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Einstein once said something like, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” According to lore, it was a quip he gave to his secretary to fend off reporters asking for explanations of relativity they wouldn’t understand. So, naturally, when it was first related to me by someone at College of the Atlantic, they said, “See, Einstein was saying time really is in our minds and perceptions.”
He was not. He was trying to spare his secretary the ordeal of explaining a mathematical framework that posits time as a dimension and says a bunch of funky things about acceleration. I get that: 90 years later, I’m sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet after reading about relativity for most of my adult life, and I’d still prefer to substitute “funky things” in place of a palatable explanation of relativity.
I mention this because I don’t want the following argument to be mistaken for anything resembling a scientific theory, hypothesis, or explanation. It’s a curious convergence of experience and definitions that makes sense to me.
A couple of decades ago I noticed a few things: adults complain about time speeding up as they get older, the most vivid memories I had were of arriving at an unfamiliar location, and I had no solid recollections at all of my own internal monologue. I had an early theory connecting all of these things, but my empirical, if anecdotal, investigation was hampered because my life tends towards chaos. I have very few periods of relative calm with which to compare the sometimes literal insanity of everything I’ve lived through.
Points of contrast started when I moved to Brooklyn. It’s counterintuitive, since a city is not a calm and steady place by nature and I did nothing to alleviate the situation, but regardless of my job or personal life, the first portion of my commute was unchanged for twelve years. I distinctly remember learning the route from a neighbor, and I remember almost getting hit by a car twice in the same week, but the rest of the approximately 6000 trips between my apartment and the nearest subway have collapsed into a blurry notion of movement. I thought about a lot of things during those trips, and some of them must have made it to conversations I remember or paper I can read, but the thoughts themselves have a less substantial place in my mind than dreams I know I’ve forgotten.
The journey was automatic by the end of the first week, and I didn’t need to learn anything more for it. I’ve always found thinking under these circumstances a useless affair; it’s the brain spinning its wheels for lack of anything productive to do.1[1]
The brain kicks into gear when it’s absorbing new information. It’s engaging with the senses and the world, the internal monologue shuts up as the brain does whatever it does to properly consume the experience of working with new things.
Another way to say this is the brain increases in entropy. It does this in two ways; being busier and more attentive burns a little more energy, so entropy increases in the physical sense, and there’s new, incompressible complexity being added to the structure of the brain, so entropy increases in the information theory sense.2[2] Entropy is also central to our understanding of time, in that time appears to be time and move in one direction because entropy increases.
I realize I’m at the end of a long limb tied to an overburdened camel standing on a train going off the rails, but looking at all this in a pseudoliteral way explains all these subjective time issues, especially the ones emerging since half of us locked ourselves in our homes.
The subjective notion of past time is rooted in change. The more that has changed, the more time there seems to have been. Childhood seems vast because everything is new, adulthood seems to speed up because people tend to get into routines. Whole months seem to vanish because they were an unchanging daily cycle of work, have a drink with Alex, go home and watch a Star Trek, eat dinner and go to bed. I couldn’t tell you if I fixed a bug in my website’s checkout form two months ago or two years ago; office jobs in technology are completely homogenous to me.3[3]
Measuring information entropy is about expressibility. 00000000000000000000 is low entropy: you can write as 20 0’s or 20x”0” or a number of other ways that express the same thing. 0101010101 can go down to 5x”01” so actually has approximately the same entropy as 20x”0”.4[4] 18014398241046527, on the other hand, can only be expressed as 18014398241046527, thus has high entropy.
So three months of not leaving the house feels like an eternity in the moment because of boredom, and infinitely distant from the past because everything, everywhere has changed so radically. Yet the time itself can be expressed as 92x”did not leave house all day” punctuated by a series of horrors accessed through newsfeeds. Personally, I was a wreck for the first two months, so despite how interminable the days felt at the time, they’ve been packed away as “despair, work, despair, tv, eat, despair, drink, maybe talk to friends, sleep.” You can even compress that further with 3x”despair”, which my brain definitely did since I have no time-specific memories of despair, only a constant thread running through every recollection. I told the same stories to people multiple times, because all my conversations with anyone outside the house were Zoom chats which all have a distinctly similar feel so I don’t remember who I was talking to even if I remember telling somebody something. Also there wasn’t a whole lot to tell since none of us left the house and there wasn’t a lot of room for new things to happen.
Despite this, the time can still feel like the full and crushing weight that it was if you choose to decompress those 92 days. A lot will be missing because it was homogenous time, but it’s possible to walk that grey hallway and see glimpses of things that must have happened, flecks of memory that escaped the compression process. But it’s not particularly fun to do, because the major markers of time were the horror points, like “Italians apologize for not taking this seriously” and black people getting murdered by the state. Those horrors feel even worse because they’re the only noteworthy changes, thus all we have to construct a linear timeline. If the United Just Kidding We’re Basically in a Civil War States doesn’t descend into complete societal collapse, anyone can be forgiven for thinking that it was going to, because it literally feels like that is the only thing happening.
Time feels weird because we’re in a low-entropy experiential purgatory surrounded by a high-entropy black hole of social disorder unlike any in our lifetime. That’s my pet theory. Keep in mind my actual pet just lost an eye to cancer.
1 Recently I’ve tried to apply this downtime to altering memories I don’t want, but that’s another subject.
2 These notions of entropy are actually the same, I think, but I’m not confident enough in my understanding to lay it all out, and I recently learned that Claude Shannon plucked the term entropy from physics because nobody knew what entropy meant. But I learned that from and xkcd cartoon and even Munroe quotes it as told by a third party, so I feel safe in both my ignorance and in treating the story with the same hand as the Einstein thing.
3 This is partly me. I approach all code as code: I don’t care what it does as long as it does it according to spec, so everything feels the same to me whether it’s fixing a Linux install or writing CSS for a WordPress blog.
4 I am so sorry to all the people who actually study information theory. I’m sure there’s a comment section somewhere out there where you can scream at me for butchering this.
