As I celebrated the New Year, with all the resolutions that are traditionally broken before January turns into February, I reflected on how quickly the year seemed to go -- taking the entire decade in its wake.  This year, because it was my 60th, I suppose it felt personal. 

We all know where the time goes -- into the past -- but the harder question is: how does it get there? More than a century ago, Einstein taught us that time is relative. The theory feels abstract and distant -- don’t you have to be going near the speed of light for it to matter? -- but it is real, and we all live under a man-made constellation built on the idea. Satellites in the GPS system are moving quickly enough relative to us, and are far enough from the influence of Earth’s gravity, that they would be useless if they didn’t constantly correct for time dilation. Yes, time can and does dilate and contract. Rarely in science does something so fundamental feel so true to our emotional experience. 

We all know the feeling, but why? Relativity isn’t really concerned with our subjective experience of time, but a simpler theory, first posed by Paul Janet, is that people perceive ratios, not absolutes. It’s true for many things, including musical pitch. If you play the 88 keys of a piano, one by one, the interval always sounds the same – but only because each absolute interval was tuned to be bigger than the last. In other words, when we listen to a scale, we are hearing the music of compound growth.  

Imagine laying the years of your life across those keys, one key for one year. As a child you jab the first few notes; in old age you brush the last. To tune your life like a piano, to make each year pass with the same perceived interval, your last decade would need to be 90 times longer than your first. Of course, life isn’t tuned like that, and that’s why our last few notes are a lot harder to distinguish than the first few.  

There are many other theories for why we perceive time this way. Maybe it’s a matter of novelty, which comes cheaper when we’re young. Maybe it’s the way we group and summarize later experiences in terms of earlier ones. Like a chess master who absorbs the whole board at a glance, our latest game cannot stand alone: it’s just another permutation of all the ones that came before. 

Whichever theory is closest to the truth, there’s really only one response. This year, my resolution is – well, it’s not to slow down time, but to recognize that as it passes, we have to learn to use it more wisely. To take advantage of new and unique experiences. Time may fly when you’re having fun, but those are the moments that become milestones and make life feel longer. It’s going to the same places and doing the same things that makes for motion-blurred memories of fast-receding years.  

So, now and then, let’s remember to play new games – games that force us, in some small way, to start over, to build new intuitions, and to remember how to remember.  

 Ron Kruszewski 

Chairman and CEO of Stifel Financial Corp.