revisiting time

People who know me know that I have an unhealthy obsession with time - in particular, subjective time - and I sometimes spend hours on end wondering where all this time went. If you're unfamiliar with my theses on time, suffice it to say that my great insights into this arcane science can be summed up in the following rather catchy (if I say so myself) sentences: 1) How long a year (or any constant length of time) feels to a you diminishes as you age; and 2) Events that are separated by a significant period of change (e.g., changing jobs, schools, houses, cities) feel more distant from each other than events that are not, even if separated by the same length of time.

While you're swallowing all that, permit me to drop another bombshell of an idea in your lap, which I shall call the self-polarizing tendency of memories: Memories of past periods of your life (in a general sense) grow warmer and happier in hindsight, unless something markedly unpleasant occurred in that period. Which is to say periods of you're life that you remember fondly, or even neutrally, will grow warmer and happier in your memory as time passes. Eventually all memories will tend to be either pleasant or unpleasant, which is the polarity alluded to above.

If you find that this is not true in your experience, then I might suggest that the problem lies with you and not with me, by Newton's Principal of "I'm Always Right".