Why Time Seems to Go So Quickly
We all say it, “Jeez, how did it get to be this date already! Time just seems to be going by faster!” Then we wonder why it seems holidays come sooner, years pass by more quickly, life is going too fast, and kids grow up before you know it. What’s going on?
Although you won’t hear about it in the mainstream news, the fact of the matter is that all this is a result of America’s outsourcing the manufacture of time. It was a move undertaken back in 1978, in an effort to reduce costs and stop the roaring inflation of the times.
People think that the OPEC introduction of oil pricing caused the inflation, but that’s not true. It was the costs of manufacturing time here in the US. With the emerging economy in China, President Carter signed an agreement to send time over to Asia, thereby jump-starting the Chinese economy.
Unfortunately, as we now all know, Chinese manufacturing methods don’t often meet the high quality standards of good old Yankee know-how. As such, it turns out that not all time is created the same. What used to be an hour has been tested, and currently seems to last about 48.7 minutes. Seconds are shorter, thereby making minutes shorter, and all the ensuing increments of time as we know them.
A new year, now arriving from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other areas of China lasts only 76.83% as long as pre-1978 years. Even then, following the Nixon administration of the 1960s, time was being cut short in an effort to become more competitive on a global scale.
The 1980 Recession
When Ronald Reagan took office, the economy was in dire straits, and he took extreme measures to get things back to normal. With tax cuts and federal stimulus efforts, things began to get better. But all this came at a price, costing the American taxpayer a significant portion of the gross domestic product.
With less money in foreign exchange rates, the US began to borrow from abroad. At first it was only money, but it soon began to move into other areas. We started borrowing dirt from Europe, which is where the extra dirt comes from when you fill up a hole. There’s always that extra mound, and that’s because we don’t have the storage capacity in our original ground.
Inflation came under control, but several important industries were severely impacted. One of them was the Time industry, unrelated to Time magazine. We soon found that there wasn’t enough time to provide everyone with a full measure, so behind-the-scenes protocols were put in place to reduce time for people with too much time on their hands.
Among the first to lose time were people under the age of 12, as they hadn’t yet developed a capacity to notice. This is why children seem to grow up faster than they used to. They do.
This helped, but we still didn’t have enough time to do everything we thought we needed to do. So the so-called Daylight-Savings program was adjusted. The government removed 14 minutes from the geographical areas between the four time zones in the country, taking 7 minutes from both the eastern and western segments of the borders.
The 1990s
Sadly, even that wasn’t enough for a society that constantly wants more and more time. With consumer usage mounting, the subsequent Clinton administration came up with a novel idea. In exchange for American business ventures, we began to borrow time from China, our primary time manufacturing source.
From approximately 1993 until now, we’ve been mostly living on borrowed time. We can’t entirely make up the difference between pre-1960 time and today’s time, but with careful time management, we can appear to do so.
The science is complex, but in a nutshell what the Central Time Management System (CTMS) does is to extract seconds on a randomized basis from each larger moment. So in each minute, we lose a few seconds, but not always the same seconds. In each hour, day, month, and year, we accumulate a time gap sufficient to help us maintain the status quo, without noticing.
CTMS management takes place out of Colorado, and with the popularization of so-called atomic clocks that automatically keep the “correct” time, more and more people are kept in the dark. Some say that Daylight Savings Time was extended, but in reality the days simply are much shorter than they used to.
If we were to use inflation-adjusted seconds, you would find that time is passing at the same rate it did back prior to 1960. A summer would last 8 months, as it did when you were younger. The time between turning 13 and being able to drink and drive would be an eternity, just as it was back then.
It’s only that we’ve become acclimated to cheap foreign goods that there’s a problem. And even then, only older people notice the shortening time. Young people who’ve grown up with modern time, don’t pay any attention.
