Lost Time is Never Found

By Caoilfhin Foley

Photography by Elizabeth Hunt

how time is especially relative in your twenties.

It’s very easy to devote all your time to thinking about time. Since the beginning of time, time has been an issue - not for mankind, who perpetually reproduces - but for the individual mortal man. Time is the uninvited guest that turns up to all of your functions and sips on something strong in the corner, staring. I don’t know about you but I wish he’d find someone better to avert his gaze to or better yet, leave altogether.

I think the presence of time has become amplified more than ever as a result of the digital age. Our lives have become categorised by the unwritten rules of online expectation - what ‘era’ are you in? How are you documenting this period of your adulthood - which is as if to say, if it’s not recorded then it doesn’t exist at all. This is a model that works based on appearances and not much else; in an overpopulated and dense virtual realm, you must make your presence known for seeming like you are utilising your time better than those around you. It is a design that applies a sense of urgency towards day-to-day life. I’m struck with a senseless panic to scramble for my phone in times of documentary worthy events. But why does it seem necessary to prepare a backlog of half-lived experiences collecting dust in a camera roll, when the alternative is that you could simply live your life entirely immersed?

There are a plethora of reasons that affect the current generation's hyper-awareness of chronological-expenditure. The largest one that stands out to me is the way young adults have uploaded their entire existence online. Sometimes it feels as though social media exists not as an escape from reality but the other way around - reality has now become an escape from social media. We pat ourselves on the back for putting the phone down for a few hours and getting work done, going for a walk, meeting up with a friend - but shouldn’t these be our main priorities anyway?

I also blame our elders for glorifying the college/pre-adulthood experience. “Enjoy these years while you can, these will be the best times of your life”, they say casually and matter-of-factly as if that phrase doesn’t evoke an immediate sense of impending doom. As a result of this mantra, I’ve developed a sort of hyper-consciousness surrounding my youth that can only be described as akin to the train of thought belonging to someone twenty years my senior. It is a God-forsaken motif that has me curating Spotify playlists labelled with time stamps, as if to preserve the melodic structure of my mind as it existed six months previous (rip summer 2023). I am all too aware of the absence of maladies, muscle pain, and fatigue that do not impact my day-to-day life as they do with an older person. It is a realisation that makes me strive towards a level of gratitude I am incapable of feeling in the body of someone who has not experienced age in any sort of capacity. All of these emotions are pent up under the guise that the things waiting for me after college - a work life, a partner, kids? - are nothing to write home about. It is an idea that magnifies a window of about fifteen years and states that everything after thirty-five involves the fizzing out of a person into irrelevance - in terms of their quality of life. It could be argued that eighty years is an incredibly short span to exist on this planet. Therefore, an emphasis on an allegedly ‘special’ fifteen or twenty of which seems myopic in comparison.

When you fall into a black hole of comprehending time, the idea of wasting it is immensely insecurity inducing. Not only in terms of your own but other people’s time. If life is as short as we comprehend it to be, why interact with the real world in fear of putting a dampen on someone else’s day, embarrassing yourself or arguing with someone? It suddenly becomes very apparent why retreating to a social media world is favourable - considering that the ordinary person has a minuscule digital impact (in comparison to the real world). However, I would argue that the only individuals benefiting from this symbiotic relationship are a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley that have learned to monetise your very attention span. I would encourage everyone, because of this, to understand that you cannot win… in anything that you do.. so, keep that in mind when you decide how to spend your limited experiential inventory.

I’m still learning to deal with time in my own way. If it were possible to put a line under time and forget about it, I would, but like I’ve said - it is present in everything that I decide to do or not do. One of the only times I enjoy time is when I write, I like being able to look at old diaries and watch my younger self stress my whereabouts and exact moments in history, pleading for a time traveller to come back and visit me. As I get older and the more I write, I’ve come to realise that I am this time traveller of the future - looking back but never interacting on these words in some state of eternalism that I find myself subscribing to. For old times sake, I’ll state that I was sat here writing this piece on the 14th of March 2024 at 16.21pm and nobody, time nor money can take that away from me. I look forward to getting old and reading this piece like a time capsule - my thoughts uninterrupted by the life experiences that will soon alter or corrupt me. Did you hear that? I said I look forward to seeing time pass.

So, time is this intangible thing that still manages to get under our skin (and scrunch it up like tissue paper) but unfortunately we will never defeat him. Time is the old man that sits on the pub stool but will never finish that pint - ‘he is part of the furniture at this stage.’ The best thing to do is to give him a wave ever so often but don’t interact any more than that. God knows that if you find yourself sat beside him, you’ll start a conversation that may go on forever.