Poll of the Day > Have you ever had any anxiety due to feeling that time is going too fast?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I must have these answers.

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I'm old so I'm constantly seeing evidence that time is racing by so much faster now than it ever did before, and soon I'll be dead.

I don't really have existential dread or anxiety from that knowledge, though. I just have a philosophical acceptance of the idea that we're all going to be dead a lot longer than we were ever alive.
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Depends on what you mean. The passage of time is alarming to anybody with a finite lifespan who has an awareness of such. And not just from the standpoint that there are only so many more years of life, but also how much they want to get done that they have yet to accomplish. For instance, I've never even written a novel.


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No but some times Ill have cognitive issues where time will have passed that I cant really remember

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Not as such. I do feel very aware of things at times though such as my own mortality and how I don't seem to be doing much with the little time I have here.

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Zeus posted...

but also how much they want to get done that they have yet to accomplish. For instance, I've never even written a novel.

I feel like, at a certain point, or perhaps possibly to a certain sort of perspective, what you've accomplished kind of becomes less meaningful.

Like, realistically, you've never written a novel - but even if you did, 500 years from now, almost no one will know or care about your novel anyway. Even as is, there's a LOT of books written only a few decades ago that have almost entirely disappeared from public consciousness, and it's really only the greatest authors (and sometimes not even them) who keep getting republished decade after decade.

But there's a limit to even that. How many people can tell you who the most famous stage actor of 1850 was? Or the most popular book in 1900? Radio shows from 1920? Eventually, even the greatest artists of our lifetime will be nobodies. "It is the doom of men that they forget".

We tend to have a skewed view of stuff like this because we think about how there are books written in ancient Greece or from thousands of years ago we still have access to, but that's the faintest sliver of knowledge compared to just how much has been created, lost, and forgotten. Even moreso now that our overall output is so much more vast, so things are more likely to be lost in the noise, and forgotten even faster as we move on to the next big thing.

Nearly every single one of us, aside from those rare one-in-a-million types, will be absolutely forgotten a thousand years from now. No one will remember us, care about us, or sing songs about us. Even if society doesn't suffer some global collapse or reset in that time, old records will still be purged, the significance of our lives will be lost, and the overall impact of our time on the world will functionally be zero.

In that sense, and from that perspective, trying to leave some sort of legacy kind of pales in comparison to simply trying to make the most of the time you have while you still have it. Rather than regretting what you fail to leave behind, regret the experiences you failed to experience, the feelings you failed to feel, and the fact that absolutely none of that will matter when you're dead anyway.
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Zeus posted...

what you mean

The closest thing to what I mean is the feeling of being stagnant. At work, these people at work who find another job feel this need to announce to the entire company his farewell message,saying how great their experience working at a homeless shelter has been, and how they're moving on to greater things. Then these phonies keep on cc'ing the entire company when they write their "good luck and goodbye" messages to the one person who is leaving. It's just so depressing because it just reminds me that I'm making hardly, if any progress at all with my career. I end up just marking the what's-his-face as spam as an act of passive-aggression because I know I am never going to see him ever again and will not need to endure my inbox being bombarded by "good luck!" messages and all that nonsense.

In any case, though, this complaint wasn't exactly relevant, seeing as I have received no such messages today. It's just the thought of my classmates from school with whom I attended class, who will be graduating in fewer than two weeks. I imagine them going on to greater things after they officially obtain their degrees, and it just makes me bitter and angry that I'm still doing work that doesn't pay me enough for rent. I'm also frustrated because I'm being laid off by the end of this year. I'd been wanting to take a vacation somewhere, but by the end of the year, I'll be without work. So now, going on a trip is no longer an option. And as it is, my resume is incredibly dismal and it just makes me feel like dung, it does. Although, I cannot say that it is completely worthless; the other day, I went to see a staffing agency and was told I'd be eligible for two jobs. Neither of them related to my own experience, so it just gave me the impression that my experience is worth nothing. It really makes me wonder what I'd been doing at that job for over three years. The thought makes me hate myself even more for not being more pro-active during my academic career.

