Forty minutes of 5-4-1
Time is a funny thing.
A study last year appeared to identify the biological reason for time seeming to speed up as we get older. Something about longer and fewer neural states and having to watch eight minutes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Parents often talk of long days and short years, with sleep deprivation and the constant demands of a child making a Tuesday feel like a millennium, until you blink and they’re all grown up, demanding you leave them alone.
Time, of course, is now relentlessly optimised. It is the final, unconquered frontier, and we must make the most of it. Listen to a podcast while you cook. Learn a new language while you drive. Eat, drink, and move in the right way to extend whatever precious minutes you have left.
So much of our current cultural preoccupation is about time. Even AI, the technology so revolutionary and significant it demands its own government office, is positioned as a driver of efficiency. Embrace the inevitable digital overlord and you too could be granted more time to do, well, something.
Time may be a construct, but it is at least fixed. We measure time in much the same way across cultures. Days, weeks, months, years, eons. It is one of very few universal languages.
But we all track our lives in different ways. Age, of course. Years to retirement, perhaps. Length of tenure in a job, or relationship. The distance from the loss of a loved one. Or for many, the time between major events…like the census.
The ABS has recently begun spending $33m on ads for the next Australian census. Firstly, let’s get the obvious out of the way. These are bad. No one thinks a Koala was going to fill out a census form. The need to measure “people that need healthcare” seems a simple matter of counting everyone in the country. It’s not like they didn’t have five years to write some decent copy.
The census will undoubtedly uncover some fascinating socio-demographic data that illuminates the path of a changing nation. Some of it will inevitably find its way into a deck that’s been written too late for useful insights to be added (see also: the Edelman Trust Barometer and Digital News Report).
Five years ago, the census was rolled out during the first wave of Covid. In a world of baking bread, painful video calls, and Jimmy Brings, filling out a form felt like a moment of sweet relief.
Ten years ago, the ABS suffered a mass outage on its website, preventing thousands from completing the national survey. If you really want to date that particular event, Twitter lit up with the hashtag #CensusFail, which seems remarkably quaint when compared to the dirge of right wing hatred that floods the platform today.
If the census doesn’t stand out as a major milestone for many, sport definitely does.
Major sporting events, like the census, are set in stone. The Olympics reliably brings back memories of your favourite games, particularly for those fortunate enough to attend one in person. For the legion of new fans generated by the Women’s World Cup in 2023, the prospect of the next edition in Brazil next year brings that familiar realisation of time slipping away, barely noticed.
Which brings us, finally, inescapably, and for many reluctantly, to the current FIFA World Cup.
It’s 1998, and hosts France nail the branding (weird rooster aside), the immigrant story, and the final against Brazil. England had Michael Owen and David Beckham and that goal and that kick.
It’s 2006 and the Socceroos arrive home with an achievement so great (scoring a goal) that it’s included in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
It’s 2018 and after two disastrous tournaments, England come close to making the final. It’s 2022 and Harry Kane skies a penalty in the quarters.
Neither England or Australia has tasted anything approaching glory, and yet fans’ lives are pockmarked by these events.
Because time is a funny thing. Most people hoping for the end to sixty (plus) years of English hurt cannot even comprehend it, because they have never lived it.
And yet, they have marked at least part of their lives in those four year blocks, in missed penalties and red cards and tears and forty agonising minutes of backs against the wall and a trudge back to the mundane. To arrive at the same moment, another four years later, and wonder where that time has gone and how life has changed so much, or not.
That dull, quiet, familiar heartbreak doesn’t change time. It does not slow down or speed up. But it will pivot, in some small way, on such moments. We cannot stop time. But we can mark it.