NOT NEW YEAR ALREADY!

2013 Suggests 2014 Back Off

My doctor has told me I have suffered a bad case of 2013.  She has advised me to avoid 2014 altogether.  I asked her how I can possibly do this without Dr. Who's Tardis and she really has no idea.

When you think about it, the older you get, one year becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your life.  For example, when you are a one-year-old, a year makes up 100% of your life.  When you are five, one year is 20% of your life.  No wonder it seems so long for Christmas to come around.

Then when you're thirty, one year is 3.3% of your life.  Spins round a lot faster, doesn't it? Barely time to make money to pay the bills and buy your children their long-awaited Christmas presents.

OK for those of us fifty and over one year has plummeted to 2% and decreasing, of one's lifespan. How to solve this predicament?  The various states may go in for daylight saving, but I don't think anybody is going to approve of relative year lengths according to age. Therefore, if you are fifty, say, no one is going to make one year equal to ten for fifty-year olds so that you feel the same excitement on reaching Christmas as you did when you were five. No one would be capable of correlating the various calendars for the corresponding years anyway.

It's as mind boggling a thought as Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  In fact, it's about relativity and so there is no way it's going to catch on.

No, the sad thing is that the older you get the shorter the years become.  Compounding this is the fact that your time is growing shorter and at an exponential rate of progression.  It will seem like you'll be dead and in the ground by the end of the week even if you live another thirty years after turning sixty.

We all want to reach old age save the rock star who sang "I hope I die before I get old".  The problem with this is, you don't stay young.  Wouldn't it be great to live to eighty years and not age a bit over twenty?  This would lead to some problems, like the man of twenty who brings the hot chick of eighty home to meet his parents.  Their only succour would be that she'd be dead before the wedding took place.

Then, of course, what would kill us?  Would we just drop dead at a certain age?  A bit too much of a let down if you still feel and look twenty.  I suppose this is the only thing that makes old age viable.  We're winding down to the inevitable.

I am beginning to resent the speed at which the years are passing but I'm also turning into one of those people who is glad to have been born when I was.  I don't much care for the way the world is going and the speed with which things are changing with no one, apparently, in charge of what changes we can and can't accept.

I worry that people have too many children without thinking of the consequences and then the poor darlings are turned into worker drones to support the macrocosm the world and technology has become.

Another thing that bothers me is how confident the youth are, how little they respect experience and yet, how they don't seem to think about where they're heading and what it's all about.  Never fear, when their percentages start to drop they too may have an epiphany.

By the time they are forty they probably think they'll have access to 3D printed kidneys and other organs; they may even have access to 3D printed offspring if they miss their fertility window.  Why have in-vitro fertilisation when you can print out a little darling according to specs?  Well that's a little far ahead, but it may happen.

What are Baby Boomers, who just want a mobile that's a phone without the Internet attached, going to think of 3D grandchildren?  Not much, I can assure you.  What youth forget is that the Boomers are called that for a number of reasons.  We were there at the start of the technology boom.  That's why we're sick of it.  We can take all the new technology in, we just don't want to anymore.  It doesn't have to get smaller and smaller and faster and faster for us to appreciate it.

Some things are worthy in themselves.  When I had a dinosaur of a computer, my stepson said it was slow and out of date.  I said that if a cave man saw it, he'd be pretty impressed. It's all relative you see.  You can keep pushing down the pedal of a car's accelerator until you reach exorbitant speeds, but what's the point?  You are only human after all.  That too may change, sadly, but until then, let's just enjoy the good things we have.  The tortoise won over the hare after all and he probably stopped along the way to smell the roses.

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