Sensing time
Sloths and the impossible housing market, why a year is relative and the podcast I'm setting my body clock to...
This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.
That was one of the riddles that Gollum gave to Bilbo in the Hobbit, and the answer to it is ‘time’.
Time is everything.
It’s precious, it’s money and we all want more. It’s funny, though, that we really only think of it in hours and minutes. This was punctuated by the fact that I started tracking my working time using an app to try and help me work effectively.
This made me feel two things. First, I felt like an idiot for not quantifying tasks in time as a freelancer. Now that my tasks are timed, I can work exactly out how much my work is worth. Second, I felt the value of the downtime that working as a freelancer afforded me. I initially wanted to track all my non-work non-paid time, until I realised that downtime had value in itself.
That realisation got me thinking about how else we perceive time, on and off the clock. Here’s a round-up of the interesting tidbits that I found…
More about sensing time…
LISTEN: Dr. Samer Hattar on the Huberman Lab
This is easily one of my favourite podcast discoveries in 2021. Dr Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. This podcast covers how our brain and nervous system work to control our perceptions, behaviours, and our health and what you can do to make them work for you.
It’s my go-to for information on how to biohack my way to wellness.
In this episode, Dr Huberman talks to Dr Hattar, a circadian biologist, about how to time light exposure, meals and workouts for better sleep, energy and mood. As a struggling sleeper, I’m always looking for ways to help me get my zzzzs. This episode is full of practical suggestions that I’m going to implement in my life, like not wearing my blue-light filter glasses all day and using candlelights, lamps and fairy lights only to light my home at night.
On his website, the 2+ hr podcast is timestamped so you can skip ahead to points of interest.
TRIVIA: Sloths ancestors have indirectly made homeownership difficult
If you think like a politician.
I watched this video that explains why sloths move so slowly. The answer is because of many things but is mostly so that they can save as much energy as they can from their leaf-only diets.
Interesting as that is, it is not the trivia. Giant Sloths - modern sloths’ predecessors - were the only animals that could eat and disperse avocado seeds. How avocados persisted beyond the extinction of the Giant Sloth is a mystery, but without Giant Sloths, avocados might have gone extinct and there would be no avo on toast, the barrier to millennial homeownership.
Actual trivia in the traditional sense: Sloths only go to the bathroom once a week and 50% of them die when they do.
WATCH: Lived Relativity
Have you ever wondered why a year in primary school dragged on for so much longer than a year as an adult?
I had this conversation with friends a few weeks ago. For some reason, I didn’t feel like time dragged on when I was younger. Probably because that Hobbit riddle instilled a sense of time fear/perception in me nice and early.
But as an adult, I do get a sense of time speeding up. This is because time is relative. Not just in the Einstein sense - I’m not ready to touch that - but in a lived sense.
This video essentially sums up what my friends told me. Time is relative to how much time you’ve lived. When you’re four years old, a year is a quarter of your life. That’s why it feels so long. The older you get, the smaller a year becomes in proportion to your life. In short, if you feel like the time between Christmases is flying by, you’re getting old.
READ/WATCH: Can dogs smell time?
I saw an Instagram post that suggested that dogs could sense when their owners were coming home based on how much scent had faded in the home. I have no anecdotal evidence because my dog has separation anxiety and implodes as soon as I leave, but this article explains why there could be some truth to this theory. If you’d rather a bit of video evidence (or a reason to watch another dog video), the BBC recorded a non-scientific experiment they did to test this theory with an adorable time-telling dog names Jazz.
THEME SONG(S):
I cheated this week with two song picks, but I blame it on the theme. The most relatable sense of time distortion is emotion. If you’re feeling sad, time ticks slowly, and as the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun.
They say life is what you make it, but maybe time is too. This is why this week, you can choose your own musical adventure.
Moody: Time Moves Slow - BADBADNOTGOOD
Heartbreak, sadness, and loneliness dilate time in a special, ache-y way and this song by BADBADNOTGOOD captures that perfectly.
Groovy: One More Time - Daft Punk
This is one of those songs that you could dance to all night long and play one more time over and over again.
That’s all the time I have for this week!
Alegria