Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
As we age, life seems to fly by ever faster. How does one strike a balance between appreciating that our time here is finite and should be spent wisely without obsessing over how much (or little) of it may be left?
– Aspiring Nonagenarian
Allow me to concede straightaway that I might be the wrong guy to ask. As I spend a lot of time—too much of it—looking back wistfully. I’m the kind of person who watches a film from the eighties or nineties and, upon seeing a dog that’s featured in it, can’t help but do the math, calculating that that happy dog is no longer with us. (RIP, Beethoven, Hooch, and Air Bud.) I am then further deflated when recalling the warning of the late Jim Harrison: “It is easy to forget that in the main, we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.”
But it gets worse. I tend to be nostalgic for the present before it becomes the past, just to get a leg up on other revisionists. Many of us overly revere the past, not because it was so great, but because it’s known terrain. We’ve had time to gussy it up, to Photoshop it, to have already told the sweet little lies we tell ourselves in order to have slogged through it. Life’s uncertainties tend to be less daunting when put in the proper context of space and time, since, as Robert Frost put it, “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” And so as I sit here on deadline, miserably banging my head against a keyboard, I might even detest the act of writing this very column in the present. Though in future retrospect, I already miss it.
The glib answer to your question might be that if you feel you’re getting pick-pocketed by time, and are in need of slowing the clock down, find something you hate doing, and do plenty of it. You never hear federal inmates or schoolchildren complain that time passes too quickly.
But the best way of not fretting over the future, which hastens time’s passage as you’re fast-forwarding toward your own expiration date, is to make a peace with your present. I will not revert to that overworked buzzword of TEDtalkers and HuffPost bloggers: “mindfulness,” a cloying term that’s now more ubiquitous than “gluten-free” as an all-purpose badge of good health. But there might be something to it.
Being present in the moment that you’re actually occupying breeds contentment, a satisfied mind being the most undervalued of all commodities. Unsettledness and naked ambition might be the twin engines of achievement. They push us to strive for things we don’t yet have. Most advancements we regard as monumental were created by fundamentally unsatisfied and sometimes even mentally unbalanced people. But as my wife likes to say, “If you have peace of mind, what else do you need?” Show me a truly content person, and I’ll show you one who quiets all demons in one fell swoop, someone who easily lives with themselves. And easily living with yourself is a useful thing to do, as yourself is a roommate you can never evict.
In his recent book, Why Time Flies, Alan Burdick states that the most commonly used noun in American English is “time.” So we all clearly spend a lot of time thinking about time and our relation to it. Burdick cites repeated studies that show people feeling time speeds up as they age. Except, of course, that it doesn’t. It just plods along with its same metronomic ruthlessness. But the same studies often show those in their twenties feel time’s acceleration as much as those who are in their fifties or their seventies. Perhaps because what is common across all age groups when it comes to time, is that with every second that ticks by, we have less of it. And while our trains leave at different times, we’re all getting off at the same stop. As poets and pastors like to say, the mortality rate forever hovers right around 100 percent. Think of your three favorite historical figures, and what do they all have in common? They’re dead. Yet the only thing they have on you is a head start.
But even as I stumble through middle age, of which Doris Day said the most frightening thing is “that you’ll grow out of it,” it doesn’t seem like cause for abject fear. For those of us who are either fortunate or naïve enough to believe that there is a great hereafter, along with someone who orders it, we at least hope that we’re not running out of time, only the iteration of time that we’re able to understand. We are here now, and someday, we won’t be. But we will be somewhere else. Or, for my more skeptical brothers and sisters, who think I’m betting on the wrong color at Pascal’s roulette table, have it your way: you’ll be nowhere at all. In which case, you’ll lack the consciousness to regret running out of time. Either way, it’s a plan.
But what we can all agree upon is that fretting over time is probably the very worst use of it. As the Gospel of Luke says: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” And since Luke was known as “The Physician,” I doubt he’d mind my adding that worrying elevates cortisol levels, which science now believes is a killer. Worrying about time can literally cause you to have less of it.
Trying to return to an earlier time is just as unrewarding. And not just because it’s impossible to do so. While I’ve written this elsewhere, it bears repeating: Several years ago, I was listening to a radio interview with a terminally ill journalist. I don’t recall her name, but she’d once been a gold-plated action junkie and swashbuckling war correspondent. Her high-speed life, however, had slowed to a crawl, as she was now under hospice care, waiting for the inevitable. Yet when she was asked if she spent much time looking back, she said no, she didn’t. She explained that when reading a book, no matter how engaging chapter two was, when you’ve reached chapter eight, you’re still more interested in what happens next than in what you’ve already read.
It’s no secret, as my former colleague Matthew Continetti has convincingly detailed, that we are marinating these days in nostalgia, salvaging “artifacts of the past for entertainment to calm present anxieties.” Why just the other day, after reading an Atlantic piece on nostalgia, I fell down the rabbit hole of “The Nostalgia Machine,” a website that allows you to search for songs by the year of their release. Traveling back to the year I graduated high school, 1988, I was awash in memories for hours as I listened to everything from Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” to Richard Marx’s “Endless Summer Nights,” to Exposé’s “Seasons Change.” Until I remembered: I hate all these songs. I loathed them when I was living through them during their first go-round, even if they now remind me of a time that was not nearly as good as I remember it being.
All this nostalgia-talk makes me nostalgic for an email exchange I once had with my old friend, Greg Gutfeld. You may know him as a co-host of Fox News’s The Five. He’s the guy who sits at the end of the table, cracking wise in the man-leg chair (as it used to be called during the more licentious Roger Ailes era), as millions of panting women and gay Fox viewers tune in nightly to see his denim’d gams seductively dangling in front of Dana Perino. But I know him as my own personal Lao-Tzu.
Nearly a decade ago, just a few years shy of his fiftieth birthday, Gutfeld told me he was struggling. He’ll take it from there:
When I asked his permission to print this email, Gutfeld thought it worth pointing out to readers that I was writing him from a Yahoo! address, which is a bit like owning a car that still has roll-up windows. Point taken. And I know that my frumpy Yahoo! email address signals that I am a man out of time. It was the first email account I ever started, and I have stuck by it through all of Yahoo!’s hackings and service disruptions and general mismanagement. I am sticking with it still.
Why not? At this point, it’s practically a totem of my youth. When I inaugurated it, I was sick with worry—just a couple of years shy of turning 30. Now, I’m sick with worry, less than a half-decade from turning 50. So maybe I’ll give up Yahoo! mail when I give up worrying about time’s passage.
Or maybe I won’t. Some things are timeless.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
