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Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences. I believe our brains compress the information and an entire day tha

by djmips 5y ago

Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences. I believe our brains compress the information and an entire day that was much like the previous day can just feel like it sped by quickly. Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as you process a lot of new information.

WA9ACE 5y ago
It's all anecdotal, but having been full time RVing for several months now after selling our house time has slowed to a crawl. Before we sold our house the days flew past at 100mph. It's amazing how little control we can exert on our own perception of the flow of time.
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gmfawcett 5y ago
This is a much more compelling argument than the article's.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  This is my impression as well. Old people who have settled in a routine can tell what year and month it is, but probably have a harder time telling the day or weekday. For them, all days are weekends. You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations certainly felt considerably shorter.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    JRPGs, as well as the Civ games, are time compressors. You blink and 5 hours have passed.
    - contingencies 5y ago
      Commuting / driving.
    - lsaferite 5y ago
      Games like factorio must be 'super compressors'.
      - tuatoru 5y ago
        And Kerbal Space Program. Why are those birds cheeping? Oh, it's the dawn chorus. Again.
      - mikewarot 5y ago
        So if you grow the factory big enough, time and space take on new relative dimensions, and the Doctor shows up? Or do you become the Doctor?
    - eafkuor 5y ago
      God, really? I can't take those for more than 1h at a time usually. Except Chrono Trigger I guess. Any recommendations?
      - cassianoleal 5y ago
        JRPGs? The Persona series is quite interesting, good story telling; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 are both very good; NieR Automata is a great action RPG set in a dystopic future; the old school Zeldas, the original Phantasy Star... I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of time.
      - ASalazarMX 5y ago
        Chrono Trigger is an excellent game! Maybe Chrono Cross (PS1) if you want to play a sequel. Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play the previous ones. My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined, but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many hours.
  - pugworthy 5y ago
    You might correct that to "people who don't work" instead of "old people".
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      Not necessarily. People who don't work aren't necessarily living boring lives.
      - pugworthy 5y ago
        Just pointing out a bit of inadvertent ageism. And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives. My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually matter.
        ASalazarMX 5y ago
        I think I was unintentionally ageist, sorry. I'm fifty myself, it wasn't deliberate. Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't flunk.
        pugworthy 5y ago
        I'm 60. I'm learning to be sensitive about it, while also being aware that there are those that are younger who have insights I don't. It's a partnership, and it works better when one tries to understand that roles evolve over time - for one's self and for others. Also understand that stereotypes of age (and many other things) are not a great way to go through life.
        seoulmetro 5y ago
        You weren't being "ageist". It's normal to assume that old people live at home and aren't out doing many things. It's also normal to assume that 16 year olds get acne. Please don't let someone censor you for acting rationally.
- belltaco 5y ago
  Both can be true in their own way though.
- itsdsmurrell 5y ago
  Yes, I agree, the article is very bad and I don't know how it got upvoted so highly here.
- d23 5y ago
  This is more intuitive, but I don't know that it makes it more compelling for me. I find the article's hypothesis a bit more interesting, since it's not exactly what one would expect.
- lathiat 5y ago
  I've seen a different explanation. When you are 10 years old, a year of your life is 1/10th of your life. Relatively, it's a large portion. When you are 50 years old, a year of your life is a much smaller 1/50th portion of total memory, experiences, etc.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as you process a lot of new information. Yeah...the first week of a new job feels like a month of the previous job. Four months into it now, and the weeks fly by. While on vacation, the days feel long. Though once I get back, the week felt short. :-\ I worry about what retirement will be like. On one hand, all my time is free time. On the other, 10 years will probably fly by and I'll have no idea where it went.
throwaway2331 5y ago
Truly gives a whole nother meaning to "wasting your life away at a job."
someelephant 5y ago
Indeed. Our brains are good at 'compressing' similar experiences.
com2kid 5y ago
This is the typical explanation, and it meshes very well with everyone's day to day experiences. Vacations to unique places last forever. Never been? Spend 2 weeks in Japan and you'll remember it just as vividly as the best summer from your childhood. Every moment of every day will be long and filled with memories. Debugging code every day? Yeah of course that's not memorable. Your brain is just tossing away repetitive data. Feeling like life is going by way too quick? Have a kid. Every day with a baby is unique. People with large families will have lived 200 subjective years by the time they are 70! Other advice: Stop doing stuff you are good at. Every few years try to take a new job that you are specifically not good at. Companies that hire people who have succeeded at a lot of different things but not necessarily the thing they are hiring for are likely to be very good places to work. (FWIW my current workplace doesn't hire based on language or tools or background, we hire good people and assume they can pick up what we are doing).
