First Person: Time Inflation

Since I penned my last First Person (actually I wrote it on a computer), I had a big birthday (85) which was an occasion for some looking back. One such item was a piece I wrote 35 years ago in a Washington newspaper (the Evening Star) when I was 50 and practicing law (BAR was just a little start-up published out of my law office and not even mentioned in the piece):

Monetary inflation is an overriding concern of almost everyone. Nothing commands more serious analysis in government halls or more space in the media.

Yet another form of inflation, equally insidious, is completely ignored.

I refer to time inflation. A day, a week or a year is simply not worth anywhere near what it used to be.

In a couple of months (which, these days, is likely to pass by almost as quickly as I can write these lines) I will turn 50. I have checked with my friends and contemporaries, people of sufficient age and maturity that their judgment can be trusted, and they agree to a person that in recent years the pace of time has accelerated enormously. There can be no doubt as to the existence of runaway time inflation.