That’s a lot of “you” which doesn’t necessarily apply to all readers, and needlessly weakens the whole post when even a few of the assumptions are obviously wrong.
I personally conceptualize subjective time as deltas in experience. I get more subjective time for the same wall time when I’m doing something that makes me have new thoughts worth remembering, compared to when I’m doing something that’s a repeat of familiar experiences.
Your advice to imagine everything having changed/aged, before gathering evidence that it’s done so, strikes me as likely to create more of the bad kind of “my assumptions were wrong” surprise than simply updating with real new observations when acquiring them. For instance:
The new year! This is probably the most quintessential example. When January 1 of a year arrives, you still feel like it was the previous year—you often don’t really internalize the year you’re in as being the current year until February or so.
I experience writing the year as something that happens on autopilot. For 11 months, the shortcut of using a hardcoded number instead of recalculating which year it really is saves a lot of cognitive effort. The cost of this shortcut is a bit of struggle while overwriting the old value in that cold storage, but I choose it over the alternative.
You might visit a landmark one day (e.g. a street, a park, a school, etc.) as a tourist or visitor. But the next time you stop by, it might have been renovated or removed to your surprise.
The reason I’m surprised by infrastructure changes is because they happen relatively rarely. If I imagined/predicted that every street, park, and landmark would change between every time I visit a place, my predictions would be mostly-wrong. When I imagine that most stuff won’t change but a few things might, my prediction will be mostly-right, and I’ll update based on observing which things changed. I experience the surprise/curiosity of “what did they change this to?” as an important part of adding emotional weight to performing the right update quickly and accurately.
You might have spoken with an old friend many years ago. But when you speak to the friend next, you’re surprised that they’re so old, even though everyone is always getting older.
Usually when I’m surprised by how someone has aged, it’s not the fact that they got older, but that the series of choices/experiences shown by their aging has shaped them in a direction that I wouldn’t have expected based on what I used to know about them.
For instance, I fondly recall an acquaintance I haven’t seen since in a decade who was quiet, bookish, and surprisingly skilled at making tie dye. If I ran into him today, he would certainly have aged; that’s not what would surprise me. There are many new experiences he might have had in the intervening decade, which would show in his appearance: Maybe he got into business, and now wears suits instead of t-shirts and cargos. Maybe he chopped his long hair off, or dyed it. Maybe his circumstances have changed for the worse, and now he looks unhealthy and unkempt. He might have gained weight, even lots, or taken up fitness as a hobby and gained muscle, or encountered health challenges and lost a lot of weight, any of which would change the appearance of his face as well as his body. Regardless of how this acquaintance has changed, the surprise isn’t that there were changes, but which changes there were. Whatever direction he’s changed in, it’ll tell me more about who he was a decade ago as well as who he is now, because who he was before turns out to have had the capacity/proclivity to live the lifestyle I see side effects of in his appearance today.
In short, the surprise isn’t that the changes happen, but which changes one sees, out of the myriad possibilities.
You might get an interesting gadget (like a computer, a smartphone, or a robot), which was state-of-the-art when you bought it. But later on it might feel woefully obsolete, and you might start coveting the newer gadgets your friends all got instead.
I’ve encountered a lot of old once-state-of-the-art gadgets while organizing my stuff lately. Other than the natural decay of battery life and occasional disappearance of required peripheral infrastructure, their core functionality basically doesn’t change. The surprise is not that my old iPod worked as an iPod and basically still does, but that my current phone does those same things and so much more. If my desires for features change, that’s because I changed, not because the stuff did.
Remembering the moment when that iPod was the best portable music player in the world, and comparing it to the moment when my phone is basically tied for the best at being a pocket supercomputer in the world, helps me greatly with predicting what it’ll look and feel like in another couple decades when my 2024 tech compares unfavorably to the state of the art.
no one ever stops to wonder how the specific day it is today is a foreign world.
Foreign to whom? The present moment is the only truly non-foreign world to us as denizens of linear time. Today is foreign from the perspective of tomorrow or yesterday, but we as we are in this moment don’t exist tomorrow and didn’t exist yesterday. Although the perspectives from which today is foreign matter a bit, I don’t think it’s a good idea to privilege them over the perspectives from which today is domestic.