- deleted 5y ago
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- googlerx 5y ago
  I dunno. I had a kid and it feels like time is moving even FASTER now. "They grow up so fast..."
fasteo 5y ago
This is it
GuardianCaveman 5y ago
This is why I was enjoying living overseas in different countries because there were so many new experiences some frustrating some good but it did feel like time was moving slower.
frogpelt 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on a very small scale. The first time I drive down a road it seems longer than subsequent times. Once parts of the road become familiar the time it takes to get down the road seems shorter.
tralarpa 5y ago
> Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences I have read that explanation several times on different websites, but I don't agree. Had a lot of new and unique things happening to me in the past decade (kids, moving, new job, new country,...). Times still flew. I have talked to friends about this and they have noticed the same thing.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  How old are you? These were new but now a new job or a new country is also a repeat. It gets harder and harder to find truly new things.
- handrous 5y ago
  I don't buy the "novelty" thing, either. Between high school and an evening job, about three of those years were the most regimented of my life, and high school definitely wasn't providing enough novelty, in any way, to make up for it. Yet those years felt extremely slow compared to now. I feel like I blink and a season's gone. Fall or Summer used to feel so long back then. And Winter, practically eternal. Now it's like, "wait, didn't Summer just start? Why are the leaves all turning?" Some time around IIRC 25, the effect really started to take off, and it's never gotten better, no matter how much my life is shaken up. [EDIT] and on shorter time scales, back then, tell me I've got an hour? Fuck yeah! Enough time to do several things! Now it's like... ugh, barely enough to even start something. Guess I'll putter and tidy the house until it's up, which'll feel like about ten minutes from now.
  - spc476 5y ago
    Another way to look at it: by the time you graduate high school, you will have spent 1/4 of your life there. By the time you are 40, 10 years is 1/4 of your life. By the time you are 80, 20 years is 1/4 of your life. The relative portions of your life get longer the longer you live.
    - handrous 5y ago
      That's another way to look at it, sure, but it still doesn't seem to explain anything about why perception of time speeds up with age. That's true, but why does it matter?
ww520 5y ago
Our brains also filters lots of uninterested stuff automatically. When we’re young, many things are interesting. We spend lots of time processing them and it feels like time goes slowly as we have to “experience” these things fully. As we grew older, lots of things have been experienced and known. The brains recognize the known patterns and just filter them out. The brains are probably micro sleep all time while idling saving energy, and the time keeping is off.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
That's my theory too. In your first 20-30 years there are so many new things to keep your mind busy. Different schools, driver's license, first car, first time seeing a movie, first time seeing a concert, first relationships, first break up, moving out, travel, first job, children and so on. At some point it all becomes a repeat. I feel a lot of movies are just a repeat of what I have seen 30 years ago. Same for music. I can go to India for the fifth time but it's not the same excitement and amount of new experiences as the first time. I don't know how to get out of this. I can't think of any truly new things to do. Maybe I could go to jail or win Wimbledon? These would be truly new :-)
- deepsun 5y ago
  Outdoor sports. Any of the following can consume your whole time, and have huge communities of full-time devotees: * Rock Climbing * Mountaineering * Kayaking * Paragliding * Kite/Windsurfing * Surfing * Snowboarding (if you ski, skiing if you snowboard) * Backcountry skiing (aka ski-tour)
- com2kid 5y ago
  Learn something completely unfamiliar to you. Something you are going to start off terrible at. Even better, an activity where the community surrounding it is also vastly different than your typical friends circle. Know a bunch of engineers? Dive into painting or sculpting. Find a way to twist your brain in a painful new direction.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've always felt that traveling to somewhere new feels like a longer experience than coming back from that place, unless the return trip has an emotional component to it (boredom, urgency, anxious to return). I tend to notice the details of the unfamiliar road more. On the way back, my mind has already cached that path.
another_why 5y ago
A very simple example which i can replicate at any time, with the same result: I have serious problems with memorizing places and can easily get lost anywhere where I haven't been yet. So, sometimes(knowing that i have a phone with gps in my pocket) I look at the map beforehand and try to go to some unknown place, on my own, in a limited time, like to a doctor appointment. And everytime it feels like it takes A LOT of time, like if I walked for 30 minutes when it was just 10. If I try it at the same place again, it will feel faster. Eventually, when I stop looking around and just go thinking about smth, like I usually do, it will feel like I walked for 5 minutes, when it actually was 20. It will not work in the same way if the time won't be limited - I will be more relaxed. People can spend years solving one problem in their mind and there are not many experiences in your mind until it generates smth you haven't thought about, and this doesn't happen often.
sva_ 5y ago
If in the first year of life, you have 100% new experiences, 2nd year, 50% new experiences, etc, and reach an age of around 80, you'll have made half your life's experiences by the age of 20. I think in retrospect we perceive time through our memories, less so by our momentary experience. If your memories have little variance, you'll feel like time has passed quickly. So if you work some factory job for 40 years, you may feel like life passed by in a blink of a moment.
