When I was younger, the scale of things was not so arbitrary. Back then, a second was far shorter than a minute and a minute far shorter than a hour. Now it all feels so distant and yet so close both at the same time. As a mortal being I am subject to the whims of time and so I age and I grow not only in stature but in impatience as time flies by and I am still where I was so long ago. In this way I am very acutely aware of the time that goes by. However, ever since I had understood orders of magnitude, bases, and logarithms to even a fundamental extent, the passage of time began to accelerate to ever greater and greater speeds. When I was younger, a summer was forever. Now, summer is just another blip with the rest. It's hardly even worth discerning between the length of a summer and the length of a weekend anymore. I am still young as well, so I find it reasonable to expect that the passage of time will continue to accelerate for me until I either die or something happens to slow it down. It is almost frustrating the way that months slip by and yet I end up having barely moved an inch.

My disconnect from time has somewhat hindered my functionality as well. I will do nearly anything and everything last minute regardless of how much time is given for me to do it because I haven't failed for it so far though I know it to be poor practice. The regular irregularity of my sleep and schedule certainly do not aid me. Alas, if those were the only issues it would almost be fine, but as a consequence of my disconnect from time I have almost developed this sense that I am immortal—not in the sense that I believe I cannot die or cannot age, but rather in the sense that I have unlimited time to live out my dreams. In reality I have a few decades—perhaps at most a century at best—to carry out my will, yet I waste hours every day not pursuing it. Please do not think I mean that my drive should be single-minded and without care for anything or anyone else between me and what I want, but rather that I truly do waste hours every day on activities that don't even bring me joy nor are necessary for any reason. It's extraordinary the ways I find to waste more time and avoid my passions. It isn't that my passions are hallow either—I enjoy them truly more than I feel many could know. Instead, I feel as though I have an eternity to answer them and so I put them off despite my time being so short. My perception of time has even begun to sneak into my speech; I constantly refer to any length of time as being so short because truly for me it oftentimes feels as though it was yesterday.

Though no matter how long ago a moment was it feels somewhat recent, my memories do not feel the same. When I was younger my memories were more fresh and so I could gleam more from it, but now when I look back on them the details that are now missing are almost inexcusable. It isn't the same as forgetting something so trivial either like the 20th digit of \(\pi\) or what I had eaten that day. The memories to which I refer are far more important—they are memories of people who fundamentally made me who I am and have been ever since I met them. Most all are no longer in my life for various reasons that I wish to not elaborate on at this moment. It pains me though that I can no longer remember for certain the color of their hair, the hue of their eyes, or the gait of their walk. They have been reduced in my mind to caricatures of my own making. Of course memories are never certain—they are quite fickle things and even the best of them surely degrade, but when a memory is so treasured and so important to oneself it tears one's heart asunder to have it ripped bare and turned empty for them. These are people I often think about at least once a week—usually far more often verging on many minutes a day on average for some. It's too much to imagine that with time growing ever so distant from me that my memories too grow distant just as quickly.

My familiarity with this existentialism is far from new. I've been grappling with it since I was quite young, but this sense of scale and thus importance losing it's meaning permeates itself into other aspects as well such as my sense of distance. Of course compared to the earth and the cosmos I am small, such information is neither new or particularly abrasive. I have always felt myself—at least since the age of 7—to be just another blip among an infinity of blips ever outstretching past what the mind can fathom, but more recently this sense of smallness—or rather the sense that everything really is so small in comparison to what is has swapped—for a sense of largeness. For many years now I have been at least somewhat acquainted with the structure of atoms—a positively charged nucleus in the void with a negatively charged electron cloud. The average distance between an electron and an proton for any given atom is astounding and suggests that matter is mostly free space. This fact is far from weird for me now and it was far from weird for me then oddly enough, however, now in these last years as I have embraced my passion for chemistry this paradigm has flipped itself on its head to me. I often look at the ground and imagine the vastness between me and it and I shudder. Things that were once close are now far. Though I am small and I know the ground is in a human sense so near, I am big and the distance between us could not be larger. I very much have a fear of falling and so this sense of distance between me and the ground can sometimes be quite uncomfortable.

Usually though I embrace my ever warping sense of the scale of things. I think sometimes that though I am only human it may serve me best to live as if I was not, for though I am anything but immortal perhaps it would serve me best to waste my time. I do not think the way I am currently doing things is great though in any way. I would like to spend that time following my passions—if I can gain control over myself that will be what I'll do. I want to keep learning things—often nothing of the practical sort, just things I find interesting forever. When I do eventually die I think I'd like that to be the end. I neither care about living well for the sake of others or about being remembered. I am naught but sentient stardust with desire and after life fades from me I would like to return to that—eventually. I want to consume knowledge purely for my own sake because I think that is the most pure way to consume knowledge. It certainly isn't the most helpful to society at large, but I think in the pursuit of as close of a thing as contentedness as I could achieve that knowledge purely for knowledge's sake is more than fine. I want my curiosity to die with me and no sooner, and if what they say about part of you living on in others is true then I hope my curiosity lives on in them. It almost feels weird to talk about my passions and thoughts on death in an excerpt about the loss of the sense of scale of things, but I think I really mean to say that that scale of things is now intrinsically a part of me, and though it now hinders me I don't particularly hate it. When I look up at all the clouds above me and their majesty, I now also think about their water content and how massive the amount of water resting above me is. I think in multiple ways this is fascinating and I hope it doesn't end—if anything for the sake of further expanding my random collection of knowledge. Unlike my sense of space and time though, I wish for my passions to be near to me. I wish for myself to become my passions and my passions to become me. It's certainly somewhat selfish goals in many senses, but it doesn't exclude selflessness either. What I don't directly do for my own sake I do indirectly for my own sake because I couldn't bear not doing it whether it be for guilt, curiosity, or something different altogether. I don't think most people are really different from this, but rather just that they phrase it differently as for the sake of others and not indirectly for their own sake and in more terse a manner. I hope to further document myself for my own sake as time presses forth.

—PressTabs