Is Time Speeding Up?
Welcome to the deeper you go, the weirder it gets. I'm your host,
Garett:Garett Renon. So in this episode, I want to talk about time. See, time, which seems simple on the surface, is actually a complicated concept that plays a crucial role in how we understand and interact with the world. And when it comes to time, maybe it's just me, but it feels like time has really started to speed up lately. It feels like the days, weeks, months, and even years are flying by faster than ever.
Garett:Now I know there are some obvious reasons for this, which I will discuss, but I can't help but feel like something else is going on. It's like there's something spiritual, cosmological, and even technological that is affecting our understanding of time. And before we start, I have some announcements. First, if you are enjoying the show and want to support it, please share it with a friend and make sure you subscribe and leave a review. A few other ways to support are, one, you can buy me a cup of coffee.
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Garett:So a link to everything I talked about is located in the show notes. Alright. So let's get into the episode. So a little over a week ago, I celebrated my 40 birthday, which got me thinking a lot about time, specifically how now more than ever it feels like time is speeding up. And I'm not sure what is exactly going on.
Garett:Now I know that everyone seems to agree that the older you get, the faster team the faster time seems to fly by. And this makes sense, especially when you look at your life from a proportional perspective. See, when you are 10 years old, one year is 10% of your life. When you are 40, one year represents just 2.5% of your life. So from a proportional perspective, one year is a much bigger deal and feels much longer when you are 10 compared to when you were 40.
Garett:There are also other reasons why time feels slower when you were a child compared to when you were an adult because the older you get, the more routine your life becomes, which then leads to a lack of novelty. For example, when you were a kid, there was nothing routine about your life and everything was novel, whether it was learning to walk, learning to talk, starting kindergarten, becoming a fifth grader, getting into middle school, becoming a teenager, your first kiss, getting your driver's license, going to high school, graduation, turning 18, moving out of the house, and turning 21. Every year when you were a kid gave you something to really look forward to, and when you were younger, you always wanted to be older. Then after 21, something weird happens. It's like all the major landmarks seem to disappear.
Garett:And I mean, obviously, there are tons of landmarks as an adult, but for some reason, the excitement for these landmarks is not the same as when you were a kid. So when you have less novelty and more routine in your life, it is easier to go through life on autopilot. You get up, you go to work, you pay your bills, you go to sleep, and then you repeat the process. It's like the movie Groundhog's Day. One day just bleeds into the next, and before you know it, five years have gone by without anything really happening or changing.
Garett:You barely even noticed. This is all to say that there are obviously several logical reasons for why time feels like it's speeding up as you get older, But my gut tells me that there is more to the story. I mean, we've learned anything by now, it is that there's always more to the story.
Garett:So let's look at some
Garett:of the more interesting reasons as to why time may be in fact actually speeding up. The first thing to notice is that a decade seemed to be a bigger span of time in the past than it is now. In other words, culturally, there was a big difference there was a big difference between the decades of the past and the decades of the present. In the past, in the twentieth century, the nineteen hundreds, if you will, each decade had its own style, culture, and vibe. Right?
Garett:The forties, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. All those decades were completely different from each other in almost every way imaginable. Different music, different cars, different fashion, different morals, different architecture, and different ideologies. But in the twenty first century, everything seems to be the same. Culturally, there is very little difference between the music, fashion, architecture, cultural norms.
Garett:There's culture there's very little difference between the music, fashion, architecture, cultural norms of the February, the February, and even the February. It's like once we emerged into the new century, our perception and even interaction with time shifted. We no longer talk about decades like we used to. It's like the last twenty four years have just kind of blended together. Then there's the interesting fact that in general, people look younger and seem to live longer today than they did in the past.
Garett:40 is the new 30. Right? I mean, hell, if we're honest, it's almost like 50 is the new 30. And I know there are a lot of theories as to why this is, such as advancements in medical science, exercise science, and nutrition, which is true. However, at the same time, despite all these advancements, in general, people today are extremely unhealthy compared to people in the past.
Garett:Obesity, depression, autoimmune diseases, and cancers are all at an all time high. And typically, sickly people don't age well or live longer. So like I've said before, it seems like there's more to the story. Maybe time is speeding up. Maybe a year today is not as long as a year in the past.