Darmody 5y ago
And you usually are not excited for the next day but for the nexy payday. Zombies until the weekend or until we get paid.
999900000999 5y ago
I'll definitely agree with this, I'd advise anyone who's not tied down to routinely go on vacations, and even consider moving. Staying in old routines is comfortable, but to use myself as an example if I just stayed in la complaining about how horrible the city is, I'm robbing myself of a fuller life. My plan right now is to move abroad for at least a few months or so. I really need to change up things
GuB-42 5y ago
The original article is inaccessible for me but it depends on the experimental protocol. What "speeds up"? Looking at a clock ticking doing nothing? Eating breakfast? Waiting in line? Watching a movie? An international flight? Memories of a typical work/school day? Memories of a two week vacation? And relative to what? You can't say something "speeds up" without a reference. For example you can ask : "What feels the longest, a day at Disneyland, or the 8h drive to get there?". And you will probably get different answers based on the context. Our body doesn't have a single clock, and BTW, neither do computers, so the transmission delay between neurons and the amount of new experiences can each explain a different kind of "speed up".
aequitas 5y ago
Regarding vacation or trips in general for me it still feels going by fast and less special as I get older. I recon it has to do with that in the past vacations and trips would be planned for me (by my parents) so everything was a surprise and a discovery. Nowadays I have to plan everything for my family, so I do a lot of research regarding where to go, what to do, what will be most fun. So there is less of a surprise for me in case things do go as planned (like an attraction being closed or not as fun as it would seem). But this also means there is less room for me to be surprised and discover.
xnx 5y ago
Exactly. Often on vacation something I did in the morning will feel like a week ago.
esja 5y ago
I have long believed the same. I also experience this when taking a long drive to a new destination - it seems to take longer to get there than it does to return home.
tylerscott 5y ago
That makes a ton of sense. The process of dissimulation that we go through as children just to be able to map language to our environment sounds like this. Once an experience is categorized we likely don't have the CPU spin up on the next similar experience. Business as usual. No need to make a note in memory about it.
carlmr 5y ago
I think this is true as well, it's easier to remember special days, than average days. Another issue is that kids are exposed to more varied experience at school. Jobs often expose us to similar experiences over and over again. The only problem is how to get paid to have a varied life.
darkwater 5y ago
It's totally unscientific but in my opinion it's like when you are hiking a path you never did and when you reach your destination, you hike back. Going back always feels faster even if the pace is exactly the same, but you already know the path, you remember some rock, or that view, or those oaks. And your brain works less. We have routines when we are small children just like we have when we are adults so it might be that as we grow older the brain is in power saving mode and that feels like going back through a path you already know.
- bigwheeler 5y ago
  I have the opposite experience when hiking- The way back usually feels like it takes forever. I think it’s because I’m seeing things I’ve already seen, so it’s not as exciting as it was when I saw it the first time on the way in. Same thing for roadtrips too, if I take the same route both ways.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    Then my anecdotal theory goes boom :)
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Nevermark 5y ago
I agree completely! Time seeming to speed up isn't a visual phenomena! I don't see people walking faster. People are not talking faster. It is in recall of recent times, not in the moment, that we feel like time is going by faster. And your point explains that. We tend to have fewer memories of recent time, because we had fewer unique experiences relative to when we were young and almost every day was full of new experiences and new things to learn.
rkp8000 5y ago
I also think this is a quite reasonable. For some work on this beyond anecdotal evidence, see https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008668 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... . The authors' main finding (in rats and humans) is that the perception of the intensity of a stimulus relates to the perception of its duration, i.e. more intense stimuli are perceived as longer lasting. A speculation beyond the specific study would be that more intense experience generally (perhaps due to the saliency of more unique life events) could lead to a slowed down perception of time.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Also with increasing responsibilities of childcare and work you don't really even get time to be bored. I get max 2-3 hours per day for "myself" and half of that means just doing doing chores.
pleb_nz 5y ago
This is my favourite theory and I liken it to this for those who have driven alot. The first trip on a new road or a road not travelled for a very long time always feels like it takes the longest. The more you travel that same road often the faster the journey feels. At least to a certain point.
refurb 5y ago
As someone who moved to a country where I didn’t speak the language, then changed jobs twice and then moved to a third country I can honestly state the year went by just as fast.
xtiansimon 5y ago
You want to experience a languishing day? Work as a poll worker for your local board of elections. You see 2-5 elections per year. The day lasts from 0500-2130h (at least here in NY) New faces throughout the day. Constant stimulation, followed by periods of inactivity. Practically impossible to guess when someone will walk in the door. Strict rules for how you’re supposed to conduct the election, combined with the anxiety of how your co-workers and yourself actually perform. And then waiting for the results.

