Then I remember how lucky I am. I started with next to nothing, worked through college, and now basically get paid to play with computers all day (something I would have done for free anyways). I get to travel and have other amazing experiences. Biggie said it best, "when I was dead broke man, I couldn't picture this".
One of the reasons I think programmers always end up in this existential plight is that we are successful enough to have time to think about it. When I was young and worried about eating or having enough money to put gas in the car so I could get to work or school (or even having a car) I never thought about these things.
I remember moments from my college days that I can pinpoint to the year they happened. That thing that happened sophomore year? I know it happened sophomore year because I did it with my roommate at the time.
But nowadays I'll watch a movie on Netflix thinking it came out just in the past year or two, only to discover it came out in, say, 2007 or worse 1997.
A close friend of mine's daughter just turned 16. I remember her birth like it was yesterday. But the intervening years... not so much.
I think having kids, which I have not done, might slow time down a bit. Travel helps too.
Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer.
When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place.
That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...
Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1
It's a paradox best expressed by the old adage: the days are long, but the years are short.
Before having my daughter, days were fast, weeks were faster, and years slipped through my fingers. Time goes faster when you daily routine is always more less the same, and that is more difficult with a child.
I find that if you hang around long enough and pay attention, you start to see the shape and patterns of your life. Not an original or profound observation, but it can be surprisingly easy for many of us to defer thinking about such things. What you gain from this you pay for with time, though.
In a similar experience to yours, I watched The Matrix with my son recently and was shocked to discover that it was released in 1999 - but I think of it as a recent thing. Holding my niece when she was a newborn baby and showing her Christmas tree lights, and now she's making an independent life in a big city.
In my experience, and as others have commented, having children doesn't slow time down. You're so busy with them for so long, and they rush towards their future so fast.
I'm reminded of a phrase that Sam Altman used: The days are long but the decades are short [1].
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-...
Speaking from firsthand experience, it seems to do just the opposite.
So I also struggle with this exact same problem, i.e. some thing which I feel is recent is actually 5/10 years back. I am trying to work on it, so far not so successfully.
Nope. Makes it go even faster, and you remember even less.
The days are long the years are short.
Have you noticed that now more than never before there is plethora of amazing libraries, frameworks, language, tools, platforms, clouds, etc. that are easily available to use and if you like to build stuff WHY NOT CREATE YOUR OWN THING and come up with your own ideas and build them instead of continuing working for one company probably using the same software stack? Why limit yourself? have you entertained a regret like this?
I ask this, because I'm in the same boat as you and this is my small regret though I'm working on the side, slowly, to build my own thing in the free time that family and my day job allows it.
Cheers!
"You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today."
This is not a bad way to live, but as I get older I am increasingly aware that there will be a day when I'm dead tomorrow. And for that reason I'm increasingly less interested in spending time in the state where "time shifts, and before I know it hours have passed." Instead I want to fill those hours with real-time concious, experienced enjoyment. Because I can't live them again.
Being in the zone and cranking out great code still feels good, but only at the time. Which I guess makes me conflicted or something.
Thank you for making me think about this.