Garett:While that may seem crazy, science seems to back this up in a roundabout way. See, according to NASA, which is as mainstream as you can get, the universe is expanding faster now than it has in the past. And I'm not exactly sure what that means, but apparently, recent observations from NASA's Hubble telescope have confirmed this, and scientists are baffled as to why or how this is occurring. So if the universe is moving faster, could this mean that time is also speeding up? Maybe two years today is the equivalent of one year in the past.
Garett:Maybe that's why forty feels like the new thirty. And speaking of space, have you seen the movie Interstellar? In that movie, there was a planet called Miller's planet where time was significantly altered due to a phenomenon known as gravitational time dilation, which apparently is a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Anyway, when they landed on the planet, and spoiler alert, when they landed on that planet in the movie, they had to move extremely fast because one hour on that planet was equal to seven Earth years. Now I won't pretend to understand how this works, but apparently, this is a real thing.
Garett:So because this phenomenon is real and because the universe seems to be expanding faster now than in the past, this would lead one to conclude that it is possible that our interaction with and perception of time could change significantly depending on a lot of different factors. Maybe this affects how fast we how fast or slow we age. And speaking of aging, it is really interesting to note that there are historical counts of people living much longer in the past. For example, in the Old Testament, it was said that many people, including Adam, the first man created by God, and Noah, the guy who navigated the big flood, were both said to have lived to be over 900 years old. Then there is a Sumerian king's list, which is an ancient manuscript that recorded the names of the kings of Sumer along with the lengths of their reigns.
Garett:And well, it's crazy because this this list says that some of the kings ruled for tens of thousands of years. For example, one king, An Men Lu Anna, had a reign of forty three thousand two hundred years. And another, Al Al Nagar, was said to have ruled for thirty six thousand years. In fact, there were nine kings on the list who were who were recorded as having ruled for at least ten thousand years or longer. And if you add and if you add the length of time together of these nine kings, they ruled these nine kings ruled for two hundred and seventy six thousand four hundred years, which is insane.
Garett:And I don't get it. But what's even though that sounds insane, what is really weird is that this is a documented fact. And by that I mean, the translation is considered to be correct and factual. So what does this mean? Well, your guess is as good as mine.
Garett:But according to modern mainstream scholars, they say these long reigns were just an exaggeration and are not meant to be taken taken literally, that these lengths of time were exaggerated to elevate the status of these particular kings. Now maybe that's true, but I also must add that our modern scholars are not basing this on anything other than the fact that it seems impossible for someone to live that long. In other words, there is no indication that the Sumerians were exaggerating the length of time these kings ruled. Modern scholars just assume this is an exaggeration because they have no way of explaining what was actually written down. So now maybe they were exaggerations or maybe something else was going on.
Garett:Maybe these kings were a different race of beings like the Anunnaki or the Nephilim, or maybe time moved differently back then. Maybe people aged differently back then. See, the truth is Earth, from what we've been told, is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we have no real idea what really happened in our ancient past. We have no idea what happened ten, twenty, thirty thousand years ago. Hell, if we're actually being honest, we have no idea what really happened five hundred years ago.
Garett:The truth is our ancient paths our ancient past, Earth's ancient past, is a mystery. Our scholars are just guessing. Sure. They are making educated guesses, but they are still guessing nonetheless. And we do know, however, that with every new discovery modern science makes, things become more mysterious, and the historical timeline seems to get pushed back further and further.
Garett:So while we don't know how much about our actual so while we don't know much about our actual history, we do know that the universe seems to be cyclical in nature. It seems and this seems to be a universal law. See, we have the daily cycle of night and day. We have the cycle of the moon, which corresponds to our monthly cycle, and we have the cycle of the seasons, which corresponds to our yearly cycle. We also have the great cosmological cycle known as the great year.
Garett:And the great year, which is also known as the precession of the equinox, is a cycle that plays out over twenty six thousand years. And during this cosmological cycle, it is believed that we also cycle through different ages known as the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the iron age. And these ages are also known as the yugas according to
Garett:the
Garett:Hindus. So these ages or yugas are said to affect life on the planet differently just like the yearly seasons affect life on the planet differently. And according to lore, it is said that during the golden age or Satya Yuga that people not only had really long lifespans, they also remained youthful looking for long periods of time, which then begs the question, how or why did people from these ages live longer? Maybe time moved. Maybe time moves at a different rate depending on which age you are living in.
