Our lifespans are both long and short. When we are younger, we yearn for to be older and when we are older, we yearn to be youthful. Part of the reason why time feels so slow in our youth is because a large size of our experiences are new. Novelty is the characteristic that grinds the pace of time down. Moving from childhood to adolescence, this feeling remains though is diffused a little bit. Moving from primary school to high school is a large change, but it is not as large as moving from no school to primary school. Then when moving on from adolescence to adulthood, the novelty of fresh experiences often becomes diluted and time really does pick up the pace. Most often, once people start working full-time, there is not stopping time.
But what if life was re-framed as different seasons? The first season of our lives is as a toddler and goes up until our earliest memory. Then there is our childhood that we remember. Following this is our adolescence and the teenage years before transitioning into a young adult. Each of these different seasons of our lives are marked by evolving values. What tends to happen is that once we start working full-time, the season of being employed often lasts until retirement. This has always seemed ludicrous to me as it is disproportionately long compared to the other seasons of our lives. But what if we split these up?
Instead of thinking of it as a 40 year span of working full-time, it can be 8x five year spans of doing different things. The first five years might be working as a knowledge worker, but following that it could be as an artist, a musician, a gardener, or a teacher. That has always sounded more attractive and more balanced. It has also contributed in my thinking of not wanting to retire ever.