The Sense of Time

As always, hi, I'm Taaro. Solo game dev doing Farewell.

Today is my birthday, and I realized how fast part of the year went by. I feel like yesterday I released the Farewell demo on Steam, and that was in June. From January to June everything went by very slowly but from June to now in the blink of an eye. Today I wanted to talk about that perception of time and why it passes.

Where does the sense of time come from?

I have suffered a slight anxiety seeing how, for example, the 5 years of my high school were eternal, but from my 20's to my 25's went by in a second. If these 5 years went by so fast, I could blink and I'm already 30? 40 or 50? It is also a fear of not being able to realize dreams and see how life slips away from you. In my case, a lot of my fears are related to loss and my family, so the passage of time means getting closer to that fear.

This led me at the time to investigate why. What makes time feel eternal at one moment but instantaneous at others? There is a video by VSauce that, among other things, discusses this topic and a possible explanation. First, on the mathematical side, it talks about how it is almost exponential growth, and one year being 10 years old means 10% of your life, but one year being 50 means only 2%.

Now, there is another explanation that I have also read, which is about how the brain stores memories based on new experiences, and that the more memories the denser the time feels. Not only a mathematical explanation of the passage of time but also of experiences. He explains that in youth or adolescence you are full of new experiences: your first real exam, first kiss, first failed love. As you get older, you move on to a more routine life without so many new experiences, and because of this, time passes faster because there is nothing new.

What do we do?

Having said all this, I found it very interesting and I consider it to be true. I make a very clear differentiation from January to June and from July until now. I can literally remember what I did each month from January to June. In fact, I can almost say what I did each week. It was my first time doing serious art for a serious game, my first professional marketing experience, steam page creation, my first festival, my first metric analysis, among others. Those were months that felt like years.

On the other hand, from July to today seconds passed. I stopped working first for a few weeks of vacation, then my dog's cancer and then a very serious health problem in my family. I tried to come back after that but it was impossible, so I decided to take a break and come back now in November. I can't explain how instant these months were in that sense. It is true that at the time they were eternal because of the raw experiences. August for example was incredibly long, but the rest were instantaneous.

Summary

Where am I going with all this? Today I'm back with Farewell and the rest of the projects I'm doing, and my goal is to maintain constancy without suffering or stress. I want it to be like the first 6 months but with a different perspective and enjoy the process more. I would like to slow down the time and be able to live all my future as slow as possible, so I will try to do what I can.

Next month I will go through all the blogs I did for the year to also get a dimension of what was going on with Taaro in each month.

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And you?

Do you have the same experience?

What do you do to live with it?

If you found it interesting, remember that you can subscribe to be notified when I make a new post. I will be posting on the 7th of each month.

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