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Why time seems to pass faster as we age

419 points by paraschopra 3y ago

ajuc 3y ago
It's also the reason going back feels much faster despite the fact you're exhausted and probably walking/biking slower. You know the route so you switch to automatic more often and remember less.
richrichie 3y ago
Let T be the life span and t be the age. Let s = T - t. Remark 1: dt / s is small when t is small. Remark 2: Perception of s (call it p) is in reality a function of t. For small t, p(t) is perceived to be near infinity. For t > 40, p(t) rapidly decays to a small number.
Jacquepagan080 3y ago
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a0-prw 3y ago
Each year as we age, in relation to the time we have already lived, is a smaller and smaller fraction.
cchi_co 3y ago
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rjh29 3y ago
I'm also obsessed with this and have mostly countered it so far by moving house every few years, living and studying in several countries and trying new things. The negative being that I don't have any stability.
- plmpsu 3y ago
  To each his own. I've been enjoying getting familiar with the sun's location and cyclic changes of nature as the seasons and years pass where I live.
  - rjh29 3y ago
    You can do that for a year or two, then move on to somewhere else.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I did this for quite a while. I am able to tell roughly when something happened based on where I was living at the time. I’ve moved 26 times and finally got sick of it. While I’m not sure how I’ll tell time now, I’ll figure something out. A lot of people use their kids for this. “Bobby was in 2nd grade, must have been 2014.”
- ourmandave 3y ago
  How do you deal with no stability? Do you have any sort of home base you can always go back to?
  - urda 3y ago
    You learn to live with the instability. You come to terms with how short and limited life and life's experiences can be. It can be a lonely life, but it by far can be the most rewarding. I look back from having diverged from a world where I never escaped my home-town gravity well and I'm glad I took the leap. It made me a deeper, richer, and more interesting individual.
  - rjh29 3y ago
    At the moment I got a visa that allows me to stay for 15 months, which provides a good deal of stability. I think a few years is probably the sweet spot before moving on.
dartos 3y ago
I think mediation and gratefulness is a good way around this too. If your take explicit time to recognize and examine the world around you, even in your backyard, time seems to stretch and you notice and retain more. I’m lucky enough to have lots of different colored birds show up in my backyard, so sometimes I sit out there and wait for them. It’s not exciting, but every time I see one it’s a new memory and those new memories make time feel more.
- bwestergard 3y ago
  If you're not already aware, Cornell offers a bunch if resources to enhance your birding experience. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/ https://www.allaboutbirds.org/
  - radlad 3y ago
    I love Cornell's Merlin app for sound-based identification of birds.
  - dartos 3y ago
    I know literally nothing about birds lol. There are just some pretty ones around me.
- alsetmusic 3y ago
  I heard someone on a podcast talk about the compression of new experiences during the pan / lockdown as a reason why time became meaningless. That seemed right, to me. I can hardly believe that it's been almost four years since that started. > If you have a stable job, you can pretty much mentally time travel a full year and find your days to be similar. > But if I ask you to imagine doing a PhD in Sanskrit at a foreign university, you would have no idea what your days are going to look like. This also feels right, to me. But also, I spent nine months learning new languages to try to build a service to launch with a friend and that didn't turn into a long memory of effort. In fact, I recall it as sandwiched. It was a blip. I think the real key is new experiences, not the aspect of study. Maybe that's the foreign university aspect: what happens when you aren't at study. The people you meet, the places you go, etc.
raspyberr 3y ago
I've always rationalised it as: When you're one years old, 1 year is your whole life. When you're 100 years old, 1 year is 1/100th of your life.
- alberth 3y ago
  This plus … Time as you perceive it, is related to new memories you make. When you’re young, everything is a new experience which in turn becomes a new memory. When your 100, to use your example, you’ve done everything there is to do. So no new memories & days blur together.
- planb 3y ago
  That's the explanation I came up with for myself, too. As humans, we rate most things not in absolute but in relative terms to what we are used to (see studies about happiness or how rich people don't realise how wealthy they are when they don't leave their bubble). Why should we perceive time differently than in comparison to our timescale?
  - mistermann 3y ago
    It even distorts logical processing, things like what is true and what is possible are also according to what (is known to the individual observer, or the culture they're embedded in) currently exists.
- rrgok 3y ago
  So, if I suddenly have amnesia and don't remember the past 99 years, will my time slow down? It is just a thought experiment...
  - ji_zai 3y ago
    If you don't remember the past, slow down relative to what?
    - rrgok 3y ago
dapearce 3y ago
I was always told it's because as you age a year becomes a smaller portion of your life. When you are 35 a year is 1/35th of your life, compared to 1/5th as a 5 year old.
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  I’m not sure you’re optimizing correctly here…
- arethuza 3y ago
  That sounds like Dunbar in Catch-22: "Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years."
- pjerem 3y ago
  I’m not sure that a long and painful life is preferable to shorter and happier life but if that’s your thing …
- GuB-42 3y ago
  That's not my experience. Intense pain makes time feel longer, but it is the same for all intense experiences. And I am not even sure about that, endorphines can make time fly. And when I consider memories, pleasurable events tend to take more time in my mind, pain tend to get erased more than pleasure. For example, I don't remember much about sick days, though obviously uncomfortable, they don't take much subjective time, thankfully.
  - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    Memories that are recorded have an initial depth and upon retrieving the memory, the depth gets deeper. Trivial events, with little reason to recall, are forgotten. This explains how trauma and ptsd can create terrible feedback loops. Having lived through a somewhat damaging childhood I have chosen to not recall the unpleasant memories and have forgotten them.
stared 3y ago
There is already a body of research on the perception of time as a function of age, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_a.... It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.) In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)
- cchi_co 3y ago
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- cruano 3y ago
  My anecdata is that my late-twenties felt way slower than my early-twenties, mostly because I switched from a 9-5 office job to a remote job that allowed me to slow travel. I spent a month in Rome and I remember most days and definitely remember all weekends, but I would have to really dig deep for a memory from 2019.
- dakial1 3y ago
  Yes, and one thing you can do is doing something/everything different everyday, but the downside of this is that you'll get fatigue out of keeping your brain on alert all the time. I observed this with people traveling, I used to call travel cognitive impairment, as usually functional human beings (like my close relatives) suddenly get very lost and helpless during travel (specially at airports). I then realized that this was because this was a unusual experience for them (once every year) and this would overload them with things out of their routing (even if they traveled before). That didnt happen to me (yet) because I was traveling a lot for work, so this was a routine for my brain.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    I am travelling right now, freeform exploration of another country is full of novelty. It feels like I have been here for a month but it has only been two weeks. The downside is I am exhausted. I also couldn't imagine doing any of my work while travelling even if I had a computer with me. There is downtime enough to do some, but I don't think I'd have the capacity to engage with it. I think advanced abstract thinking relies on a bit of cognitive room being created by routine. Perhaps that is at the consequence of the routine moments disappearing into a void of compressed time.
Apreche 3y ago
This is one of those things that seems true, but is it? They’ve presented no evidence whatsoever. Even the question itself carries with it an assumption. Does time seem to pass faster as we age? I bet you could find some people for whom it does not.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I definitely feel it. I'm sure some people do not, and they are lucky. My recent perception has been distorted by the pandemic years and resulting working-from-home. WFH created a monotony I never realized was possible. Time had sped up, in general, though some days (especially Mondays) drag on forever...
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  yeah im 31 and i don't feel it. I do however, remember being 22 and just marvelling that its been 5 years since (an event) at high school.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  What are you arguing against? This is an experiential thing. Or phenomenological. Evidence? This is just something that people often report. No one cares if there are counter-examples. That doesn’t make it less true for those that experience it.
nathias 3y ago
it's just simple math, when you're 1 year old 1 year is the totality of your experience, when you're 2 years, it's half, etc.
mikedelfino 3y ago
Nice hypothesis. I've always thought that it had to do with the percentage of life already spent. When you're a teen, an afternoon counts as 0,004% of your whole life thus far. In your mid 30's, it gets down to 0,001%. So to me it's only fair that it feels to pass four times faster now. But this is just a random thought.
- 4RealFreedom 3y ago
