How to Age Mathematically

Many children first encounter arithmetic when they struggle to understand the concept of age. When Aunt Mary asks, as she always does, “And how old are you, young man?” I can confidently hold up 3 fingers. (BTW, that gets me half way to a PhD!) Later, I will wrestle with the fact that even though I get older every year, I never seem to catch up to my siblings. How come?

Eventually, the wonder of numbers will likely give way to drudgery of drill but the question of how we age through time will continue to draw us in. By the time you hit double digits, you’ve already noticed that the insufferably long ‘year’ is slowly getting shorter. Thank God for that! I couldn’t bear to wait another 10 years to turn 20. Fortunately, I won’t have to. I can purchase the future with discounted dollars (i.e. shorter years). 

At 12 you put up a picture of Einstein on your bedroom wall. Time dilation is your best friend! After all, your life is dominated by a single subliminal goal: getting to the age of 21 as quickly as possible. BTW, your parents share that goal for you; they just add ‘and as safely as possible’. 

If you’re precocious…or just posh…you may have already learned that time flows more slowly in the presence of stronger gravitational fields, e.g. in the neighborhood of a singularity (black hole). 

Your conception and birth is analogous to such a singularity. Time seems to flow more slowly close to that singularity and speed up as age distances you from it. This  process continues through your 20’s and into your 30’s as you pursue the 5 Ps of contemporary Western ‘personhood’: pay, pad, pension (401k), partner (significant other), and pet (and/or kids). 

As you drift, semi-conscious on your best days, towards Milestone 40, you may feel a tug: Could time possibly be moving a little too quickly? But not until your 40th birthday will you feel the first real jolt: “I have lived half of my expected lifetime!”

Such a thought could be disconcerting, but we don’t allow that! Instead, you’re quickly comforted, “It took forever (quite literally) for me to get here so ‘same again’ is Ok by me.” Oh, the delusions of the Middle Aged! 

At the age of 40, 40 years = a lifetime (1.0). At age 80, 40 years = a half-life (0.5). Therefore by age 40, you have already lived 2/3rds of your experiential life: 1.0/(1.0 + 0.5) = 66.7%. There is no ‘same again’; that ship has long since sailed.

What a rip-off! But if this is so for everyone, if this is the human condition, why isn’t everybody in the streets banging pots and pans? Nature is way too clever for that! The future seems to linger, shimmering out there on time’s horizon. As you move toward it, it seems to recede at a similar pace. 

Crossing Detroit’s 40 Mile Road, you get serious about your contracting lifeline. You gaze at the horizon, expecting it to meet you half way like the ‘Prodigal Father’; it doesn’t! In fact, it doesn’t seem to get any closer at all, no matter how long you walk toward it.

Danger, Will Robinson, danger! It’s a trick! Don’t fall for it! The future is not hanging out on a cosmic corner; it is hurtling toward you…and at an accelerating pace; the last 20 years of your calendar life will only amount to c.10% of your ‘experienced life’…but you don’t see that coming!

Not your fault; you are caught up in a mirage. Imagine you are trekking in the Sahara as is your custom. You look to the horizon and imagine you see your destination: The Great Oasis! But it’s a trompe d’oeil.

As you approach the end of your life, time itself seems to inflate. You feel it: “…There will be time, there will be time to…murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands…” (Eliot). But there won’t be! In fact,  ‘Now is the hour of our death.’   

Unless you’re very fortunate, or read Aletheia Today, you will wake up one morning surprised to find that the mirage has vanished and that the singularity (death) is much, much closer than you’d imagined, upon you in fact. Now it’s too late to save yourself. Relax and prepare to be elongated into a lonesome strand of spaghetti. What a way to go!

Plus, the orientation of your ‘temporal field’ (like Earth’s ‘magnetic field’) suddenly flips. From birth your vision has been future oriented; without realizing it, you’ve understood the past in terms of that future: “I go to school to get a job, etc.” but you don’t realize that what you’re really saying is “I live to be spaghettified.” 

Now that you’ve crossed the event horizon, however, things are reversed; your vision is directed toward the past. From here on you’ll understand the future in terms of that past: your legacy! Without meaning to, you’re literally tying up loose ends. Life has become estate planning. Borrowing from Proust, the future no longer creates time; it redeems it. You’re searching for some nugget of Goodness that might allow you to trick your way past St. Peter. Good luck with that! But in the meantime, “Wake up...please.”

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