More or Less

Without having researched it at all, it occurs to me that there is probably a formula to calculate time lost or gained given the amount of travel on which one embarks.

Have I lost or gained days given all the time zones and date lines I've crossed so many times? If I had only ever stayed in one time zone, would my life be X days longer or shorter? Or if I'm always returning to where I came from, is that time balanced out? (Non sequitur, there was just an 80-year-old guy who walked past the lobby of the hotel where I'm staying in Chicago wearing a three piece suit and...Pumas! What an unbelievably awesome sight....almost as awesome as yesterday when I saw a homeless-looking guy riding his bike down the street with a magnum of champagne!)

Anyway, I'm just trying to conceptualize this idea of time, and if by going through all these time zones all the time, I'm somehow losing out on or gaining hours of life. And ultimately, does it matter? I mean, if I hadn't been sitting on a plane, what would I be doing instead? Lots of stuff, surfing, swimming, walking, reading, talking, drinking wine, etc, etc. But sitting on the plane, I'm doing a lot of that stuff, too, so what does it really matter if I'm crammed in some plane or somewhere else?

And moreso, as we all know, time is just some arbitrary construct that we've created for various reasons, so the idea that I'm losing or gaining is just as arbitrary. And this idea of lose/gain is really just in reference to other people, right? But, I don't live in a vacuum, so to speak, so of course it's in reference to other people.

If I hadn't had half a bottle of Pinot Noir (which, honestly, I'm not really a fan of), I'd be able to conceptualize this a lot better. DZ crosses the date line over and over, is his loss/gain substantially greater than mine since I mostly go intra-continentally? (Though I'm apt to argue that travel from Hawaii to the mainland is decidedly like going from one continent to a wholly other one. I'm in culture shock every time I come here. Why are there so many white people?! And why do they all dress the same??)

Whether I've lost time or not, I do know this: I would happy continue on in my time warp rather than spend my life traveling without moving.