  This is what I've always thought - time is relative to how long you've lived.
- zoky 3y ago
  100% this. The older you get, the shorter a minute or an hour seems to be. When I was 12, an hour was an interminably long amount of time to spend in a classroom. Now that I’m 42, it’s barely long enough to take a decent nap. Life is cruel that way. Can hardly wait for how quickly it passes when I’m in my 70s or 80s…
jvanderbot 3y ago
I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc. For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there's so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years. Novelty and so on may help to "slow" time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine. (and I'm horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps) We're at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It's helped me keep the habit up. https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak: # list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days # get years and day range from args echo "### $years years ago" for i in `seq -w -$days $days` do olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d` longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y` echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)" cat $olddate.md done
- smm11 3y ago
  I've been using OneDrive for more than ten years for much the same purpose. Journal folders by year filled with weekly files since 2010, and accessible from any computer, tablet, phone, whatever. And in a folder I can download easily with TXT content. I'm at the point where everything is a dumb terminal again.
- paraschopra 3y ago
  It's great to hear journaling helps you reflect on actual passed time. For me, I never get around to revisiting old entries regularly. How do you motivate yourself to do so?
  - 3y ago
justanotherjoe 3y ago
it might be because schools are just more interesting than adult existence. Everyone comes from all walks of life and all you seem to think is to have fun (and other wholesome things)
anonzzzies 3y ago
I have been able to avoid this by just immediately switching to something else when I feel things are getting too comfy. Doing things that are not comfortable seem to stretch time for me. It works so well that for me (at 50) time is moving incredibly slowly and I like it that way.
- paraschopra 3y ago
  I also do the same. Spent a bunch of time scaling a B2B company, and now I'm doing a consumer app intentionally for an intentionally different challenge.
Shawnecy 3y ago
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls it 'Zenosyne' [0], or the sense that time keeps going faster. I quite like it and have found myself coming back to rewatch it every couple years. [0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4
hiddencost 3y ago
LSD can put you in a childlike state, increasing neuroplasticity.
randomdata 3y ago
Watching my children, they appear to have more time. I expect it is not so much that time seems to pass faster, but that as you age you move into loftier goals that take longer.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
1. Time is, literally, relative. We have nothing to compare things to when we are young, so everything takes for-ev-eeeeer. 2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar. Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  (1) is nonsense (and literally not needed to explain this phenomenon) but (2) is true.
velcrovan 3y ago
I think this blog post of mine from 2007 gives a better (or at least more succinct) answer to this question: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  That’s just some made up math-as-psychology that makes sense to nerds for some reason. Just conflating two completely different concepts. Any explanation that doesn’t say anything about the mind is just baloney. Time here is an experiential phenomenon. It’s not fractions. Insert your pet theory in a context where adults have the same mindset as children and retain memories perfectly and have no reason to discard/compress memories them—you see that it’s totally irrelevant whether your life is 2/3 or 1/8 over. It has everything to do with how the mind works, not how numbers work. Bonus points for the “unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect”… which is very self-aware-useless.
naasking 3y ago
The explanation is probably simple in the end: children are mentally more present and mindful, and thus bored, and as adults we become increasingly distracted by higher order thoughts and projections and plans so we're considerably less mindful of the present.
dougmwne 3y ago
I’ve learned that the passage of time is extremely relative. My college years were extremely full of new experiences and they feel like ages. Once I started working, my life was very rote and consisted mainly of driving from home to work and back again. I worked a lot of hours and vacations and weekend trips were infrequent. Time flew by. Then I ditched settled life and started traveling year round with a couple of bases i spend more time in between traveling. I’ve learned that the change in environment keeps putting the mind back into a more neuroplastic state where we are more open to the experiences around us, can change our habits more easily and just generally turn off autopilot for awhile. I’ve been doing this for about 9 years. It’s been like a century. I feel like a very different person then when I started. I have some friends who still live in the same city at the same job that I left originally and it absolutely blows my mind that they stood still while it feels like I went to Mars and back.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  Yeah I can't believe more people don't just travel for a decade.
  - rcbdev 3y ago
    It's not as unreasonable as you think - even in lower income / high tax burden countries like Austria an avg. net salary is enough to keep on travelling to all kinds of places. I know people who work for the state government who keep appearing in India, Thailand, Brazil etc. when we're in meetings - usually they're billed as external consultants to avoid tax liability issues. The true crux is that most people don't actually want the digital nomad lifestyle, humans naturally seek out some form of stability.
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      Exactly this. But I disagree that settled is natural. Humans evolved in nomadic tribes that followed the herds. Stability is a social technology that was developed alongside agriculture. Stability feels unnatural to me and I get the itch after too many months in one place. My two bases are near family and I have developed friendships with other traveling people. I’ll meet up this weekend in Miami with a Swede that I met in Portugal and last saw in New York.
avgcorrection 3y ago
I think with these things it helps to reflect. If you reflect you can either glean the truth about it or make up some intuition that is instrumentally useful. I think a lot of use manage to reach some wisdom milestones completely independently by just reflecting. And if you are concerned about this feeling of time going by faster: being less of a tunnel-visioned adult who is mostly focused on the extrinsic can maybe counteract this feeling.
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kamaal 3y ago
Nah Actually we do have very little time, its just that the upswing and downswing have different feels to it. You might have noticed this even when you are driving for a vacation. Drive to the picnic spot feels like an eternity, drive back home feels quick. There are ~52 weeks a year. Which makes a week 2% of a year. That's already a fast enough tick. Weeks do go by fast. An year is like 10% of a decade. Once you are past the age of 40. You indeed have little time left. Human life is short if you are doing remotely well in life. It can be a suffering if you are not doing great.
jalk 3y ago
My dad (who is in his late seventies) told me that while years seems to pass faster and faster with age, the future is still as far away, as it has always been.
jmathai 3y ago
> Take on projects that you have no idea about. The idea of high correlation between predictability and time flying is interesting. I'm working on patenting an idea and have filed the provisional. This gives me exactly 1 year to file the full application. There's so many unknowns between now and then which has me very aware of time and actively wanting to slow it down. I'm not certain it always applies though. I've definitely had periods of high unpredictability where I enjoyed what I was doing and it didn't seem to go by slow at all.
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whoomp12341 3y ago
I assumed it was just short term memory loss perceived as a framerate
olav 3y ago
I wonder if the way the author describes it, ie. new memories are just diffs against older experiences, is scientifically grounded. I came up with another explanation: My thought processes have slowed, so the world has sped up, relative to myself. Is there scientific evidence for either explanation?
standardUser 3y ago
I try to balance my life between new and exciting experiences and more routine and mundane experiences. The routine and mundane are important. They are how I maintain my important relationships and pay the bills. But when it all becomes routine, time will fly by regardless of age (at least for adults). But my sense of time reliably slows to a crawl if I have enough new stimulus. And the older I have gotten (40's currently) the more I have gone out of my way to purposefully generate experiences that slows things down. I lived abroad for 2 months a few years back and it felt like 6 months. I moved states not long after and once again, massive slowdown. That first year in a new city felt like three. New relationships can do the same thing. As can new jobs or, even more so, a career change. And let's not forget drugs. But those are all things a person can completely avoid if they don't make a conscious effort not to. My default for many years was to sit snuggly at a boring job, travel only intermittently and otherwise immerse myself in repetitive media. I refer to those as the lost years (mid-to-late 20's).
tacone 3y ago
I have a memory from my childhood that still makes me smile. At six years old I have been told that old people tend do sleep less. So I went to my father and asked: "Daddy, why do old people sleep so little?" He looked at me and said: "Because in a way they always sleep".
gnatman 3y ago
"My grandfather used to say: 'Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride.'" - Franz Kafka, The Next Village
irrational 3y ago