by djmips 5y ago

WA9ACE 5y ago

It's all anecdotal, but having been full time RVing for several months now after selling our house time has slowed to a crawl. Before we sold our house the days flew past at 100mph. It's amazing how little control we can exert on our own perception of the flow of time.

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gmfawcett 5y ago

This is a much more compelling argument than the article's.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
This is my impression as well. Old people who have settled in a routine can tell what year and month it is, but probably have a harder time telling the day or weekday. For them, all days are weekends. You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations certainly felt considerably shorter.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  JRPGs, as well as the Civ games, are time compressors. You blink and 5 hours have passed.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    Commuting / driving.
  - lsaferite 5y ago
    Games like factorio must be 'super compressors'.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      And Kerbal Space Program. Why are those birds cheeping? Oh, it's the dawn chorus. Again.
    - mikewarot 5y ago
      So if you grow the factory big enough, time and space take on new relative dimensions, and the Doctor shows up? Or do you become the Doctor?
  - eafkuor 5y ago
    God, really? I can't take those for more than 1h at a time usually. Except Chrono Trigger I guess. Any recommendations?
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      JRPGs? The Persona series is quite interesting, good story telling; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 are both very good; NieR Automata is a great action RPG set in a dystopic future; the old school Zeldas, the original Phantasy Star... I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of time.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      Chrono Trigger is an excellent game! Maybe Chrono Cross (PS1) if you want to play a sequel. Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play the previous ones. My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined, but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many hours.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  You might correct that to "people who don't work" instead of "old people".
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Not necessarily. People who don't work aren't necessarily living boring lives.
    - pugworthy 5y ago
      Just pointing out a bit of inadvertent ageism. And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives. My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually matter.
      - ASalazarMX 5y ago
        I think I was unintentionally ageist, sorry. I'm fifty myself, it wasn't deliberate. Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't flunk.
        pugworthy 5y ago
        I'm 60. I'm learning to be sensitive about it, while also being aware that there are those that are younger who have insights I don't. It's a partnership, and it works better when one tries to understand that roles evolve over time - for one's self and for others. Also understand that stereotypes of age (and many other things) are not a great way to go through life.
        seoulmetro 5y ago
        You weren't being "ageist". It's normal to assume that old people live at home and aren't out doing many things. It's also normal to assume that 16 year olds get acne. Please don't let someone censor you for acting rationally.
belltaco 5y ago
Both can be true in their own way though.
itsdsmurrell 5y ago
Yes, I agree, the article is very bad and I don't know how it got upvoted so highly here.
d23 5y ago
This is more intuitive, but I don't know that it makes it more compelling for me. I find the article's hypothesis a bit more interesting, since it's not exactly what one would expect.
lathiat 5y ago
I've seen a different explanation. When you are 10 years old, a year of your life is 1/10th of your life. Relatively, it's a large portion. When you are 50 years old, a year of your life is a much smaller 1/50th portion of total memory, experiences, etc.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as you process a lot of new information. Yeah...the first week of a new job feels like a month of the previous job. Four months into it now, and the weeks fly by. While on vacation, the days feel long. Though once I get back, the week felt short. :-\ I worry about what retirement will be like. On one hand, all my time is free time. On the other, 10 years will probably fly by and I'll have no idea where it went.