Moreover, I rejected those two offers because I was having an anxiety attack. At that moment, I was so very unsure of whether I'd be able to do the work described by the temporary-work agency worker, whether I'd be able to stomach constant contact with executives and their lot. Then I started twitching and freezing up due to anxiety. I was already ill-prepared for the interview, having neglected to practice it. It made me wonder if I was worthy of even being considered. Additionally, I cannot even decide if I want to take a vacation or find work. Sometimes, I secretly hope I will not find work and will have an excuse to go on vacation during January. I know this thought should be banished from my mind if I should be successful in my job-hunting endeavors, but even so. I'm tired beyond all belief. The last time I went on vacation, I was three, and I don't even remember it. I digress. Taking trips should not be my first priority at the moment. It should be finding work. Although, I don't know if doing so will benefit my mental health. As it is, I still suffer from severe agitation, panic attacks, and nervous fits at my current workplace.

And nowadays, I cannot help but hardly enjoy anything. Everything looks like dung, as I have said in a few topics before this one. Nothing makes me happy. I don't see the point in playing video games anymore. They're not fun as they used to be. Reading literature to keep my mind away from real-life problems has lost its appeal. I always know I'm going to have to return to worrying about finding work with what is essentially no experience. Writing tires me out nowadays. Now, I just don't see the point in writing about my troubles that often anymore. I don't really see the point in trying to resume amateur fiction-writing. Most days, I don't even have the energy to go through with it. Nowadays, it's just job-hunting and programming after eight hours of tedious work.
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I barely have anyone to talk to, anymore. It's just my mother who just expunges her own set of problems whenever I talk to her about what is bothering me. She'll just interrupt me part-way through my venting, tell me I'm giving her a headache because my sadness is causing her to be sad, and then she will just keep going on and on about how much more depressing her life is, with the neglectful husband, bullying sisters, her advanced age, and two of her kids being jerks to her almost everyday. It's tiring having to go through that every time I want to talk about anything. Last night, I dreamt that I found a document stating that my father cheated on my mother and that I was born as a result of that infidelity. Then I woke up and remembered that my birth certificate has my mother's name on it. It makes me wonder if I secretly resent being my mother's kid. And I don't feel like telling anyone on the internet what I'm going through (other than on here), because they're just going to respond with unhelpful, annoying comments like "oof", "yikes", or "RIP".

Nowadays, I feel that I'm only happy when I'm asleep and don't need to deal with this nonsense. I think about the past too often because I was less lonely back then. Now, I think that I'm lonelier than I've ever been. Part of the appeal of school was that I'd see people everyday and sometimes I could talk to them. But I digress; I'd given up on finding friends long ago, so I didn't actually have any intention of befriending any of those lot. It's too much work because everyone is afraid of my scowling face. I end up resenting people in the end for being happier than I am and because I'm unable to relate to them, anyway. As early as elementary school, people have been telling me over again to smile. After I got over my selective mutism, I told them that I didn't smile because I wasn't happy. My reasons for not doing so have not changed in the slightest. It's just far too hard to smile nowadays when I cannot help but feel tired, angry, frustrated, and miserable all the time. It's nearly impossible for me to care bout anything anymore. There's nothing to smile about. There's no reason why I should be happy.

I'm tired of older people telling me continuously that I'm still young. What's even their point? And I'm sick of people constantly complaining about how they're depressed, how their friends are scum, how they suffer from bad break-ups, and more nonsense that I do not care to list. It annoys me greatly for some reason. And now suddenly, I understand a bit more how my mother feels when my sister and I complain to her about being depressed. People at work, at home, and on the internet just talk about the most mundane nonsense that I cannot be bothered to care about anymore. When people talk about the latest news about games, politics, local trash, movies, and the like, I just cannot help but think about how pointless these things are. It makes me feel all the more disconnected from them, not being able to care about the same stuff they do. I don't suffer from normal-people problems. It's very, very hard for me to care about other people if they sound so inanely dull, and people who moan about their depression, for the lack of a better word. And the latter just makes me want to tell them to shut the hell up.