I wonder if people who daily reflect on their day and write in a journal experience time passing more slowly? I’ve heard that time seems to pass faster because it is such a smaller percentage of our life. For a 2 year old, 1 year is 50% of their life. For a 100 year old, 1 year is 1% of their life.
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xenodium 3y ago
If anyone’s keen to journal on iOS, I’m looking for beta testers! No login, social, tracking, etc. Saves to plain text. https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-plain-text https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl...
throw0101c 3y ago
See also Greek chronos versus kairos: > It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time,[2] kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos > The ancient Greeks recognized the difference between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception
adawg4 3y ago
The vsauce video on time reminds me of this thread
nutate 3y ago
My thought has always been that the ratio of lifetime to any given sublifetime unit of time is always increasing, leading to a change in relative experience. But if you focus on the fact that a second is constant, you always have the same amount of time right now.
bradley13 3y ago
I think it is much simpler. When you are 4 years old, a year us a quarter of your life. When you ate 40, it is a mere 2.5%. Comparatively, that difference is huge: a year is far more significant to the child than to the adult.
- smokel 3y ago
  This sounds like a reasonable argument, but I don't think it is. A day for a 4 year old still takes the same 24 hours as a day for a 40 year old. The argument presupposes that you experience the length of an event relative to the sum length of all experiences you've lived through. That seems pretty much related to the premise of the article we are discussing. So it's not much simpler.
bachmeier 3y ago
I don't agree that it does. Something I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it feels like time is passing more slowly. My late 30s is when time felt like it passed the fastest. On the other hand, if you're talking about "that happened two years ago, but it feels like it was yesterday" I agree. I don't think that's what the post is talking about.
- smokel 3y ago
  You might be an interesting specimen for scientific research. What food do you eat? Do you travel the world year round? Do you moisturize? Seriously, I'd probably give a year of my life to experience it being two years longer.
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    When my kid was young, it felt like time was evaporating. Days would fly by without any possibility of doing the things I needed to do, much less do the things I wanted to do. My life was defined by my time shortages. That's no longer the case. Not that I'm less busy (this is the busiest I've ever been) but I seem to have things better under control. So I think it's more about being better at time management.
lumb63 3y ago
Yesterday I watched a video that described a two-dimensional grid where the x and y axes were “skill” and “challenge” respectively. A range surrounding y=x was the flow state. Below it was boredom (skills exceed demands) and above it was anxiety (demands exceed skills). Flow arises when our skills align to what we must do; not something easy, not something hard. The presenter also noted that amount of time in flow correlated with life satisfaction, and that it’s also when people do their best work, and time moves the fastest. That’s the sweet spot to be. Where life is challenging, so you aren’t bored, but not so challenging to where you are overwhelmed. It seems the author urges people to flip from the boredom side of the flow state to the anxiety side because both of those are where time feels like an eternity (which anyone who has been in either of those states can attest to). I think a better idea is to question if what the author is proposing, trying to make time feel slower, is a good idea. Personally, I think the exact opposite is the case; all the best moments I’ve had are ones that went by “too quick”, and we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Time going by slowly is likely a canary in the coal mine for something being wrong.
Ekaros 3y ago
I feel that as children your experience is lot more variable... Every year of school or even university is slightly different, but once you get to work life many years can mostly be same or at least weeks and months... On other hand I am sure there is some difference with perception of time when you get older and you will handle boredom better or can take something nap like just easier...
- glimshe 3y ago
  I think that's the reason of the trope "As days becomes months, and months becomes years". The days eventually become very much alike.
larve 3y ago
One thing I love about the speedup of time is that picking a compounding habit (say, doing something for 10 minutes each day) feels like having an almost instant pay-off. "Oh wow 3 years already passed" -> "Oh wow I got pretty good at this thing I picked up just yesterday" I picked up biking during the pandemic, and 3 years later I have legs of steel, 10k miles under my belt, and people know me as "the bike guy", when I think of myself as "ok this biking thing is kind of fun".
- Madmallard 3y ago
  It kinda sucks that you learn much slower when you’re older though. I’ve been practicing piano an hour or two a day for 7 months and I don’t really feel like I’ve improved at all. I was intermediate when I started and I am taking professional lessons. Mid 30s here.
  - cchi_co 3y ago
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  - boredemployee 3y ago
    learning curve of the piano is crazy. and if you stop playing you go back to zero really really fast
    - crossroadsguy 3y ago
      What instruments are relatively easier to play?
      - marktucker 3y ago
        I could recommend taiko (Japanese) drums as an adult hobby. You very quickly get off the ground in terms of making wonderful music together with a group.
      - boredemployee 3y ago
        sorry, in fact i think its hard to play any instrument, but my experience is with piano only. i studied hard for 18 months in my mid 30s and could play many pieces of Erik Satie and some other musicians.
nox101 3y ago
This is the part I found most interesting about the first few episodes of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" anime. The main character is an elf. In this world elves are rare so she hasn't see another in 100s of years. Time for her passes differently than humans. She's got 1000s of years so for her, spending 10yrs in some library researching a hobby topic is not a big commitment. For her human friends it would be a large portion of their life. She commits to multi-year projects easily (10 years of a 5000 year life is 1/500th of your life vs a human where it's more like 1/8th). And, she watches her human friends pass away. Societies form and collapse. Etc...
beaugunderson 3y ago
Another explanation: https://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html https://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html
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Alifatisk 3y ago
You all should checkout https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time It explains and illustrates why time flies so well, love that site.
- xela79 3y ago
  yes awesome site! I remember this from when it was first published, very clearly explains why the passage of time changes during your lifetime, and also explains why some people search for new thrills around their midlife to try and get those extended experiences again, always trying something new, because just doing the things you were doing before is now perceived as boring.
rajeshp1986 3y ago
Modern society and work makes people have less free time to form memories. Certainly, people felt time is running fast even in older times but I doubt if time ran faster at the same rate for people from say 50s as much as it is for us today?
jenoer 3y ago
I think that the older you get, the less new milestones/events you have (that impress you and remember in detail). This results in having less moments to refer to when looking back in time, (skipping uneventful timespans). This makes things seem closer to the current time than they really are as everything in between is empty noise.
debo_ 3y ago
I had some very long periods of intense suffering over the last decade. After... a lot, I'm in a much better place now. I made some minor lifestyle changes to make things a bit easier on myself, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of my days are largely the same. However, life moves much more slowly now. When I get to the end of a week, Monday seems quite a long time ago. I'm not sure about the predictability thesis. The way I think about it is that I have no expectations from life anymore; I take what I can get, give what I can, and focus on one day at a time. I think this more than anything has contributed to a feeling of my life slowing way down.
locallost 3y ago
I always thought of it as each unit of time being relatively shorter in relation to your life on earth. A year is 20% of the time a 5-year old is aware of, but only 2% of a 50-year olds life. But the boredom argument is pretty strong. I remember vividly the time when I moved to another country and those first three months still feel like they lasted longer than the last three years.
s0teri0s 3y ago
It is a progression: year 1 = 100% of your life year 2 = 50% of your life year 3 = 33% of your life ... year 10 = 10% of your life ... year 50 = 2% of your life etc.
everybodyknows 3y ago
> Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth). Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
javier_e06 3y ago
My way to slow down time is using git to write a diary with every day is a commit. I try to be careful not fall on the fallacy that "I get it" and draw assumptions about things. If not, after your pass your 50s time turns into blurring mashup of deja-vu's and the feeling that you are Fred Flinstone rolling in my Flintmobile while the background scenery, the houses, the palm trees and buildings repeat every 3 seconds.
rstuart4133 3y ago
