I've already had - it must be something less ... perhaps considerably less.
What is the relationship between the time I have lived and the speed at which my life is now passing ? When I was 10, a year was a very long time - a tenth of my whole life ... 10% according to your charming percentage scale. One year was 10% of everything I had experienced, which (from where I was standing at the time) was 10% of my universe. 10% of the Universe - that's 10% of a lot.
By the time I was 20, a year was not such a big deal - a mere 5% of the universe. Now, for me, it's 2.76%. In terms of the length of my life so far, the next 4 years are worth the same as 1 year when I was 10. Hmmm ... so from here, the age of 40 seems as distant as the age of 11 did when I was 10 ... that feels about right.
So perhaps the value of each passing year (and each passing month and hour and minute) is diminishing in proportion to how long I've lived. At age 40, an hour is worth half of what it was worth at age 20, and a quarter of what it was worth at age 10. It's a good second approximation anyway; doesn't seem as simplistic as the linear approach I started with. Viewed like this, if a baby's first day of life is worth 1, its second day is worth 1/2, its third day is worth 1/3 and so on. Its total accumulated life at the end of its 5th day is 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5. How old is it after n days ? More than 1, but much less than n: here's a chart ...
Objective time is plotted along the x-axis, subjective time is plotted up the y-axis. If the first lived day is 1 subjective day, the second lived day adds only half a subjective day, the third adds another 1/3 and so on. After 10 days of life, the experience is less than 3 times as long as after 1 day. Subjective age can increase without limit, but its rate of increase gets ever less.
I can't remember being a baby - I imagine it was a rather timeless experience. I can remember a time before I could read clocks, when I had no idea what the time was. Sometimes I was fed, and sometimes it got dark outside. I partly imagine and partly remember that a day could seem very long. Later, school gave my days more structure, and school days were certainly long. Was it just boredom, or was it the fact that, at the age of 6, a day was still nearly .05% of my universe ?
It has always seemed to me that the chronology of the Bible is rather like this ... the further back you go, the more vague is the notion of time. The events of the New Testament take place in a reasonable span of time; but Kings David and Solomon lived suspiciously long, the Patriarchs lived hundreds of years, and the Earth was created in a week. If the Bible is viewed as history, and history is personified as a human life, this makes some sense. That primordial week in which the World was given birth might account for a huge subjective time. Each day at the beginning of the world would be worth thousands of days today. The very first day would be infinite and unmeasurable (notice I start my charts at the end of day 1 - day 0 is unplottable: the subjective value would be infinite). The world is recreated by every baby in that timeless period of infancy. As we come closer to the present, and history accumulates length, timespans become more standard. Days become even in length. The calendar approaches objectivity.
Back to today: how long have I got ? In subjective years, I can measure how much time I have left by adding up the subjective value of the years I have left. Assuming an 80-year lifespan, I can make a chart like this:
Again objective age runs along the x-axis, and the y-axis measures my subjective remaining time (on the basis that on my first birthday I have 79 years left). On my 36th birthday, I have 13 subjective years left. 13 years. Is that all ? Well ... considering that the scale is set to value a subjective year as I did when I was 1, it seems reasonable. What I have left is just over 1/3 of my life so far.
More shocking is that, when I was 7, half my life had gone already (check the curve - 7 years lived ... 40 subjective years left). Well ... it does explain why the few years of my childhood seemed longer than all my years of adulthood, and why children have short attention spans (5 minutes is a long time for them !), and why I have the sense that time is rushing by and I am achieving less and less. By the age of 7, I had done a lot: learned the concepts of language and literacy, of counting and arithmetic, of art and music - the foundation of the whole of my experience of culture. All learning after that was just filling in details.
Perhaps there should be a rite of passage at age 7, marking the transition from infancy to childhood. Perhaps it should be the biggest rite of passage of all: before it, the tools of consciousness are still being installed; after it, the tools are being used.7 years old - the halfway mark - perhaps that's when we should be having our midlife crises ... by the age of 50 (8 subjective years left !) we should have learnt not to waste time on such foolishness.
Perhaps I should stop messing about with charts and do the washing.
http://www.jpagel.net/article/lifeleft.htm
© Jonathan Pagel 2002