That’s a lot of “you” which doesn’t necessarily apply to all readers, and needlessly weakens the whole post when even a few of the assumptions are obviously wrong.
I personally conceptualize subjective time as deltas in experience. I get more subjective time for the same wall time when I’m doing something that makes me have new thoughts worth remembering, compared to when I’m doing something that’s a repeat of familiar experiences.
Your advice to imagine everything having changed/aged, before gathering evidence that it’s done so, strikes me as likely to create more of the bad kind of “my assumptions were wrong” surprise than simply updating with real new observations when acquiring them. For instance:
The new year! This is probably the most quintessential example. When January 1 of a year arrives, you still feel like it was the previous year—you often don’t really internalize the year you’re in as being the current year until February or so.
I experience writing the year as something that happens on autopilot. For 11 months, the shortcut of using a hardcoded number instead of recalculating which year it really is saves a lot of cognitive effort. The cost of this shortcut is a bit of struggle while overwriting the old value in that cold storage, but I choose it over the alternative.
You might visit a landmark one day (e.g. a street, a park, a school, etc.) as a tourist or visitor. But the next time you stop by, it might have been renovated or removed to your surprise.
The reason I’m surprised by infrastructure changes is because they happen relatively rarely. If I imagined/predicted that every street, park, and landmark would change between every time I visit a place, my predictions would be mostly-wrong. When I imagine that most stuff won’t change but a few things might, my prediction will be mostly-right, and I’ll update based on observing which things changed. I experience the surprise/curiosity of “what did they change this to?” as an important part of adding emotional weight to performing the right update quickly and accurately.
You might have spoken with an old friend many years ago. But when you speak to the friend next, you’re surprised that they’re so old, even though everyone is always getting older.
Usually when I’m surprised by how someone has aged, it’s not the fact that they got older, but that the series of choices/experiences shown by their aging has shaped them in a direction that I wouldn’t have expected based on what I used to know about them.
For instance, I fondly recall an acquaintance I haven’t seen since in a decade who was quiet, bookish, and surprisingly skilled at making tie dye. If I ran into him today, he would certainly have aged; that’s not what would surprise me. There are many new experiences he might have had in the intervening decade, which would show in his appearance: Maybe he got into business, and now wears suits instead of t-shirts and cargos. Maybe he chopped his long hair off, or dyed it. Maybe his circumstances have changed for the worse, and now he looks unhealthy and unkempt. He might have gained weight, even lots, or taken up fitness as a hobby and gained muscle, or encountered health challenges and lost a lot of weight, any of which would change the appearance of his face as well as his body. Regardless of how this acquaintance has changed, the surprise isn’t that there were changes, but which changes there were. Whatever direction he’s changed in, it’ll tell me more about who he was a decade ago as well as who he is now, because who he was before turns out to have had the capacity/proclivity to live the lifestyle I see side effects of in his appearance today.
In short, the surprise isn’t that the changes happen, but which changes one sees, out of the myriad possibilities.
You might get an interesting gadget (like a computer, a smartphone, or a robot), which was state-of-the-art when you bought it. But later on it might feel woefully obsolete, and you might start coveting the newer gadgets your friends all got instead.
I’ve encountered a lot of old once-state-of-the-art gadgets while organizing my stuff lately. Other than the natural decay of battery life and occasional disappearance of required peripheral infrastructure, their core functionality basically doesn’t change. The surprise is not that my old iPod worked as an iPod and basically still does, but that my current phone does those same things and so much more. If my desires for features change, that’s because I changed, not because the stuff did.
Remembering the moment when that iPod was the best portable music player in the world, and comparing it to the moment when my phone is basically tied for the best at being a pocket supercomputer in the world, helps me greatly with predicting what it’ll look and feel like in another couple decades when my 2024 tech compares unfavorably to the state of the art.
no one ever stops to wonder how the specific day it is today is a foreign world.
Foreign to whom? The present moment is the only truly non-foreign world to us as denizens of linear time. Today is foreign from the perspective of tomorrow or yesterday, but we as we are in this moment don’t exist tomorrow and didn’t exist yesterday. Although the perspectives from which today is foreign matter a bit, I don’t think it’s a good idea to privilege them over the perspectives from which today is domestic.