I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated. I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. All I can tell you is "they are sponges" is a common description. It blows me away they can learn how to recognise faces, walk, speak a language in the space of a few years. As a kid I recall getting bored very easily. I needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed my brain. As a young adult I recall a friend asking me to look up a telephone book to find the a persons address. I got back to the car and told them the address. "Oh", they said "I must have the spelling wrong, try ...". No problem, I remembered every name and address on the page I've just seen. But as I grew older, remembering stuff came less easily. Now at over 60, if I put in a situation where I'm forced to remember a while pile of new stuff I feel distinctly uncomfortable, whereas before I was better at it than most. And during all that time, the passage of time has sped up. Ergo, my theory is I gauge the amount of time that has passed between events X and Y by the number of memories accumulated in the period.
- Qem 3y ago
  > I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated. I had this same realization. In other words, our internal clock is not like a mechanical, or a quartz watch, with seconds flowing at a constant rate. It's more like a hourglass or a clepsydra, but instead of sand/water, the flow is of bits of information from the world into the brain. As in a hourglass, near the end the flow is weaker (learning is much slower as an adult than as a child), and the same amount of physical time corresponds to much less sand (subjective time).
m0llusk 3y ago
This sounds highly rational and also comes across to me as completely wrong. I have maintained a fairly tight circle of friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. One of the patterns that stands out very strongly is the high variability in the perception of time. Those who have settled into a routine such as a relationship that endures and work that remains highly similar even if the company and title change tend to experience this time flying by effect strongly. Others who have had major complications to deal with like relationships coming and going, medical problems, big changes to location, fundamental changes in work situation and so on end to have a critical time slowing effect. Coming to grips with big changes and getting settled again requires a lot of attention and work and does not allow for a relaxed grip on life events. Try getting mugged, dumped, fired, sick, and then moving somewhere unfamiliar and you might find this time passing faster effect disappears, if only until adjustments are made. This implies the whole effect may be about how humans must focus when pushed but then tend to zoom out and ease up when ongoing attempts to steady themselves are successful. Reminds me of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/).
user90131313 3y ago
No mention of energy? I think energy plays a big role because your movement and energy literally becomes less and less each year. At 80 you don't have much energy, forget about any other thing
davis 3y ago
We've known this for over a decade at least https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flie...
karaterobot 3y ago
It would be interesting to know when the subjective midpoint of your life is. I mean, if you lived to 80, and time seemed to speed up as you get older, is the subjective middle of your lifespan more like age 35, or more like age 25? I recognize it's impossible to answer this question from inside a life, but I have wondered it many times.
airocker 3y ago
According to this book: https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power-of-time-perception-jean-paul-zogby/1142895269 https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power... , it basically happens because the number of snapshots you encode per second goes down. Snapshots are visual cues that we encode. The best example is that if we are watching a fan start, after a certain speed, we cannot tell how many wings are there on the fan. We are not snapshotting fast enough. Younger people can probably tell the number of wings on a faster fan :). Various things slow down this snapshotting in our brain, and the best antidote is to get in the zone and do things with immense attention.
nerder92 3y ago
One very simple explanation I’ve read is that time perception (as time itself) is relative. Time goes slower when you are a child because your perception of time is relative to the totality of time you’ve experienced. So for instance, when you go from 1 to 2yrs old, it’s double the amount of your entire life, but from 80 to 81 it’s just a small fraction. Not sure if this has been proven or is even possible to prove.
- eep_social 3y ago
  On top of this, the totality of your experience also grows with time. To a four year old, many day-to-day experiences are fresh and new. By the time they’re thirty, there are far fewer such events on any given day.
- awb 3y ago
  That makes sense to me. Also, if you think about memory recall, it takes a second to recall a memory. So you have the ability to traverse time at a rate of (Your Current Age - Age of Your Earliest Memory) / 1 second So maybe it’s also the feeling that looking back in time feels faster (more time has elapsed relative to the speed of memory recall) as you get older.
- LorenDB 3y ago
  I also tend to view it this way.
- osmsucks 3y ago
  Came here to write the same thing :)
- themagician 3y ago
  “Life is short and life is long, but not in that order.” https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4 https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4
- bibliotekka 3y ago
  I thought I watched a Vsauce video that debunked this idea. Instead they suggested it was the fact that adults have fewer novel experiences than children. In other words, have lots of new experiences and time seems to extend. Something about the brain storing "same" in some kind of compressed time memory slot. Oh yeah, found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E
nerevarthelame 3y ago
This is a lot of speculation about the brain and how memories are recorded, by someone with no apparent training on the subject, and with no sources cited. Maybe they're right. But I'd prefer more reliable sources, which other commenters here have provided.
black_13 3y ago
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hosh 3y ago
In my early and mid 30s, as a result of visionary experiences, my experience of "lived time" changed. In general, moments lasts a lot longer. This doesn't really have to do with the brain becoming a better prediction machine so much as how mindful and present you are in the moment. While it is true that doing the same things over and over creates habits (ruts) of the mind, the practice of mindfulness reverses this. These days (in my early 40s), when I spar with swords, time stretches out by a lot. Especially during tournaments.
NoPicklez 3y ago
I remember discussing this in Psychology about a decade ago. Supposedly it's quite a bit to do with routine and not having new experiences.
iwontberude 3y ago
Seems like time goes the same for me. I don’t ever do the same thing each day, I don’t keep a routine or show up consistently and sort of follow my interests and they change constantly. This makes me utterly incompatible with most people but I kind of like this more, I want to enjoy life as it comes. I am in no rush.
Olumde 3y ago
I wonder if prisoners feel the same way. I think time seems to pass by quickly because as we get older we get busier with family, work, children, spouse, friends, a few side interests etc.
seydor 3y ago
Does it? Not if you switch away from the 9-5 routine. Daily work makes life feel fast, as do routines of all kinds, family kids etc. Switching to on-demand employment leaves a ton of opportunities for our attention to drift away and travel. It s true that novelty is rewarding. When mice are placed in a novel environment, their neurons become more excitable, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with subjective perception of time
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simonblack 3y ago
A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen. You think that's fast? Just wait till you're over 75!
BenFranklin100 3y ago
My advice: Start a company. Every day is a new adventure.
archsurface 3y ago
I came here to see what the 60 somethings have to say - the comments are from 30 somethings. The 30 somethings feeling old are in for a ride.
erererereere 3y ago
This post is extremely speculative and the author stretches the CS analogies way, way too far, but the gist is reasonably accurate. Time does pass faster on average as you get older because our brain doesn't bother to record repeated experiences. But guess what? That means that all you have to do to make time pass more slowly is bring more novelty into your life. I can say from personal experience that the year I spent living abroad seemed to go on forever. Every single day was filled with new experiences. There was a huge amount of continuous novelty and learning and growth. It was really nice. I need to move to a new country again.
munchler 3y ago
I think long periods of time are experienced logarithmically, with a base of around 2. So the period from, say, 10 to 20 years is comparable to the period from 20 to 40 years, and then 40 to 80 years. The seasons really start to zoom by at my age. (I'm in my late 50's.)
novia 3y ago
Recently I've been listening to the song "Time and I" by Jukebox the Ghost on this very topic.
RunawayGalaxy 3y ago
The concept of tolerance is most often used in the context of drugs, but it applies here too.
rayrey 3y ago
My father in law opined that life is a toilet paper roll. It spins faster towards the end
WuxiFingerHold 3y ago
This touches the personal topic of life choices and I find many posts here inspiring. I'm striving for not causing harm to others, avoiding things that lead to ill mental states like compulsion or anger, seeking things that lead to healthy mental states like calmness and focus. This seems to be a boring life from the outside, but doesn't feel like that to me. Maybe because I've got enough challenges. Time perception is not important to me.
jerrygoyal 3y ago
Dopamine also plays a role in the perception of time. Basically, high dopamine gives more processing power it means you get higher frame rates so time feels slower. similarly, low dopamine leads to time flying quickly. Moreover, the speed at which we blink eyes also affects the perception of time. (Learned this in one huberman podcast)
ddmf 3y ago
I always thought it was because it's a ratio of how long we've been here, at 10 a year is an eternity, it's 10% of your life - you could do so much during the 6 weeks of summer holiday. At 48 a year is just over 2% of your life, it's so fast almost supersonic.

