Understanding Why "Time Flies" In 2020

Saturday morning coffee is a mental marker. Like post-it notes stuck on the Calendar, at equal intervals, every week on Saturday - at approximately 10.30 am each day. Every time I sip this coffee, I'm reminded of the events of the week that went by. So I count weeks like this, coffee to coffee, every Saturday.

Ever since the lock-down began, I realize I'm sipping Saturday coffees in quick succession. And since Saturday coffees can be had only on Saturdays, I can only conclude that Saturdays are coming and going faster than they used to in the past.

I've asked family and friends if they feel this way too, to identify if this is a feeling that is solely mine or if it is shared by members of the community. I've been told that many people share this feeling: time flies in 2020.

I don't love this year any more than the last, but it hasn't given me any reason to dislike it either. So, I don't particularly wish to alter my perception of the speed of time now; I wouldn't really care if it moved any faster or slower. I do, however, wish to understand why our shared experience tells us now that time is flying past.

One significant shift in our behaviour during the pandemic is the abandonment or lack of focused, time-bound pursuit of medium-term goals. Most immediate goals (eating, sleeping, tomorrow's deadline for work, shopping for groceries, etc) haven't changed, and they are repetitive; neither have the long-term goals (career progress goals, family goals, monetary goals, etc).

But the medium term is hazier than before. When is our next vacation? Do we plan to buy a new house in the next 4-6 months? A new car? Can we go out for a movie this month? Many of these goals fall into the "want" bucket, as opposed to the "need" bucket. And in the face of ambiguity created by COVID-19, we have sacrificed these goals.

The presence of immediate, repetitive, short-term goals and absence of medium-term objectives present us with a strange situation: the present seems to be in a loop, and there are fewer things to look-forward to. We can no longer get through a monotonous week eagerly anticipating a weekend movie, or work through the month while planning the upcoming international trip. We are relegated to working on what is important here and now, in this present moment; future-plans are a lot less tangible than they used to be before the pandemic.

Therefore, we are limited to counting time by our Saturday morning coffees. The anticipation and longing for a future to come sooner was possibly what made us think time wasn't moving fast enough. Today, that longing for a medium-term future is less intense, and the clock is ticking on faster than we would "expect".

The writing of this post sufficiently slowed down time for me. I realize that variety of experience and  a stubborn belief in a definite medium-term future is important to balance my perception of time.

Three Levels of Perception: How to become a Zen-master?

Do you remember how we first read books? Those hard-bound things of wonder, with fair, blonde princesses and square-chested knights who would slay dragons and breathe life into the damsel with a kiss… Do you remember Amar Chitra Katha, and the legends of kings and demigods? And then Enid Blyton and her Pixie folks, and later still, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Hercule Poirot…

LEVEL ONE

I don’t know about you, but I read them the same way a devout would read the Bible or the Quran: as gospel. It was written; therefore, it had to be true. This is the first level of perception. When confronted with an experience, we begin by reacting to it, with the body, mind or some combination of the two.

In the first level, the experience itself is flawless. The book is comprehensive, the movie is complete, and the person you talk to is perfect. At this level, we are easily influenced by the permanence and immutability of the stimulus. When our parents said something to us, it had to be correct; it had to be good advice. When a history textbook said that Shivaji was good and Aurangzeb was bad, that had to be correct as well.

LEVEL TWO

Beyond this basic understanding of the world, we begin to question the experience itself. Maybe the book was flawed, or the movie had terrible plot-holes… Perhaps, the person giving us advice is as confused as us.

At this level of understanding, we begin punching holes into theories, books, people and everything that isn’t the Self. We realize that textbooks are flawed because of their own skewed viewpoints, we understand that people have their own vested interests, and that movie-scripts are often written by idiots. At this level, we begin trusting our own previous experiences and the cumulative derived wisdom from those.

We pitch our opinions against those of another. “I think that the eagle could have flown to Mordor and dropped the ring into the fires of Mount Doom”. “I think that Genesis is a bad idea, because I believe in the Big Bang, in evolution, and in scientifically proven concepts”. “I think what you did was really shitty”. Our teenage and early twenties are often about this level of understanding.

LEVEL THREE

After we have spent enough energy fighting with the world, we wonder why we perceive the world in a particular way. What are these lenses through which we observe the world? How do we build our own personal rules?

With a third-person-insight into the prevailing conditions of the mind, we dissect not only why we act the way we act, but also why others act the way they do. In books, movies and works of art, we understand why we perceive a plot-hole where others (including the writer) possibly do not.

It is at this level that I think we are truly incapable of intense hatred or passion. If it can be explained, one can do away with a primal emotional reaction. We begin to see the code that governs this dysfunctional world, and keeps it stuck together in this precarious way.

At this stage, we are far less susceptible to intense life-changing moments. But we become Zen-masters, who can control the flow of water and the motion of the Moon. At this point of balance and peace, the will has a real shot at controlling our own actions.

Note: These levels of understanding are infinite: each subsequent level offers a unique, defining insight into the machinations of the world.