throwaway2331 5y ago

Truly gives a whole nother meaning to "wasting your life away at a job."

someelephant 5y ago

Indeed. Our brains are good at 'compressing' similar experiences.

com2kid 5y ago

This is the typical explanation, and it meshes very well with everyone's day to day experiences. Vacations to unique places last forever. Never been? Spend 2 weeks in Japan and you'll remember it just as vividly as the best summer from your childhood. Every moment of every day will be long and filled with memories. Debugging code every day? Yeah of course that's not memorable. Your brain is just tossing away repetitive data. Feeling like life is going by way too quick? Have a kid. Every day with a baby is unique. People with large families will have lived 200 subjective years by the time they are 70! Other advice: Stop doing stuff you are good at. Every few years try to take a new job that you are specifically not good at. Companies that hire people who have succeeded at a lot of different things but not necessarily the thing they are hiring for are likely to be very good places to work. (FWIW my current workplace doesn't hire based on language or tools or background, we hire good people and assume they can pick up what we are doing).

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googlerx 5y ago
I dunno. I had a kid and it feels like time is moving even FASTER now. "They grow up so fast..."

fasteo 5y ago

This is it

GuardianCaveman 5y ago

This is why I was enjoying living overseas in different countries because there were so many new experiences some frustrating some good but it did feel like time was moving slower.

frogpelt 5y ago

Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on a very small scale. The first time I drive down a road it seems longer than subsequent times. Once parts of the road become familiar the time it takes to get down the road seems shorter.

tralarpa 5y ago

> Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences I have read that explanation several times on different websites, but I don't agree. Had a lot of new and unique things happening to me in the past decade (kids, moving, new job, new country,...). Times still flew. I have talked to friends about this and they have noticed the same thing.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
How old are you? These were new but now a new job or a new country is also a repeat. It gets harder and harder to find truly new things.
handrous 5y ago
I don't buy the "novelty" thing, either. Between high school and an evening job, about three of those years were the most regimented of my life, and high school definitely wasn't providing enough novelty, in any way, to make up for it. Yet those years felt extremely slow compared to now. I feel like I blink and a season's gone. Fall or Summer used to feel so long back then. And Winter, practically eternal. Now it's like, "wait, didn't Summer just start? Why are the leaves all turning?" Some time around IIRC 25, the effect really started to take off, and it's never gotten better, no matter how much my life is shaken up. [EDIT] and on shorter time scales, back then, tell me I've got an hour? Fuck yeah! Enough time to do several things! Now it's like... ugh, barely enough to even start something. Guess I'll putter and tidy the house until it's up, which'll feel like about ten minutes from now.
- spc476 5y ago
  Another way to look at it: by the time you graduate high school, you will have spent 1/4 of your life there. By the time you are 40, 10 years is 1/4 of your life. By the time you are 80, 20 years is 1/4 of your life. The relative portions of your life get longer the longer you live.
  - handrous 5y ago
    That's another way to look at it, sure, but it still doesn't seem to explain anything about why perception of time speeds up with age. That's true, but why does it matter?