419 points by paraschopra 3y ago

ajuc 3y ago

It's also the reason going back feels much faster despite the fact you're exhausted and probably walking/biking slower. You know the route so you switch to automatic more often and remember less.

richrichie 3y ago

Let T be the life span and t be the age. Let s = T - t. Remark 1: dt / s is small when t is small. Remark 2: Perception of s (call it p) is in reality a function of t. For small t, p(t) is perceived to be near infinity. For t > 40, p(t) rapidly decays to a small number.

Jacquepagan080 3y ago

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a0-prw 3y ago

Each year as we age, in relation to the time we have already lived, is a smaller and smaller fraction.

cchi_co 3y ago

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rjh29 3y ago

I'm also obsessed with this and have mostly countered it so far by moving house every few years, living and studying in several countries and trying new things. The negative being that I don't have any stability.

plmpsu 3y ago
To each his own. I've been enjoying getting familiar with the sun's location and cyclic changes of nature as the seasons and years pass where I live.
- rjh29 3y ago
  You can do that for a year or two, then move on to somewhere else.
al_borland 3y ago
I did this for quite a while. I am able to tell roughly when something happened based on where I was living at the time. I’ve moved 26 times and finally got sick of it. While I’m not sure how I’ll tell time now, I’ll figure something out. A lot of people use their kids for this. “Bobby was in 2nd grade, must have been 2014.”
ourmandave 3y ago
How do you deal with no stability? Do you have any sort of home base you can always go back to?
- urda 3y ago
  You learn to live with the instability. You come to terms with how short and limited life and life's experiences can be. It can be a lonely life, but it by far can be the most rewarding. I look back from having diverged from a world where I never escaped my home-town gravity well and I'm glad I took the leap. It made me a deeper, richer, and more interesting individual.
- rjh29 3y ago
  At the moment I got a visa that allows me to stay for 15 months, which provides a good deal of stability. I think a few years is probably the sweet spot before moving on.

dartos 3y ago

I think mediation and gratefulness is a good way around this too. If your take explicit time to recognize and examine the world around you, even in your backyard, time seems to stretch and you notice and retain more. I’m lucky enough to have lots of different colored birds show up in my backyard, so sometimes I sit out there and wait for them. It’s not exciting, but every time I see one it’s a new memory and those new memories make time feel more.

bwestergard 3y ago
If you're not already aware, Cornell offers a bunch if resources to enhance your birding experience. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/ https://www.allaboutbirds.org/
- radlad 3y ago
  I love Cornell's Merlin app for sound-based identification of birds.
- dartos 3y ago
  I know literally nothing about birds lol. There are just some pretty ones around me.
alsetmusic 3y ago
I heard someone on a podcast talk about the compression of new experiences during the pan / lockdown as a reason why time became meaningless. That seemed right, to me. I can hardly believe that it's been almost four years since that started. > If you have a stable job, you can pretty much mentally time travel a full year and find your days to be similar. > But if I ask you to imagine doing a PhD in Sanskrit at a foreign university, you would have no idea what your days are going to look like. This also feels right, to me. But also, I spent nine months learning new languages to try to build a service to launch with a friend and that didn't turn into a long memory of effort. In fact, I recall it as sandwiched. It was a blip. I think the real key is new experiences, not the aspect of study. Maybe that's the foreign university aspect: what happens when you aren't at study. The people you meet, the places you go, etc.

raspyberr 3y ago

I've always rationalised it as: When you're one years old, 1 year is your whole life. When you're 100 years old, 1 year is 1/100th of your life.

