Clarion Content

Remember those endless days of Summer as a young kid? Those lazy, hazy days of Summers that seemed to last forever? The days were a month long, and the months, well they were incalculable.

What happened? Why does Summer fly by so fast now, when it used to take so long? It can’t just be the pressure of a job, can it? After all, one had to go back to school at the end of those summers. Shouldn’t the dreaded anticipation of that first day of school have made Summer blow by? And maybe it did. At first, it was just the last few days of Summer that flew by, but eventually those Summers started to get away more and more quickly. Start with when did the feeling end; the endless Summer feeling, 4th grade, 5th grade, middle school, high school? It was not the same age for everyone, but likely, gradually, one felt the Summers were getting shorter and shorter.

As a grown-up, unless one is a teacher, professional basketball player, or retired, one does not get to take the whole Summer off. Logically, it goes by faster when one does not get to stop for it. But even before that, what happened as an older kid, and then a teenager, when did Summer go from forever to over? And why? Here’s a quick thought and the math behind it. Maybe there was a baseline reality to why Summer seemed to last forever as a truly, young kid.

Time was and is a perception thing. Humans perceive it through, among other things, astronomical and meteorological cycles. We also inevitably measure time by the ultimate clock, mortality. It is the Clarion’s contention that time is perceived like an accordion, bellows expanding and compressing. On occasion, perceptually, it is stretched, expanded as it were into long slow, languid flat waves where the days seem to crawl by. During other spans, time is compressed, contracted as it were into choppy waves, with high crests, deep troughs and short periods. Days pass, and pass, and pass. Each day passes faster and faster. Most people have had some experience with this phenomenon. People often perceive periods of boredom as slow compared with periods of heightened activity. Busy days, hectic stretches appear to fly by, whereas during stretches with no responsibilities, no pressures or cares, time moves at a slow and leisurely pace. When it is final exam’s week, or the CPA exam or the Bar exam is looming, or one is in Basic Training, time whips by like a high speed train. The days and weeks blow by like the scenery outside the window, blurring.

So then, think back to those endless Summers and consider this math for an American child. (not in a year-round or a home school situation.) After the Summer following 3rd grade, a typical eight and a half year old child would have been alive for 3102 days. Assuming that one couldn’t remember much before age three, one would have a memory of approximately 2372 days. Assume also an average American public school’s eleven week Summer vacation, which at the end of Summer of 3rd grade year would have occurred four times, (a total of 308 days.) And that the child remembers having age four and five essentially without obligation, 730 more days on vacation. At the end of the Summer of 3rd grade the average American kid would have spent approximately 33.5% of her/his rememberable days on vacation. Nearly one-third of life thus far would have been a break!! Summer vacation, only, was already a restriction from having the whole year off. It is likely kindergarten and 1st grade didn’t entail much homework, so maybe school wasn’t a burden. But each passing year comes with more and more homework and responsibility. Simultaneously, each year the eleven weeks Summer would represent a smaller and smaller percentage of a child’s days. After the Summer of 5th grade, the average kid would have spent approximately 31% of her/his rememberable days on vacation. By the end of 9th grade the percentage of life on vacation is down to 28.3%, and they are handing out mandatory Summer reading lists. By the end of high school it is 27.1%, without calculating for time spent in today’s hyper competitive extracurricular activities and training camps rather than relaxing.

Assuming five years of college, and eleven week Summer breaks still, things don’t get much worse until one joins the workforce. But, if like many American’s the newly hired employee gets the standard two weeks vacation a year, between age twenty-three and thirty-three, the percentage of days spent on vacation drops from nearly 25% to 18.5%. Even if seniority starts to get you three and four weeks of vacation annually, the numbers don’t improve until...yep you guessed it retirement.

Obviously, there is something more than math underlying why people look forward so much to retirement. And those endless, forever Summers one remembers from youth, there something more to the nostalgia they represent than just the math. But it wasn’t just in one’s head, those Summers, they didn’t just feel longer, they were a much greater slice of life to that point.

Labels: thought