ww520 5y ago

Our brains also filters lots of uninterested stuff automatically. When we’re young, many things are interesting. We spend lots of time processing them and it feels like time goes slowly as we have to “experience” these things fully. As we grew older, lots of things have been experienced and known. The brains recognize the known patterns and just filter them out. The brains are probably micro sleep all time while idling saving energy, and the time keeping is off.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

That's my theory too. In your first 20-30 years there are so many new things to keep your mind busy. Different schools, driver's license, first car, first time seeing a movie, first time seeing a concert, first relationships, first break up, moving out, travel, first job, children and so on. At some point it all becomes a repeat. I feel a lot of movies are just a repeat of what I have seen 30 years ago. Same for music. I can go to India for the fifth time but it's not the same excitement and amount of new experiences as the first time. I don't know how to get out of this. I can't think of any truly new things to do. Maybe I could go to jail or win Wimbledon? These would be truly new :-)

deepsun 5y ago
Outdoor sports. Any of the following can consume your whole time, and have huge communities of full-time devotees: * Rock Climbing * Mountaineering * Kayaking * Paragliding * Kite/Windsurfing * Surfing * Snowboarding (if you ski, skiing if you snowboard) * Backcountry skiing (aka ski-tour)
com2kid 5y ago
Learn something completely unfamiliar to you. Something you are going to start off terrible at. Even better, an activity where the community surrounding it is also vastly different than your typical friends circle. Know a bunch of engineers? Dive into painting or sculpting. Find a way to twist your brain in a painful new direction.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Anecdotally, I've always felt that traveling to somewhere new feels like a longer experience than coming back from that place, unless the return trip has an emotional component to it (boredom, urgency, anxious to return). I tend to notice the details of the unfamiliar road more. On the way back, my mind has already cached that path.

another_why 5y ago

A very simple example which i can replicate at any time, with the same result: I have serious problems with memorizing places and can easily get lost anywhere where I haven't been yet. So, sometimes(knowing that i have a phone with gps in my pocket) I look at the map beforehand and try to go to some unknown place, on my own, in a limited time, like to a doctor appointment. And everytime it feels like it takes A LOT of time, like if I walked for 30 minutes when it was just 10. If I try it at the same place again, it will feel faster. Eventually, when I stop looking around and just go thinking about smth, like I usually do, it will feel like I walked for 5 minutes, when it actually was 20. It will not work in the same way if the time won't be limited - I will be more relaxed. People can spend years solving one problem in their mind and there are not many experiences in your mind until it generates smth you haven't thought about, and this doesn't happen often.

sva_ 5y ago

If in the first year of life, you have 100% new experiences, 2nd year, 50% new experiences, etc, and reach an age of around 80, you'll have made half your life's experiences by the age of 20. I think in retrospect we perceive time through our memories, less so by our momentary experience. If your memories have little variance, you'll feel like time has passed quickly. So if you work some factory job for 40 years, you may feel like life passed by in a blink of a moment.

Darmody 5y ago

And you usually are not excited for the next day but for the nexy payday. Zombies until the weekend or until we get paid.