alberth 3y ago
This plus … Time as you perceive it, is related to new memories you make. When you’re young, everything is a new experience which in turn becomes a new memory. When your 100, to use your example, you’ve done everything there is to do. So no new memories & days blur together.
planb 3y ago
That's the explanation I came up with for myself, too. As humans, we rate most things not in absolute but in relative terms to what we are used to (see studies about happiness or how rich people don't realise how wealthy they are when they don't leave their bubble). Why should we perceive time differently than in comparison to our timescale?
- mistermann 3y ago
  It even distorts logical processing, things like what is true and what is possible are also according to what (is known to the individual observer, or the culture they're embedded in) currently exists.
rrgok 3y ago
So, if I suddenly have amnesia and don't remember the past 99 years, will my time slow down? It is just a thought experiment...
- ji_zai 3y ago
  If you don't remember the past, slow down relative to what?
  - rrgok 3y ago

dapearce 3y ago

I was always told it's because as you age a year becomes a smaller portion of your life. When you are 35 a year is 1/35th of your life, compared to 1/5th as a 5 year old.

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.

nemo44x 3y ago
I’m not sure you’re optimizing correctly here…
arethuza 3y ago
That sounds like Dunbar in Catch-22: "Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years."
pjerem 3y ago
I’m not sure that a long and painful life is preferable to shorter and happier life but if that’s your thing …
GuB-42 3y ago
That's not my experience. Intense pain makes time feel longer, but it is the same for all intense experiences. And I am not even sure about that, endorphines can make time fly. And when I consider memories, pleasurable events tend to take more time in my mind, pain tend to get erased more than pleasure. For example, I don't remember much about sick days, though obviously uncomfortable, they don't take much subjective time, thankfully.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  Memories that are recorded have an initial depth and upon retrieving the memory, the depth gets deeper. Trivial events, with little reason to recall, are forgotten. This explains how trauma and ptsd can create terrible feedback loops. Having lived through a somewhat damaging childhood I have chosen to not recall the unpleasant memories and have forgotten them.

stared 3y ago

There is already a body of research on the perception of time as a function of age, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_a.... It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.) In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)

cchi_co 3y ago
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cruano 3y ago
My anecdata is that my late-twenties felt way slower than my early-twenties, mostly because I switched from a 9-5 office job to a remote job that allowed me to slow travel. I spent a month in Rome and I remember most days and definitely remember all weekends, but I would have to really dig deep for a memory from 2019.
dakial1 3y ago
Yes, and one thing you can do is doing something/everything different everyday, but the downside of this is that you'll get fatigue out of keeping your brain on alert all the time. I observed this with people traveling, I used to call travel cognitive impairment, as usually functional human beings (like my close relatives) suddenly get very lost and helpless during travel (specially at airports). I then realized that this was because this was a unusual experience for them (once every year) and this would overload them with things out of their routing (even if they traveled before). That didnt happen to me (yet) because I was traveling a lot for work, so this was a routine for my brain.
- ehnto 3y ago
  I am travelling right now, freeform exploration of another country is full of novelty. It feels like I have been here for a month but it has only been two weeks. The downside is I am exhausted. I also couldn't imagine doing any of my work while travelling even if I had a computer with me. There is downtime enough to do some, but I don't think I'd have the capacity to engage with it. I think advanced abstract thinking relies on a bit of cognitive room being created by routine. Perhaps that is at the consequence of the routine moments disappearing into a void of compressed time.

Apreche 3y ago

This is one of those things that seems true, but is it? They’ve presented no evidence whatsoever. Even the question itself carries with it an assumption. Does time seem to pass faster as we age? I bet you could find some people for whom it does not.

icedchai 3y ago
I definitely feel it. I'm sure some people do not, and they are lucky. My recent perception has been distorted by the pandemic years and resulting working-from-home. WFH created a monotony I never realized was possible. Time had sped up, in general, though some days (especially Mondays) drag on forever...
justanotherjoe 3y ago
yeah im 31 and i don't feel it. I do however, remember being 22 and just marvelling that its been 5 years since (an event) at high school.
avgcorrection 3y ago
What are you arguing against? This is an experiential thing. Or phenomenological. Evidence? This is just something that people often report. No one cares if there are counter-examples. That doesn’t make it less true for those that experience it.

nathias 3y ago

it's just simple math, when you're 1 year old 1 year is the totality of your experience, when you're 2 years, it's half, etc.

mikedelfino 3y ago

Nice hypothesis. I've always thought that it had to do with the percentage of life already spent. When you're a teen, an afternoon counts as 0,004% of your whole life thus far. In your mid 30's, it gets down to 0,001%. So to me it's only fair that it feels to pass four times faster now. But this is just a random thought.

4RealFreedom 3y ago
This is what I've always thought - time is relative to how long you've lived.
zoky 3y ago
100% this. The older you get, the shorter a minute or an hour seems to be. When I was 12, an hour was an interminably long amount of time to spend in a classroom. Now that I’m 42, it’s barely long enough to take a decent nap. Life is cruel that way. Can hardly wait for how quickly it passes when I’m in my 70s or 80s…

jvanderbot 3y ago

I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc. For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there's so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years. Novelty and so on may help to "slow" time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine. (and I'm horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps) We're at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It's helped me keep the habit up. https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak: # list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days # get years and day range from args echo "### $years years ago" for i in `seq -w -$days $days` do olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d` longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y` echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)" cat $olddate.md done

smm11 3y ago
I've been using OneDrive for more than ten years for much the same purpose. Journal folders by year filled with weekly files since 2010, and accessible from any computer, tablet, phone, whatever. And in a folder I can download easily with TXT content. I'm at the point where everything is a dumb terminal again.
paraschopra 3y ago
It's great to hear journaling helps you reflect on actual passed time. For me, I never get around to revisiting old entries regularly. How do you motivate yourself to do so?
- 3y ago

justanotherjoe 3y ago

it might be because schools are just more interesting than adult existence. Everyone comes from all walks of life and all you seem to think is to have fun (and other wholesome things)

anonzzzies 3y ago

I have been able to avoid this by just immediately switching to something else when I feel things are getting too comfy. Doing things that are not comfortable seem to stretch time for me. It works so well that for me (at 50) time is moving incredibly slowly and I like it that way.

paraschopra 3y ago
I also do the same. Spent a bunch of time scaling a B2B company, and now I'm doing a consumer app intentionally for an intentionally different challenge.

