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 the drudgery of drill but the question of how we age will continue to command our attention. 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’ future time 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. 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 into your 30’s as you pursue the 5 Ps of contemporary ‘personhood’: pay, pad, pension (401k), partner (significant other), and pet (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? On your 40th birthday you may feel the first real jolt: “I have lived half of my expected lifetime!”

Such a thought could be disconcerting, if we allowed it to be! Instead, you’re quickly comforted, “It took forever (quite literally) for me to get here (age 40) so ‘same again’ is OK by me.” It’s virtually forever; I feel ‘intimations of immortality’ (Wordsworth). Oh, the delusions of middle age! 

We measure age in calendar years, as if our experience of time was uniform and linear, and as if various atomic clocks and astral cycles had some actual significance for our lives. 

As noted earlier, by age 40 I have lived half a lifetime (80 years), speaking objectively. However, I experience the full term of my life to date (e.g. 40 years) as ‘one lifetime’. Subjectively, therefore, I have a full lifetime (40 years) left to live. I have lived one lifetime (40 years) and it literally lasted forever. I have no awareness of ‘myself’ before I was conceived. Therefore, it feels to me that I have lived a lifetime and have a lifetime left to live. “What, me worry?” (Alfred E. Newman)

At the age of 40, 40 years = one lifetime. At age 80, 40 years = one half-lifetime (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’s no such thing as ‘same again’; at best it’s ‘half again’…like in a London pub.

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! After the mid-point (age 40), the future seems to linger, shimmering on time’s horizon. As you move toward it, it seems to recede. If we were going to live forever, this is surely what it would feel like.  

Crossing ‘40 Mile Road’, you could get serious about your contracting lifeline. You gaze at the horizon, expecting it to meet you half way like the ‘Prodigal Father’; but it doesn’t! In fact, it scarcely seems to get any closer at all, no matter how long you walk toward it. You become complacent; is mortality a mirage after all?

Danger, Will Robinson, danger! It’s a trick! Don’t fall for it! The future is not hanging idly on a cosmic corner; it is hurtling toward you…and at an accelerating pace: the last 20 years (25%) of your calendar life will only amount to about 6% of your experienced life…60 is the really the new 72, but you don’t see that coming! It’s la grande trompe d’oeil.

As you approach the end of your life, mortality seems to recede; time itself inflates: “And indeed there will be time…time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands…” (Eliot). Of course there won’t be! 

Yet, this illusion (like most) is not without some factual basis. A 60 year old has a 20 year NLE (age 80) but 20 years later, a surviving 80 year old still has a 10 year NLE (age 90).

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. 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!

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; I work so I can retire, 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: it’s your legacy! Without meaning to, you’re literally tying up loose ends. Living has become estate planning. Borrowing from Proust, the future no longer creates new time; it redeems time past. 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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