It's the Content, Stupid

I was thinking this morning about how I've gotten a tad overwhelmed with the University, my blogging and vlogging and my personal need to stay informed on all of my interests (God bless Google Reader). Except for the latter (which is probably just some side product of both the pace at which technology is allowing my obsession to be fed, and the events that happened 6 years ago yesterday) the other two are essentials.

All of this got me thinking about the common notion that as people age, their perception of time seems to decrease-that is, they notice that they have less and less time for things that they really want to do, and the next thing they know, they're middle-aged, have a family, and are wondering what the hell happened to their youth. Now granted what I'm going to say is probably nothing new, but I started to think about my own life and what is it that makes the time seem to pass so fast: it's the content.

I've learned to use the resources available to me to fill up my time. For some, it's video games, for others it television and movies. For me, it's all that great Web 2.0 content and the news. If I think back to when I was 10, a day after school on a sunny day like this could just about be the most boring thing in the world, and I lived it repeatedly. We also have to take into account that information travels faster in this day and age, but regardless, I think there's something to the idea that the indivdual has to figure out how and what content is going to fill up his time--granted it depends on the circumstances. But just take a middle class 20 year old like myself, and try to think about where he's going to be allotting his time. Many of my friends like to smoke weed and have little or no interest in the internet beyond the daily incursion into MySpace.

All that aside, what my point is, that if what I'm saying is true, then there's also a way to counteract the effects of time perception. There must be a way to make things seem to slow down. An average person would tell that's exactly what vacation is all about, but if you look at the studies, Americans are taking less and less of their vacation time. Could that be because they're just too enthralled with work or is it that there's more interesting things that they can do from home? Well, come to think of it, it's probably the damn economic depression that Bush has put us into.

My final thoughts on the subject is that given enough time, an individual will learn how to cut corners and make things work more effectively, so in my case, I'm not going to try to get too worried about my youth passing me by, because as long as I'm happy, and choose the right content to fill my time up with, there's nothing wrong with that, brother.