How do you see time?: Demographer Neil Howe says humans haven't always seen time as linear.

Time as an experience is something I've thought about a lot.

The closer I get to 40, the shorter the years seem.

When I was in my 20s, the days and weeks seemed like forever.

In a recent appearance on The Jim Rutt Show, Neil Howe, the historian and demographer, expressed a theory that he laid out in his new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here.

He argues that throughout human history, time has come in one of three flavors.

Number one, chaotic.

“As William James once said, a whirligig succession of events meaning nothing. They haven't yet been in the world long enough to know what's going to happen,” said Howe.

He said this is akin to seeing time through a child's eyes or perhaps a Buddhist master.

Number two, cyclical time, or time shaped by the events we experience over and over and over.

“There's birthing, there's dying, there's eating, there's gestating, there's harvesting, there's reaping, there's... right? I mean, you get the idea,” continued Howe. “There's chanting, there's dancing, there... things have a rhythm in life.”

Howe suggests that today we often look at time as linear.

“The definitive break with cyclical time was the birth of the great monotheisms in the West,” continued Howe. “And this was the birth of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, most of these being religions of the book, but they reconstrue time as a linear progress. The world is created out of nothing. Time began at that moment. It did not go back into the infinite past as Aristotle might have suggested. It began at a certain moment and it was going to end at a certain moment.”

How do you see time and does Neil have a point?

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