the world has turned and left me here

the happiness vector

I remember something my Organizational Behavior book (die! die!) once said in its sweeping but apologetic cultural generalizations about how different cultures have different time-orientations. On the one hand we have the Japanese, it said, who look largely to the past and are guided by history and ancestry. On the other hand, we have the Americans, who work their tails off for a distant golden retirement, ever delaying gratification in the way that only a Protestant society can.

Now I wish to propose the following idea: our individual (I do not wish to make cultural generalizations here) orientation towards time can be expressed as a vector, ie it has both direction and magnitude. When projected onto the time axis, the positive direction is the future, the negative the past. The magnitude represents how strongly one is influenced by considerations of time.

I am striving for a perfectly vertical vector, the "happiness vector." I am trying to live in The Now.

But this will change. As we age, our time orientation vector rotates, slowly but surely, from a positive projection on the time axis to a negative projection on the time axis. Always in the direction of experience, experience expected or experience remembered, whichever outweighs the other in our minds.