Time

Let's talk about time; that's an interesting subject, and something friends my age often bring up in conversation. Time's moving faster, they say, everything's speeding up. The last five or ten years have just flown by - and they're worried the next ten or twenty will go even quicker. The years just seem so much shorter. And can you believe it's a decade and a half since the millennium? The nineties feel like yesterday.

That's what happens when you get older; nothing new there. But I wonder if there's a little more to it than that?

I was thinking back to my early to mid-twenties. To that magical time when so much is happening, so many changes. When I think of what I've achieved in the last five or ten years, it seems like so little compared to what I would do in five or ten months then. Of course, there's all that novelty, all those discoveries - we're still making our way around the block, everything's new - but could it have also been that the world and our culture was a different place to be?

I'm in danger of showing my age here, and of being totally wrong. But that's okay, it's just an idea to float out there, see what comes back, and then think on it anew.

So what I'm proposing is that things <i>were</i> different back in the nineties. That the world was collectively gearing up to the end of the century, millennial fever, Y2K and all that. It was like a great big countdown. It loomed large over everything every day. And, mad though it now seems, we really didn't know what was going to happen. Would technology break down? Would some kind of New Age global consciousness shift take place, as so many people were predicting? Perhaps the much longed for zombie apocalypse?

I don't know: that's very much reflective of the circles I was moving in at the time, and may mean nothing to anyone else. But doesn't it sort of seem that nothing much has happened since then?

We were on the edge of something. Every preceding decade had been so vastly different to the last, in fashion and music and all manner of cultural expression. Growing up in the eighties the flares, facial hair, and browns and oranges of the seventies seemed like ancient, alien history. Likewise, the garish shoulder pads and cheesy synth pop of my childhood were so quickly consigned to the trashcan of the past they felt like nothing more than an embarrassing, short-lived mistake.

Does it feel like that now? When you flick on the TV and see Keanu Reeves promising to free our minds and teach us how to fly, and you realise that film is a full SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD?

This is where I risk embarrassment: but when I listen to OK Computer or Nirvana's Nevermind or watch a film like Run Lola Run it all seems as fresh as anything that's currently being produced, doesn't seem dated at all. And certainly not in the way that all the wonderful yet clearly from-the-past hippy and Motown music I loved in my own youth did, or gritty 70s American cinema, or tanktops and flares British sitcoms.

So what gives? Have we reached 'peak culture'? Or are we merely expanding in different directions, with the internet and smartphones and 'always connected'?

Does a year still feel as long to a 23-year-old as it did to me?

And, is there something in my idea that the decades at the beginning of a century have a different quality to those at the end, and maybe in particular those at the end of a millennium?

I dunno: I'm just typing what comes. But I sure would love some input and feedback into this, see if we can't just crack that old nut called 'time', so we can...well, just carry on as normal anyways, but you know what I mean. ;-)

Oh, and if anyone feels tempted to write "time doesn't exist" please simply award yourself minus 50 points and go sit in a corner for an hour, there's a good boy/girl.

Cheers! :-)