America at 250: On the Subjectivity of Time and the Age of a Nation

But this article isn’t about the detailed history along this way. While my nerdy love of historical context would happily scurry down that rabbit hole and share with you all the documented facts and evidence supporting that history, my role as a Veteran sworn to protect, defend, and uphold the United States Constitution asks something different of me during these times.

Instead, I want to put the 250th anniversary in a different context: the subjectivity of time and how it impacts our thinking, feeling, and doing in the world.

The Science of Time and the Human Brain

Us humans are funny little creatures obsessed with time. Meanwhile, time is one of those things that certainly exists but is nowhere near as static, clearcut, and objective as we make it out to be.

Days are measured by the spinning of the Earth, with one full rotation equaling a day, which we then break up into 24 pieces we call hours. We mark our years based on the Earth’s revolution around the Sun (the star of our solar system). It takes the littlest bit over 365 days to make the full trip around the Sun, so every four years we add an extra day to even things out.

Are you catching how imprecise that is? Or that we’ve been making it up along the way? The small scale (minutes, hours, days, years) is useful for tracking and measuring. But it’s also manmade. We could (and have) made our calendars in numerous different ways.

That said, the Earth is going to spin, giving us night and day. The Earth is going to orbit the Sun–along with the Earth’s tilt–giving us seasons that occur in cycles. Once a day is done, we can’t make the Earth spin the other way to go back to it. Likewise, the Earth will continue orbiting the Sun in the same direction. Scientifically, then, we say that time is linear. What is past is past and you won’t know the future until you get there.

A Nation Acting Like a Preteen

It’s no secret that the USA is struggling right now. A democratic republic that depends on democracy to keep its promises as laid out in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is facing very blatant authoritarian actions at its highest levels of government. (For those who didn’t pay attention in Civics class back in high school, authoritarianism and democracy are basically opposites in that one prevents the other.)

Living through it feels disorienting. A major understatement, I know. It’s hard for some of us to find the right combination of words to express the full range of experiences we have every day now. Which is exactly why it’s important for us to take some time and zoom out. 

Comparing Our History with Other Nations

Whether you know history or run from the subject entirely, surely you’re aware that civilizations and nations rise and fall over large periods of time. Sometimes civilizations are born only to dissolve or be brutally destroyed within a matter of decades. But I want you to think about those major civilizations that I know you have some foundational knowledge in.

If you were raised with a Eurocentric worldview, then your mind most likely goes to the big 3: Rome, Greece, Egypt. Those major ancient civilizations that were around for thousands of years before they eventually fell (that we have surviving records of, anyway). Take a moment and consider the lifespan of those civilizations: How they might have formed. What conflicts may have arisen from outside threats and internal ones. Major shifts as the other civilizations around them grew and changed and people migrated from one to another. Wars. Peace treaties. Whatever you know of them, reflect and consider the differences between the bigger picture and what daily life might have been like for humans living through those periods.

When we look at the lifespan of civilizations that lasted for a thousand years or more, we almost always see this really interesting macrocosm at play. As individual humans, our development from birth through old age follows distinct periods: toddler, adolescent, puberty, teen, young adult, mature adult, elder, and onwards. When we zoom out on ancient civilizations, we see similar stages taking place.

I personally love studying the mythology and religious perspectives of ancient cultures for this reason–the way a nation tells its stories and shapes itself around them makes it clearer where that nation is in its development.

USA is Acting Its Age

250 years is a blink of an eye in the context of a nation’s lifespan. At its start, human life expectancies were maybe, what? 30 years on average? That would mean that it’d be 8-9 generations of memory backwards, supporting the young people's subjective experience of time as being old.

However, our average life expectancy continues to grow, with people frequently living into the 70s-100s today. That would make it only about 2.5-3.5 generations back. That’s your grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents.

Now, obviously, I’m trying to oversimplify things entirely too much here. But the point is the subjectivity of our nation’s age. Trying to imagine how far back the “greats” go to get 250 years counting nine generations back versus three is a very different internal experience. Our brains can contextualize the three, but will likely miss it trying to go back nine.

Let your mind time-travel again. Regardless of your family’s actual personal history, imagine having a branch of your family in the USA since the founding 250 years ago. Go back just three generations. What was life like in 1776? What might it have been like to live through the country trying to find its footing? What struggles existed that they had to go through? With each major event, war, new technology, how did that reshape their lives? How did they have to adjust? 

When you do this exercise, it often comes along with some “ah-ha” moments. When the context makes the events click together and lived experiences begin to mirror your own. And you may just realize that the USA is still really young. And the things we’re living through now feel a whole lot like a civilization going through puberty.

How We Survive the Growth Pains of a Nation

I wish I could say I have the answers on how to set things right and get us to a place that would make us all happy. (Anyone well-versed in sociology knows that’s not a thing.) The reality is that we’re just going to have to live through this the best we can. Thousands of years from now, people will look back over the first several hundred years and see the full progression. They aren’t going to see our individual lives and efforts. Individual lives matter, always. Yet it’s the collective macrocosm that tells the story to the far future generations.

We have the unfortunate timing of living through the USA’s pubescent stage: When we’re lashing out against all that we have been, are told we must be, the fluctuating thoughts and feelings we have of ourselves, and the inevitable feelings that arise when we try to imagine the future beyond this moment.

So as a Veteran continuing to abide by her oath from so many years ago, I ask you to focus on that Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. What did it take to get to the point that that was what we wanted? What did it mean to put these founding documents in place? What is the actual promise of them? And how can we get past the hurt and confusion of this stage so that we can get back to living that promise?