Shawnecy 3y ago

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls it 'Zenosyne' [0], or the sense that time keeps going faster. I quite like it and have found myself coming back to rewatch it every couple years. [0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4

hiddencost 3y ago

LSD can put you in a childlike state, increasing neuroplasticity.

randomdata 3y ago

Watching my children, they appear to have more time. I expect it is not so much that time seems to pass faster, but that as you age you move into loftier goals that take longer.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

1. Time is, literally, relative. We have nothing to compare things to when we are young, so everything takes for-ev-eeeeer. 2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar. Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.

avgcorrection 3y ago
(1) is nonsense (and literally not needed to explain this phenomenon) but (2) is true.

velcrovan 3y ago

I think this blog post of mine from 2007 gives a better (or at least more succinct) answer to this question: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life

avgcorrection 3y ago
That’s just some made up math-as-psychology that makes sense to nerds for some reason. Just conflating two completely different concepts. Any explanation that doesn’t say anything about the mind is just baloney. Time here is an experiential phenomenon. It’s not fractions. Insert your pet theory in a context where adults have the same mindset as children and retain memories perfectly and have no reason to discard/compress memories them—you see that it’s totally irrelevant whether your life is 2/3 or 1/8 over. It has everything to do with how the mind works, not how numbers work. Bonus points for the “unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect”… which is very self-aware-useless.

naasking 3y ago

The explanation is probably simple in the end: children are mentally more present and mindful, and thus bored, and as adults we become increasingly distracted by higher order thoughts and projections and plans so we're considerably less mindful of the present.

dougmwne 3y ago

I’ve learned that the passage of time is extremely relative. My college years were extremely full of new experiences and they feel like ages. Once I started working, my life was very rote and consisted mainly of driving from home to work and back again. I worked a lot of hours and vacations and weekend trips were infrequent. Time flew by. Then I ditched settled life and started traveling year round with a couple of bases i spend more time in between traveling. I’ve learned that the change in environment keeps putting the mind back into a more neuroplastic state where we are more open to the experiences around us, can change our habits more easily and just generally turn off autopilot for awhile. I’ve been doing this for about 9 years. It’s been like a century. I feel like a very different person then when I started. I have some friends who still live in the same city at the same job that I left originally and it absolutely blows my mind that they stood still while it feels like I went to Mars and back.

bongodongobob 3y ago
Yeah I can't believe more people don't just travel for a decade.
- rcbdev 3y ago
  It's not as unreasonable as you think - even in lower income / high tax burden countries like Austria an avg. net salary is enough to keep on travelling to all kinds of places. I know people who work for the state government who keep appearing in India, Thailand, Brazil etc. when we're in meetings - usually they're billed as external consultants to avoid tax liability issues. The true crux is that most people don't actually want the digital nomad lifestyle, humans naturally seek out some form of stability.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Exactly this. But I disagree that settled is natural. Humans evolved in nomadic tribes that followed the herds. Stability is a social technology that was developed alongside agriculture. Stability feels unnatural to me and I get the itch after too many months in one place. My two bases are near family and I have developed friendships with other traveling people. I’ll meet up this weekend in Miami with a Swede that I met in Portugal and last saw in New York.

avgcorrection 3y ago

I think with these things it helps to reflect. If you reflect you can either glean the truth about it or make up some intuition that is instrumentally useful. I think a lot of use manage to reach some wisdom milestones completely independently by just reflecting. And if you are concerned about this feeling of time going by faster: being less of a tunnel-visioned adult who is mostly focused on the extrinsic can maybe counteract this feeling.

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kamaal 3y ago

Nah Actually we do have very little time, its just that the upswing and downswing have different feels to it. You might have noticed this even when you are driving for a vacation. Drive to the picnic spot feels like an eternity, drive back home feels quick. There are ~52 weeks a year. Which makes a week 2% of a year. That's already a fast enough tick. Weeks do go by fast. An year is like 10% of a decade. Once you are past the age of 40. You indeed have little time left. Human life is short if you are doing remotely well in life. It can be a suffering if you are not doing great.

jalk 3y ago

My dad (who is in his late seventies) told me that while years seems to pass faster and faster with age, the future is still as far away, as it has always been.

jmathai 3y ago

> Take on projects that you have no idea about. The idea of high correlation between predictability and time flying is interesting. I'm working on patenting an idea and have filed the provisional. This gives me exactly 1 year to file the full application. There's so many unknowns between now and then which has me very aware of time and actively wanting to slow it down. I'm not certain it always applies though. I've definitely had periods of high unpredictability where I enjoyed what I was doing and it didn't seem to go by slow at all.

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whoomp12341 3y ago

I assumed it was just short term memory loss perceived as a framerate

olav 3y ago

I wonder if the way the author describes it, ie. new memories are just diffs against older experiences, is scientifically grounded. I came up with another explanation: My thought processes have slowed, so the world has sped up, relative to myself. Is there scientific evidence for either explanation?

standardUser 3y ago

I try to balance my life between new and exciting experiences and more routine and mundane experiences. The routine and mundane are important. They are how I maintain my important relationships and pay the bills. But when it all becomes routine, time will fly by regardless of age (at least for adults). But my sense of time reliably slows to a crawl if I have enough new stimulus. And the older I have gotten (40's currently) the more I have gone out of my way to purposefully generate experiences that slows things down. I lived abroad for 2 months a few years back and it felt like 6 months. I moved states not long after and once again, massive slowdown. That first year in a new city felt like three. New relationships can do the same thing. As can new jobs or, even more so, a career change. And let's not forget drugs. But those are all things a person can completely avoid if they don't make a conscious effort not to. My default for many years was to sit snuggly at a boring job, travel only intermittently and otherwise immerse myself in repetitive media. I refer to those as the lost years (mid-to-late 20's).

tacone 3y ago

I have a memory from my childhood that still makes me smile. At six years old I have been told that old people tend do sleep less. So I went to my father and asked: "Daddy, why do old people sleep so little?" He looked at me and said: "Because in a way they always sleep".

gnatman 3y ago

"My grandfather used to say: 'Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride.'" - Franz Kafka, The Next Village

irrational 3y ago

I wonder if people who daily reflect on their day and write in a journal experience time passing more slowly? I’ve heard that time seems to pass faster because it is such a smaller percentage of our life. For a 2 year old, 1 year is 50% of their life. For a 100 year old, 1 year is 1% of their life.

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xenodium 3y ago

If anyone’s keen to journal on iOS, I’m looking for beta testers! No login, social, tracking, etc. Saves to plain text. https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-plain-text https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl...

throw0101c 3y ago

See also Greek chronos versus kairos: > It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time,[2] kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos > The ancient Greeks recognized the difference between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception

adawg4 3y ago

The vsauce video on time reminds me of this thread

nutate 3y ago

My thought has always been that the ratio of lifetime to any given sublifetime unit of time is always increasing, leading to a change in relative experience. But if you focus on the fact that a second is constant, you always have the same amount of time right now.

bradley13 3y ago

I think it is much simpler. When you are 4 years old, a year us a quarter of your life. When you ate 40, it is a mere 2.5%. Comparatively, that difference is huge: a year is far more significant to the child than to the adult.

smokel 3y ago
This sounds like a reasonable argument, but I don't think it is. A day for a 4 year old still takes the same 24 hours as a day for a 40 year old. The argument presupposes that you experience the length of an event relative to the sum length of all experiences you've lived through. That seems pretty much related to the premise of the article we are discussing. So it's not much simpler.

bachmeier 3y ago

I don't agree that it does. Something I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it feels like time is passing more slowly. My late 30s is when time felt like it passed the fastest. On the other hand, if you're talking about "that happened two years ago, but it feels like it was yesterday" I agree. I don't think that's what the post is talking about.

