At a restaurant today I parked next to a construction truck that had a sign on the door that read “In business since 1996“. My first instinct was, why brag about being in business for such a little while? Then I counted. Damn, I’m old. 1996 seems like yesterday to me. What happened?
Actually I have a theory. Well, not a theory, as I have no evidence to back it up, more a hypothesis. For most people, we don’t really have any memory before age 5. That means that for a 25 year old, a year is 5% of your life. At 40, it’s around 3%. See, while a year is always the same amount of time, as one gets older it’s a smaller part of our lives.
Now look at me. At 65, a year is only 1.7% of my life. to me, living three years is the percentage equivalent to one year to a 20 year old. Now you can see why 1996 seems so close.
So what does this mean? Hell, it don’t really mean much except that as we get older we need to pay close attention to what goes on around us, because it’s going by fast.