The just noticeable difference

That summer that I was ten -

Can it be only one

summer that I was ten?

May Swenson – The Centaur [1958]

We all say that as we age, time seems to pass more quickly. There exists in the human sciences a name for that phenomenon. It's called the just noticeable difference, and it extends to all of our senses. The jnd, as it's called in the jargon, can be quantified and calculated empirically.

The crux of the principle is: the larger the original stimulus, the larger the increase must be for the subject to perceive a difference when the stimulus is altered. The more we have, the more it takes to make a difference.

Possibly, that's the source of our inherent greed, as it's an unalterable human condition. I heard it said once in Brazil about a large landowner who only wanted his own ground and that next to it.

As an arbitrary example: if a person holds an object weighing one pound in his hand, and more weight is added slowly, let's say it takes two ounces for the subject to notice the increase. But if the subject begins with two pounds, it will take four ounces of additional material for the increase to be noted. This entails all of our human senses, including the passage of time.

So as we age, it seems that time goes faster than the clock, because we have past decades as our original stimulus, and that increases every day we're alive. We'll never catch up because our reference point keeps growing. This happens at a time when we want every minute we can get.

I've read that we should savor every moment and enjoy every morning as a new beginning, but when a person has spent every day of his or her life concerned only about keeping the cattle on good feed and the meadows irrigated, the choices aren't many. The rest is out of our control, with nothing left but hope, and even that seems empty to a realist who has worked a lifetime with little reward except an occasional wet summer. Hope breeds only disappointment when there is no control, so that demands the acceptance of futility as a future – but futility without despair.

We have time, of course, but we're all aging, so even that is passing more rapidly. It's a chronological conundrum in which we're all trapped.

So we'll see what 2019 brings. We can be sure that it will go by quicker than our past years have.