Anyway, I feel that time is moving by too fast because I'm stuck at a job that I will be forced to leave in less than a month. I feel like I haven't really gotten anywhere since going to college. At least with school, I felt like I was making some progress in learning something new. I just wish that I had chosen my subjects with greater care so that I would have learned something to add to my resume. Right now, I'm thinking my life's a joke, and I am hating myself more and more everyday. For example, I'm supposed to be looking for work right now. Instead, I'm typing out this great essay venting my frustrations and my sorrows, that very people will bother to read. Not productive in the slightest, I should think.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm old so I'm constantly seeing evidence that time is racing by so much faster now than it ever did before, and soon I'll be dead.

I don't really have existential dread or anxiety from that knowledge, though. I just have a philosophical acceptance of the idea that we're all going to be dead a lot longer than we were ever alive.

The way I see it time should pass by infinitely quick when you're dead. Otherwise mathematically you would be dead 100% of the time.

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I am often feeling that time is going too fast, and have constant anxiety over it.

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it gives me depression, not anxiety

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As if time is real.

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You're dead for longer than you're alive!
:D

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Sahuagin posted...

depression

Come to think on it, it might be just this. Right now, I'm thinking about how some of my classmates from the senior seminar I took last semester will be exiting school by next week Friday after their finals are over and done with. It bothers me far more than it should, I should think. Just the thought of those lot moving on to better things doesn't really make me feel better about myself. Although, it is possible that they won't all be moving onto better things, and that I'm just over-thinking this. But I doubt that all of them will be stuck in dead-end, low-paying jobs. Then again, it was a classroom of just ten, and three of them, as I recall, said they were going to graduate school after the end of spring semester. So at least three of them have already moved on to better things--"better", by my standards. But again, I likely am just over-thinking this. Not all of them I could have considered my acquaintances, but it's odd that I miss them still. My mind's stuck in the past more often than it should be, I should think. It's just so hard not to be so bitter and envious of people, sometimes.
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Will i have money when i retire?
Will i get sick and rack up costly medical bills?
Im past 30 and feel my physical and mental skills are diminishing. What is going to happen 10 years from now when my skills become even worse and i possible could be out of a job???

you have this eclair

https://phobia.wikia.org/wiki/Imerologiophobia

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Only if I'm procrastinating something.

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You, my friend, are suffering from an ego shutdown.

You hold yourself to high standards and you seek pleasure externally because your ego is worried it's miscalculating "less fun" and you don't care to be in the competition anymore. Life sucks.

Wrong.

I've seen how you post for a long time now. I am 100% not insulting you-- you have a lot of unresolved mental tension because I'm guessing you don't know how to simply let go.

You think you do, and that is a dead end because admitting it doesn't advance your satisfaction state to a high enough level worthy of your attention span, but bruh you gotta chill out and stop overanalyzing stuff and being disconnected from the present. Truly.

You gotta just be you. Find some kickass binaural beats on YouTube without ads, and lay down with the headphones. Forgive yourself for not knowing how to get past the existential funk-- it's your mind trying to point your time and energy to what you know isn't working for you.

If your thoughts drift to harmful stuff, that's totally normal-- forget what the media portrays it as, and observe your hateful thought cells getting purged away like you're puking in the form of mental clarity. You're just getting the lethargic depressing energy blockages cleared out of your system.

Meditate and look out for synchronicities. Those usually happen during these so-called "spiritual awakenings."

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I feel like, at a certain point, or perhaps possibly to a certain sort of perspective, what you've accomplished kind of becomes less meaningful.

Like, realistically, you've never written a novel - but even if you did, 500 years from now, almost no one will know or care about your novel anyway. Even as is, there's a LOT of books written only a few decades ago that have almost entirely disappeared from public consciousness, and it's really only the greatest authors (and sometimes not even them) who keep getting republished decade after decade.

But there's a limit to even that. How many people can tell you who the most famous stage actor of 1850 was? Or the most popular book in 1900? Radio shows from 1920? Eventually, even the greatest artists of our lifetime will be nobodies. "It is the doom of men that they forget".

We tend to have a skewed view of stuff like this because we think about how there are books written in ancient Greece or from thousands of years ago we still have access to, but that's the faintest sliver of knowledge compared to just how much has been created, lost, and forgotten. Even moreso now that our overall output is so much more vast, so things are more likely to be lost in the noise, and forgotten even faster as we move on to the next big thing.

