I’ve been working for a little over three months now, and I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon more and more each day. My sense of time has changed, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly how and why. While this distortion of time isn’t a huge cause for concern, it’s allowed me to reflect on why it’s happening and what it could indicate for me in the coming years of my 20s.
With work life being fairly predictable, my weekdays have begun to mesh together. My typical schedule is a full day’s work until the early evening, a quick visit to the gym to swim or play basketball, dinner, free time, then sleep. I repeat this process pretty consistently from Mondays to Thursdays, and with work becoming increasingly hectic with the start of my new project, my days have gone by even faster than before, with bedtimes coming earlier to boot.
One byproduct of this new schedule is that I feel almost completely disconnected from the student life and schedule I was living just six months ago, despite being pretty active about returning to campus and visiting friends. In college a semester felt like an eternity, and it wasn’t until I started work that I realized how short a semester actually was – merely several month’s worth of classes. Recently my Berkeley friends mentioned to me that the end of the current semester was in the horizon. I was shocked because what felt like several weeks to me had been nearly the entirety of the semester.
I guess it’s because of the environment I was in – each day in college was different with the flexibility to shift my schedule as needed or desired. And even though in college I typically settled into a nice schedule based on lectures and club events, it still felt very different than what I’m feeling currently. I used to wonder how my older friends felt after graduating, since it was harder to see them or talk to them frequently. Now I feel like I’m experiencing it firsthand.
Another byproduct of this new sense of time in the working world has been my relationship with friends and acquaintances. In college it was easy to feel connected to other people, even acquaintances, by virtue of proximity and just seeing them around campus. Since I’ve started working I’ve noticed that although I still find time to hang out with friends, because time moves more quickly, it’s not uncommon to experience longer stints between meet ups and hang outs, without necessarily feeling so.
So what does this all mean? For starters, I’m kind of liking this new schedule so far. It’s helping me adjust to working life and allowing me to see a bird’s eye view of the year without the guidance of a semester schedule. Even though it’s not as flexible as the college schedule, I still find enough flexibility within my current situation to be able to do things spontaneously if I really wanted to. And the less frequent interaction with friends because of distance encourages me to take a more proactive role in maintaining those friendships and also making new friendships.
Still, there are concerns that if ignored will hurt me in the long run, so I’ll need to keep an eye out for these. In the past I’ve felt older friends become MIA after graduating, naturally because of new circumstances brought on by the work schedule. So my goal is to live out my current life while still considering the world of school and my friends in it. Another concern is the drifting of friends post-college, another common (and guaranteed) phenomenon. Like I mentioned earlier, this requires a lot more work on my end, and being intentional with friendships hasn’t traditionally been my strong suit.
To me, realizing and observing this change in time is a beautiful thing. It confirms that life is never static and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities given this new schedule (free weekends, anyone?). And most important, it validates that my years in college were ephemeral and truly one-of-a-kind. I’ve always been fascinated by time, so it looks like this will be a topic I’ll continue to observe and reflect upon in the coming months and years!
The persistence of time at www.RandomTidbitsofThought.com.
