The holiday paradox: why time dawdles by the hour but zooms by the day

Seat-belt clicked, I speed-read a book on procrastination, five pages to go before we land in Melbourne. Leonardo da Vinci was a great procrastinator, apparently, the fruit of being a multitasking perfectionist. Charles Darwin bred barnacles in his greenhouse for a decade rather than tell the world about natural selection.

Rife with such examples, Soon by Andrew Santella (HarperCollins 2018) is subtitled An Overdue History of Procrastination. I bought the book on a whim in Fremantle, killing time on holiday. Time has been an obsession lately, why it speeds or crawls or contorts into pretzels.

Even as we land, I see my phone jump forward two hours, the surrealism of jet travel, as if clock numbers are squiggles born of make-believe. Maria Popova, the US-Bulgarian essayist, has also fixated on time lately. In The Marginalian, her newsletter, she showcased several thinkers engrossed in the stuff. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian sage, wrote, “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.” There’s your paradox, where time is both tyrant and toy, ineluctable and malleable all in one. Scholars talk of chronos (time’s linear march) versus kairos (the empirical, where everything happens in its own time). Our brains toggle between both.

Procrastination lies in the same realm, a time-travel game between our present and future selves. Economists call it “hyperbolic discounting” – the tension between immediate reward, and the benefits of taking time to arrive, like buying olives now versus planting a Kalamata grove for the vague future.

There’s also the holiday paradox, which Freo taught me. Faced with novelty, tourists will register how time dawdles by the hour, yet zooms by the day. Later, in retrospect, as you reminisce, the time feels generous, extensive. Teenage years are similar in distortion. How’s that even possible? Do an experiment if you don’t believe me. Diary keepers, choose a random day in the past, and estimate its distance from the present. Or open your phone, scroll through your gallery, and guess the date, the year, relying on memory. Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this the “the clash between the experiencing self and the remembering self.” It’s a mind-trip we travel daily.

Another idea behind time’s erratic tempo is the proportionality theory. Living a year at four, say, means one-quarter of your life: a massive chunk of your allocated pie. Contrast that to living a year at 40 – a sliver. Barely a mouthful. Fret not, however, as we also have windfall time. Research out of Rutgers University suggests the richest-slowest-weirdest hour you’ll ever spend derives from a cancelled meeting, your life awarded the sudden gift of time, which we typically waste.

Then we have the Vorhees Law of Traffic, an aberration developed by physicist Dr Conor Boland of Dublin City University. Horror fans will recall the creep in hockey mask. Across the many Friday The 13th films, might-be victims would hurtle for safety, only to realise the slow-moving Jason Vorhees is never far behind. Lead-foot drivers know this same annoying truth, as does Aesop’s hare, as if time has no time for earthly speed, let alone reality. The unbuckle light blinks. It’s time to leave the aircraft.

davidastle.com, twitter.com/dontattempt

Get tips, tricks and word games from our crosswords guru, plus links to our online puzzles and quizzes, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sign up for our Puzzled with David Astle newsletter.