It’s funny, almost absurd—men who once couldn’t bear to be five minutes late for a high school flag ceremony now move like time is their servant. People age, yes, but somewhere along the wrinkled way, they also forget how not to waste other people’s time.
It’s not that old people become lazy or indifferent—they just somehow lose that fiery urgency they once had. I remember being young myself, and though I still count myself among the not-yet-old, I see the difference. Back then, we were racing against the clock. We woke up before alarms rang, arrived at school thirty minutes early, and cursed every second of delay like it was a personal betrayal. A missed ride felt like a moral failure. Tardiness meant shame.
But now? The older folks in my life seem to treat clocks like polite suggestions. They no longer live by the minute, but rather in some expansive version of time where 4 p.m. can easily mean “after I finish my coffee, my nap, and maybe that 45-minute chika with the neighbor.”
Of course, youth has its charms, and one of them is the illusion of scarcity. Young people believe time is precious because they think they have less of it for what they want to do now. Ironically, they’re the ones with decades ahead of them. But they value time like it’s gold dust slipping through their fingers. Meanwhile, the elderly—many of whom are living on borrowed time—seem to regard it like sand in a desert: abundant, warm, and easy to lie down on. It’s not a lack of awareness, I think. It’s the fading of the tick-tock in the soul.
This shift is not just personal—it’s cultural. Older generations, once obsessed with schedules, now prefer to linger. My mother, for instance, once made me recite my itinerary before letting me go out. Later, she’d tell me, “Ayaw pagdinali nga duro. Paghinay.” She said it with a wisdom I respect, but sometimes, I think she forgot that the whole world doesn’t run on her calm. She was not being inconsiderate, not really. She just moved to a rhythm that no longer matches the tempo of modern life, and that disconnect can be frustrating when you’re the one standing in the sun, waiting for a ride home.
Maybe it’s life experience—or the bruises we get from it—that teaches people to slow down. They’ve waited at deathbeds, grieved at funerals, and seen plans crumble in a blink. So now, they pause, they breathe, they take their time. But the problem comes when they also take other people’s time. They no longer apologize for it either, which is what stings the most. It’s as if they believe age has earned them an exemption from the respect they once demanded from us when we were late to dinner.
I often wonder if this evolution from time-conscious to time-consuming is part of a deeper human flaw: that we only value what we fear losing. The young dread being late because they fear being judged. The old no longer care about judgment because they’ve survived worse. But in losing that fear, they also lose touch with courtesy. They forget that time, though less urgent to them now, is still burning fast for others, especially the young they once were. It’s not just about clocks and calendars; it’s about respect. We all live on borrowed time, but borrowing someone else’s without consent is just bad manners.
This isn’t to say that all old people are inconsiderate. I’ve met punctual grandmothers with sharp watches and sharper tongues who’d scold you for being a second late. But in general, there’s an observable drift from timekeeping to time-taking. The polite lie of “tikada na ako” has become their version of “I’m still in bed, but I want you to wait anyway.” It’s charming until it’s not—until it starts costing you hours you can’t get back.
Maybe what we need is not a crusade to make old people hurry up, but a gentle reminder that time is communal property. When we were young, they taught us to be early out of discipline. Now that they’re older, they must be reminded to be on time out of kindness. Aging shouldn’t give us a license to delay others’ lives. If anything, it should teach us how fleeting and precious each minute is—not just for ourselves, but for everyone still waiting outside the bank.