Five Awful Things You Didn’t Know About The News. Number Five Will Make You Share.

1.       Read. Copy. Share.

War room: She sat alongside the two most hated people on the team. Earphones plugged in, Tweetdeck open on the left, she powered through her newest article. Three years of experience radiated from her nimble fingers which went cluck-cluck-cluck against the QWERTY keyboard. She knew who wanted to hear what, how they wanted it packaged and why they would share it: 13 Things You Didn’t Know About ______’s Murder. Number Nine Will Make You Cry.

There were four old TVs, placed slightly apart, playing India’s three most popular English News Channels and the leading Hindi News Channel. Everything which aroused remote interest was playing in one of the channels before it quickly appeared on all four, and more significant news appeared as four independent sets of pulsating, red and yellow, creative “Breaking News” headlines – seven to ten words each.

Men and women in the room were tracking the news – Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Crime, Business – and jotting down the catchiest phrases. A quick search on the topic resulted in more results, and one or two phone-calls made them subject-matter experts. Two hours after first watching the news on Television, they would pen an independent article on the topic. Repackaged news made them superstars. Every day. Several times in a day.

Welcome to new age journalism: read, copy, share.

2.       Your Opinion versus My Opinion

If you have ever been to a friend’s place, a bar, a café, an office, university or school, or if you inadvertently walk on the road for too long, you will be asked – “What do you think about ____?”

Remember, it is important to have an opinion. You can agree or disagree, but you must take a stance, at least 0.01% to the right or left of center. Also, ignorance isn’t an option in our civilized world. When information is everywhere, only boors don’t know about trending movies, refugee-crises and cool cat videos.

If you think of news as a way towards developing your weltanschauung, you are in an obscure minority. Just like new-age startups dumped revenue for valuation, new-age media has dumped insight for virality. Opinions are in vogue and make for highly marketable content. Given our dependence on society for nourishment, it is likely that you and I field some militant, viral opinions as well.

Let’s drink beer and fight: your opinion versus my opinion.

3.       Gatekeepers Of News

We use Facebook every day. Consciously, sub-consciously, unconsciously, awake, asleep, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the car, in the plane (where there is no internet), while playing, while working, while eating, while…

Zuckerberg recently spoke about the billionth person on Facebook. In other words, one out of every seven people (with some error) across the world is on the social network. When a network is as ubiquitous as Facebook, it makes sense to fight for Facebook Neutrality – a concept similar to Net Neutrality. But Monopoly Laws haven’t evolved to cover the internet and social media.

Chancellor Zuckerberg’s blue empire is the gatekeeper of information. Today, it is impossible for companies and artists to spread information through their carefully cultivated Pages with lakhs of followers, without paying Facebook a fat commission. In order to be heard, you need to pay the gatekeepers of news.

4.       What’s Your Klout Score?

When posed the question in a Harvard Business School interview - “What do you want in life?”, my friend answered, “The same as everybody else: money, power and fame.” (Throw in a bit of love, and you’ve got life figured out.)

Major media houses are looking for people with celebrity status, achievements in popular fields or massive influence on social media. In a way, money automatically begets power and fame, fame generates money and power, and power leads to money and fame. Buy one, get two free.

In such an atmosphere, it is difficult to succeed without a head-start. If you have none of the three, but a potentially world-changing idea, no one will care.

Even the internet’s young content generating and propagating mechanism is ridden with nepotism, much like Bollywood – the bastion of news creation. The tech industry loves its own, and most apps – whether based out of Silicon Valley or Bangalore – have a tendency to lean towards a uniform techno-libertarianism. Such content is often repeated and reinforced, and therefore overrepresented on the platforms where we consume our news. Suddenly, you and I are skewed towards this niche opinion which appears to be the general worldview. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you are a cricketing-star who writes about love, a pornstar who writes about food, or a billionaire businessman who talks about pets, the industry wants you. There is only one question that matters: What’s your Klout score?

5.       Idiots in Pseudo-intellectual Hell

I came. I saw. I shared.

Social media diminishes the intellectual. The internet encourages radical viewpoints which are consistently and violently thrown at the masses with the intention of stirring joy, hatred, melancholy or another primal emotion. The general representative masses are forgotten as fortunes lie in the extremes of society – either in the vulgarities of the rich or in the miseries of the poor. The middle classes want novelty, and news channels happily quench this thirst.

Nice pictures - or better still, videos - have become essential tools in eliciting empathy and stirring our conscience. We can no longer live without this barrage of visual imagery, which we also help propagate.

The pseudo-intellectual is a wonderful consumer, because he/she thinks he/she is choosing to hold certain notions, blissfully unaware of the marketing genius which helps him/her feel that way. Then again, there is a higher pseudo-intellectual who understands this and quips "hey, what is free-will anyway?".

 But it is important to note that as long as we have our hands full - full of meaningless gibberish constantly thrown at us - we will never find the time to think. Hundreds of half-digested stories pass through our brains every day, and as long as this happens, we can never truly assimilate them. We will never know genius from lunacy or truth from the impostor. We will remain idiots in pseudo-intellectual hell.