Comment by marginalia_nu
6 days ago
Last few years I've been my own boss mostly doing whatever I feel like with several years funds comfortable and no real pressure to do or die. Time hasn't really slowed down. I also took a year completely off work in 2016, that one also passed very quickly.
If anything, having new experiences is what seems to slow down time in my experience. Visiting new locations, doing and learning new things. I suppose more things will be new to the young than the old, so it would make sense as an alternative hypothesis.
I've also had a bad tooth ache since the day before Christmas I haven't been able to get dealt with since all the local dentists are off, and it feels like it's been the longest week in my life. Dunno if I'd recommend it as a way of prolonging the subjective experience of time though.
Another anecdote is that last year I quit coffee cold turkey, and a side effect was that time seemed to slow down significantly. A lot of people seem to be reporting this. Make of it what you want. Quitting coffee also sucks quite a lot, though not as bad as week of severe tooth ache.
In the present moment, time passes slow when something boring or painful happens, and passes fast for exciting or pleasant experiences.
But in hindsight, time passes slow in periods where you had many new experiences and is almost missing in periods of routine.
So an exciting experience might be fast in the moment and slow in hindsight.
Oh, my dear, thats hell! > I've also had a bad tooth ache since the day before Christmas <
Wasnt there any emergency dentist available? In my location, there are those for these reasons.
So, short story long: Things weren't that bad before and during Christmas, but started getting bad last Friday. So last Saturday I paid a visit to an emergency dentist, who basically shrugged and said come back on Monday when we have more staff. Sunday sucked I was just in pain all day.
But said and done, I came back on Monday, they looked at it again, said it was probably an old filling that was maybe acting up, basically just drilled a bit and filled it back up again. This made it hurt a bit less for about a day (specially during the procedure, even with them drilling into the tooth, local anaesthetic made this the least discomfort I'd been in for almost a week), but since then it's been aching again. It's not as bad as before, but still barely manageable with OTC painkillers.
So tomorrow I'm hitting them up again, hopefully I'm able to convince them to pull the tooth, since it's way back in the mouth and has been nothing but causing me grief since I got the original filling, food getting stuck and causing inflammation, that sort of stuff. The alternative would probably be a root canal, but since it's in a very inaccessible location, that's a real hassle.
Update in case someone somehow got hooked learning about my dentistry adventures. Tooth is now removed. That hurt too. But now the lil' fucker is in the medical waste bin.