No Way to Slow Down

Does it seem to you that as you get older, life picks up it's pace, so that by the time you get to 40 or 50 or beyond, the days rush by like you are riding an express train going at full throttle along the tracks.

The birthday cards echo the same sentiment with quotes such as "the further you get over the hill, the faster you go", and certainly in my mind, it's all too true.

But why is this?

When I was younger, it seems that it took forever to go from one birthday to another, and that you would spend a lifetime on summer holidays and such things. Now that I I'm in my fifties, each week just seems to wizz past, and the weekends are even worse. No sooner have I woken up on Saturday morning, than the next thing I know, it's Sunday night.

I know that many of us, well maybe most of us, feel it. Is it us, is it all part of getting older, or is it just that our loves have become far more complex than they used to be?

Growing up life seemed so simple. All I had to worry about was school, homework, playing, and mealtimes. When I reached my mid teens I started to work the occasional evening and weekends to earn some pocket money, but still live kept it's steady pace. It wasn't until my later 30's or really my forties that I noticed that time had begun to shrink on me.

It's rather like the fuel gauge on a car in some ways. Have you noticed that when you fill a car up, it takes ages for the needle to move off the full position, and even then it only moves very slowly towards the half full level. But then, once it reaches that magical point, it's like the gauge switches to overdrive, and the next thing you know the car is running on empty.

Is this sensation of life moving faster just something that we feel, or is the pace of life in today's modern hi-tech world actually going at a faster pace?

Growing up we only had two channels on our black and white television, plus there were only programs at certain hours of the day. A lot of time was spent outdoors or reading books, and time passed more slowly.

Now we have a multitude of channels to watch, plus movies, video games, and of course the Internet. All of these take away from our precious time, and maybe it is this technology that saps the time out of our days and gives us the illusion of time moving faster.

I know that if I sit down to watch television, the whole evening can literally pass me by. The same is true of a video game, and I have been known sit down and start playing a game at 7pm and not realize the time until I look at the clock and it's 3am! By this time my throat is parched, my head is thumping, and my eyes feel like they are about to pop out of my head with staring at the screen for so long, but those hours just flew past.

Most days now I can spend between two and four hours reading and commenting on articles from other authors, as well as one to two hours writing my own. Probably an imbalance there as far as income generation I think, but I feel that I ought to read what people that I follow publish. I also create and update lenses on Squidoo, write on my blogs, promote my articles, and read and reply to the other emails that I receive.

By the time I have done with this, it's bedtime, so I go to bed weary, then all too soon the alarm goes off and the day begins as it ended, checking my email and reading what I can before work, and then the cycle is repeated when I get home.

Although writing is supposed to be a leisure activity, it's still work, and if we are not careful it can take over our lives. At what point does it turn from being a hobby to being a career, and to we let it take over to the extent that we are effectively working two full time jobs?

The Internet, however you use it, is a great source of information, but it's also a great user of time. Learning to manage that time and to set yourself limits as to the amount of time you spend on any given task is essential, if you are to try and not end up like the all time loser, running headlong to his death.

But still, having set goals on how to manage your time, do the days, months and years still just seem to be slip sliding away?