Garett:Just like we have longer days in the summer and longer nights in the winter. Or maybe for some other unknown reason, people's lifespans change depending on which age you are living in. I mean, who knows. Right? But either way, there are many different texts that state that people had longer lifespans in the past, which if true means that time affected people differently in the past.
Garett:See, today, we love to dismiss these old writings as nothing more than exaggerations by primitive people. But what if they're not exaggerations? What if they're telling the truth? All we know is that our true past is a mystery, one that contains lots of bizarre and unexplainable events that challenge our understanding of what's possible. With all that being said, it is now believed by many people that we are currently entering into a different age or different Yuga.
Garett:We are entering into the age of Aquarius, whereas the Hindus would say, we are coming out of the Kali Yuga aka the iron age, and entering the Darwapara Yuga Yuga, aka the bronze age. Maybe time is speeding up as a result. Maybe this is the reason we are looking younger and living longer. Then there is the idea of what Terence Mechanic calls the quickening. So the quickening was the title of a talk Terence gave where he theorized that time is in fact speeding up as we approach the singularity.
Garett:So what is the singularity? Well, the singularity, according to AI, refers to a hypothetical future point when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen changes to human civilization. This is often associated with the idea of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence, leading to an era where machines can improve themselves and innovate at an exponential rate without human intervention. And to add to that definition, Ray Kurzweil, who is a futurist and high level engineer at Google and the person who has been given credit for popularizing the term singularity says that the singularity is also a time when man merges with machine intelligence and where humans essentially become one with technology. The singularity according to Terrence McKenna is very similar, although he didn't necessarily see it as a merging of man and machine.
Garett:Instead, he saw it more as a shift in human consciousness. The singularity or omega point as he called it was more about humans waking up and transcending into our next state of evolution. With that being said, McKenna did state that our rapid rise in technology is a major driver behind this behind this idea of time speeding up. In McKenna's talk, which occurred in 1994, he mentioned that the universe seems to be moving towards complexity and novelty. He also mentioned that as complexity and novelty increases, so does the rate of time.
Garett:And this makes sense when you think about it. First, the universe starts off with the big bang, And then slowly, over the course of billions of years, solar systems and planets start forming. Then after a few more billion years, life starts to emerge. At first, life is very primitive. But then after a few more million years, an intelligent species emerges.
Garett:Once this happened, novelty and complexity really starts speeding up. Then fast forward to modern times, and we see how quickly things are changing. Just within the last hundred and fifty years or so, humans are experiencing technological, social, and cultural changes at a faster rate than ever before. Advancements in communication, transportation, and information technology have drastically altered the human experience within just a few decades compared to the slower progress of change in previous centuries. In in the talk, McKenna talked about the difference, for example, of the Middle Ages compared to that of today, that from a technological standpoint, there was almost no difference between the 12 hundreds and the 14 hundreds.
Garett:However, fast forward to modern times and the difference between technological advancement from one decade to the next, even from one year to the next over the last hundred and fifty years has been unimaginable. In other words, it is easy to see how complexity begets complexity. Every technological advancement leads to better tools and better capabilities, which then leads to even better tools and greater capabilities. To remember, the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, It ended because we built better tools. And what's crazy is that Terence gave this talk thirty two years ago in 1992.
Garett:And from a technological standpoint, think of how much has changed in the last thirty years. Since then, the rate of technological growth has been almost exponential, and it seems to be getting faster by the day. Now, with the emergence of AI, it is expected that the rate of change is going to be so fast that some theorize that we are just a few years away from the singularity. This is all to say that we are living in strange times. See, our past is a mystery.
Garett:The universe is expanding faster than ever. Technology is growing at an insane rate of speed, and people seem to be getting younger. What is going on? Sure. Maybe time feels different to me because I am getting older, or maybe we are on the brink of a major change, a major shift in consciousness, a transition into a new age, a new stage in our evolution.
Garett:So remember, the only constant is change, which means nothing stays the same, not even time. Let me know what you think. See you on the other side.