Nearly every single one of us, aside from those rare one-in-a-million types, will be absolutely forgotten a thousand years from now. No one will remember us, care about us, or sing songs about us. Even if society doesn't suffer some global collapse or reset in that time, old records will still be purged, the significance of our lives will be lost, and the overall impact of our time on the world will functionally be zero.

In that sense, and from that perspective, trying to leave some sort of legacy kind of pales in comparison to simply trying to make the most of the time you have while you still have it. Rather than regretting what you fail to leave behind, regret the experiences you failed to experience, the feelings you failed to feel, and the fact that absolutely none of that will matter when you're dead anyway.

Not everybody can be a household name, but even a historical footnote is something. There are a lot of semi-obscure authors whose work I've read over the years, as well as obscure ones; many of them I discovered because they were either referenced in other literary works or in scholarly works.

And, in general, a lot of things had previously been lost to history because we lacked things like the internet. Nowadays things are more likely to be preserved.

EclairReturns posted...

The closest thing to what I mean is the feeling of being stagnant. At work, these people at work who find another job feel this need to announce to the entire company his farewell message,saying how great their experience working at a homeless shelter has been, and how they're moving on to greater things. Then these phonies keep on cc'ing the entire company when they write their "good luck and goodbye" messages to the one person who is leaving. It's just so depressing because it just reminds me that I'm making hardly, if any progress at all with my career. I end up just marking the what's-his-face as spam as an act of passive-aggression because I know I am never going to see him ever again and will not need to endure my inbox being bombarded by "good luck!" messages and all that nonsense.

idk, I've never been big into announcements mostly because if things don't work out, then it's more humiliating. Granted, massive pratfalls tend to be rare, but still.

EclairReturns posted...

In any case, though, this complaint wasn't exactly relevant, seeing as I have received no such messages today. It's just the thought of my classmates from school with whom I attended class, who will be graduating in fewer than two weeks. I imagine them going on to greater things after they officially obtain their degrees, and it just makes me bitter and angry that I'm still doing work that doesn't pay me enough for rent. I'm also frustrated because I'm being laid off by the end of this year. I'd been wanting to take a vacation somewhere, but by the end of the year, I'll be without work. So now, going on a trip is no longer an option. And as it is, my resume is incredibly dismal and it just makes me feel like dung, it does. Although, I cannot say that it is completely worthless; the other day, I went to see a staffing agency and was told I'd be eligible for two jobs. Neither of them related to my own experience, so it just gave me the impression that my experience is worth nothing. It really makes me wonder what I'd been doing at that job for over three years. The thought makes me hate myself even more for not being more pro-active during my academic career.

Well, you can either choose to be happy for others or you can choose to be depressed that they're doing better than you. One of those is probably a healthier outlook.

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You mean something like "at this rate I'll be 50 before I know it"?

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DrCidd posted...

You mean something like "at this rate I'll be 50 before I know it"?

Wouldn't that be age anxiety? I get that a little too but then I realise I don't feel any different no matter my age.

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Oh, speaking of making your mark in history, I discovered Assassins a few days ago -- a musical about killing American presidents with a subtext of using it as an opportunity to become famous. If the campy concept wasn't enough (it has John Wilkes-Booth, etc), the cast apparently includes Neil Patrick Harris. At any rate, it kinda brings up the semi-relevant idea of how people can either get famous for doing something notable or merely for killing somebody notable, which is probably even truer today with our perhaps increasingly narcissistic culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHCgjmueEgY&list=PLCFC45CBC13F1564C


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Zeus posted...

be happy for others or you can choose to be depressed that they're doing better than you

If it's someone I care about, then I can be both. But if it is someone whom I don't really care for, I tend to default to the latter.

DrCidd posted...

at this rate I'll be 50 before I know it

It's more along the lines of me saying last semester that I'd be doing all these things, like moving out, moving to another state, traveling, and finding work I enjoy and work that can pay the bills. Almost seven months later, I am doing none of those things, and it aggravates and frustrates me. I am not exactly enjoying anything right now. Life is not fun. I cannot even bothered to figure out what I like enough to make a career of it. I'm just aimlessly wandering around, figuratively speaking, for entry-level work that I keep trying to convince myself I'm cut out for, even though I know deep down I'm not.
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