999900000999 5y ago

I'll definitely agree with this, I'd advise anyone who's not tied down to routinely go on vacations, and even consider moving. Staying in old routines is comfortable, but to use myself as an example if I just stayed in la complaining about how horrible the city is, I'm robbing myself of a fuller life. My plan right now is to move abroad for at least a few months or so. I really need to change up things

GuB-42 5y ago

The original article is inaccessible for me but it depends on the experimental protocol. What "speeds up"? Looking at a clock ticking doing nothing? Eating breakfast? Waiting in line? Watching a movie? An international flight? Memories of a typical work/school day? Memories of a two week vacation? And relative to what? You can't say something "speeds up" without a reference. For example you can ask : "What feels the longest, a day at Disneyland, or the 8h drive to get there?". And you will probably get different answers based on the context. Our body doesn't have a single clock, and BTW, neither do computers, so the transmission delay between neurons and the amount of new experiences can each explain a different kind of "speed up".

aequitas 5y ago

Regarding vacation or trips in general for me it still feels going by fast and less special as I get older. I recon it has to do with that in the past vacations and trips would be planned for me (by my parents) so everything was a surprise and a discovery. Nowadays I have to plan everything for my family, so I do a lot of research regarding where to go, what to do, what will be most fun. So there is less of a surprise for me in case things do go as planned (like an attraction being closed or not as fun as it would seem). But this also means there is less room for me to be surprised and discover.

xnx 5y ago

Exactly. Often on vacation something I did in the morning will feel like a week ago.

esja 5y ago

I have long believed the same. I also experience this when taking a long drive to a new destination - it seems to take longer to get there than it does to return home.

tylerscott 5y ago

That makes a ton of sense. The process of dissimulation that we go through as children just to be able to map language to our environment sounds like this. Once an experience is categorized we likely don't have the CPU spin up on the next similar experience. Business as usual. No need to make a note in memory about it.

carlmr 5y ago

I think this is true as well, it's easier to remember special days, than average days. Another issue is that kids are exposed to more varied experience at school. Jobs often expose us to similar experiences over and over again. The only problem is how to get paid to have a varied life.

darkwater 5y ago

It's totally unscientific but in my opinion it's like when you are hiking a path you never did and when you reach your destination, you hike back. Going back always feels faster even if the pace is exactly the same, but you already know the path, you remember some rock, or that view, or those oaks. And your brain works less. We have routines when we are small children just like we have when we are adults so it might be that as we grow older the brain is in power saving mode and that feels like going back through a path you already know.

bigwheeler 5y ago
I have the opposite experience when hiking- The way back usually feels like it takes forever. I think it’s because I’m seeing things I’ve already seen, so it’s not as exciting as it was when I saw it the first time on the way in. Same thing for roadtrips too, if I take the same route both ways.
- darkwater 5y ago
  Then my anecdotal theory goes boom :)

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Nevermark 5y ago

I agree completely! Time seeming to speed up isn't a visual phenomena! I don't see people walking faster. People are not talking faster. It is in recall of recent times, not in the moment, that we feel like time is going by faster. And your point explains that. We tend to have fewer memories of recent time, because we had fewer unique experiences relative to when we were young and almost every day was full of new experiences and new things to learn.

rkp8000 5y ago

I also think this is a quite reasonable. For some work on this beyond anecdotal evidence, see https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008668 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... . The authors' main finding (in rats and humans) is that the perception of the intensity of a stimulus relates to the perception of its duration, i.e. more intense stimuli are perceived as longer lasting. A speculation beyond the specific study would be that more intense experience generally (perhaps due to the saliency of more unique life events) could lead to a slowed down perception of time.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

Also with increasing responsibilities of childcare and work you don't really even get time to be bored. I get max 2-3 hours per day for "myself" and half of that means just doing doing chores.

pleb_nz 5y ago

This is my favourite theory and I liken it to this for those who have driven alot. The first trip on a new road or a road not travelled for a very long time always feels like it takes the longest. The more you travel that same road often the faster the journey feels. At least to a certain point.

refurb 5y ago

As someone who moved to a country where I didn’t speak the language, then changed jobs twice and then moved to a third country I can honestly state the year went by just as fast.

xtiansimon 5y ago

You want to experience a languishing day? Work as a poll worker for your local board of elections. You see 2-5 elections per year. The day lasts from 0500-2130h (at least here in NY) New faces throughout the day. Constant stimulation, followed by periods of inactivity. Practically impossible to guess when someone will walk in the door. Strict rules for how you’re supposed to conduct the election, combined with the anxiety of how your co-workers and yourself actually perform. And then waiting for the results.