smokel 3y ago
You might be an interesting specimen for scientific research. What food do you eat? Do you travel the world year round? Do you moisturize? Seriously, I'd probably give a year of my life to experience it being two years longer.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  When my kid was young, it felt like time was evaporating. Days would fly by without any possibility of doing the things I needed to do, much less do the things I wanted to do. My life was defined by my time shortages. That's no longer the case. Not that I'm less busy (this is the busiest I've ever been) but I seem to have things better under control. So I think it's more about being better at time management.

lumb63 3y ago

Yesterday I watched a video that described a two-dimensional grid where the x and y axes were “skill” and “challenge” respectively. A range surrounding y=x was the flow state. Below it was boredom (skills exceed demands) and above it was anxiety (demands exceed skills). Flow arises when our skills align to what we must do; not something easy, not something hard. The presenter also noted that amount of time in flow correlated with life satisfaction, and that it’s also when people do their best work, and time moves the fastest. That’s the sweet spot to be. Where life is challenging, so you aren’t bored, but not so challenging to where you are overwhelmed. It seems the author urges people to flip from the boredom side of the flow state to the anxiety side because both of those are where time feels like an eternity (which anyone who has been in either of those states can attest to). I think a better idea is to question if what the author is proposing, trying to make time feel slower, is a good idea. Personally, I think the exact opposite is the case; all the best moments I’ve had are ones that went by “too quick”, and we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Time going by slowly is likely a canary in the coal mine for something being wrong.

Ekaros 3y ago

I feel that as children your experience is lot more variable... Every year of school or even university is slightly different, but once you get to work life many years can mostly be same or at least weeks and months... On other hand I am sure there is some difference with perception of time when you get older and you will handle boredom better or can take something nap like just easier...

glimshe 3y ago
I think that's the reason of the trope "As days becomes months, and months becomes years". The days eventually become very much alike.

larve 3y ago

One thing I love about the speedup of time is that picking a compounding habit (say, doing something for 10 minutes each day) feels like having an almost instant pay-off. "Oh wow 3 years already passed" -> "Oh wow I got pretty good at this thing I picked up just yesterday" I picked up biking during the pandemic, and 3 years later I have legs of steel, 10k miles under my belt, and people know me as "the bike guy", when I think of myself as "ok this biking thing is kind of fun".

Madmallard 3y ago
It kinda sucks that you learn much slower when you’re older though. I’ve been practicing piano an hour or two a day for 7 months and I don’t really feel like I’ve improved at all. I was intermediate when I started and I am taking professional lessons. Mid 30s here.
- cchi_co 3y ago
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- boredemployee 3y ago
  learning curve of the piano is crazy. and if you stop playing you go back to zero really really fast
  - crossroadsguy 3y ago
    What instruments are relatively easier to play?
    - marktucker 3y ago
      I could recommend taiko (Japanese) drums as an adult hobby. You very quickly get off the ground in terms of making wonderful music together with a group.
    - boredemployee 3y ago
      sorry, in fact i think its hard to play any instrument, but my experience is with piano only. i studied hard for 18 months in my mid 30s and could play many pieces of Erik Satie and some other musicians.

nox101 3y ago

This is the part I found most interesting about the first few episodes of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" anime. The main character is an elf. In this world elves are rare so she hasn't see another in 100s of years. Time for her passes differently than humans. She's got 1000s of years so for her, spending 10yrs in some library researching a hobby topic is not a big commitment. For her human friends it would be a large portion of their life. She commits to multi-year projects easily (10 years of a 5000 year life is 1/500th of your life vs a human where it's more like 1/8th). And, she watches her human friends pass away. Societies form and collapse. Etc...

beaugunderson 3y ago

Another explanation: https://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html https://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html

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Alifatisk 3y ago

You all should checkout https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time It explains and illustrates why time flies so well, love that site.

xela79 3y ago
yes awesome site! I remember this from when it was first published, very clearly explains why the passage of time changes during your lifetime, and also explains why some people search for new thrills around their midlife to try and get those extended experiences again, always trying something new, because just doing the things you were doing before is now perceived as boring.

rajeshp1986 3y ago

Modern society and work makes people have less free time to form memories. Certainly, people felt time is running fast even in older times but I doubt if time ran faster at the same rate for people from say 50s as much as it is for us today?

jenoer 3y ago

I think that the older you get, the less new milestones/events you have (that impress you and remember in detail). This results in having less moments to refer to when looking back in time, (skipping uneventful timespans). This makes things seem closer to the current time than they really are as everything in between is empty noise.

debo_ 3y ago

I had some very long periods of intense suffering over the last decade. After... a lot, I'm in a much better place now. I made some minor lifestyle changes to make things a bit easier on myself, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of my days are largely the same. However, life moves much more slowly now. When I get to the end of a week, Monday seems quite a long time ago. I'm not sure about the predictability thesis. The way I think about it is that I have no expectations from life anymore; I take what I can get, give what I can, and focus on one day at a time. I think this more than anything has contributed to a feeling of my life slowing way down.

locallost 3y ago

I always thought of it as each unit of time being relatively shorter in relation to your life on earth. A year is 20% of the time a 5-year old is aware of, but only 2% of a 50-year olds life. But the boredom argument is pretty strong. I remember vividly the time when I moved to another country and those first three months still feel like they lasted longer than the last three years.

s0teri0s 3y ago

It is a progression: year 1 = 100% of your life year 2 = 50% of your life year 3 = 33% of your life ... year 10 = 10% of your life ... year 50 = 2% of your life etc.

everybodyknows 3y ago

> Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth). Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

javier_e06 3y ago

My way to slow down time is using git to write a diary with every day is a commit. I try to be careful not fall on the fallacy that "I get it" and draw assumptions about things. If not, after your pass your 50s time turns into blurring mashup of deja-vu's and the feeling that you are Fred Flinstone rolling in my Flintmobile while the background scenery, the houses, the palm trees and buildings repeat every 3 seconds.

rstuart4133 3y ago

I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated. I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. All I can tell you is "they are sponges" is a common description. It blows me away they can learn how to recognise faces, walk, speak a language in the space of a few years. As a kid I recall getting bored very easily. I needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed my brain. As a young adult I recall a friend asking me to look up a telephone book to find the a persons address. I got back to the car and told them the address. "Oh", they said "I must have the spelling wrong, try ...". No problem, I remembered every name and address on the page I've just seen. But as I grew older, remembering stuff came less easily. Now at over 60, if I put in a situation where I'm forced to remember a while pile of new stuff I feel distinctly uncomfortable, whereas before I was better at it than most. And during all that time, the passage of time has sped up. Ergo, my theory is I gauge the amount of time that has passed between events X and Y by the number of memories accumulated in the period.

Qem 3y ago
> I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated. I had this same realization. In other words, our internal clock is not like a mechanical, or a quartz watch, with seconds flowing at a constant rate. It's more like a hourglass or a clepsydra, but instead of sand/water, the flow is of bits of information from the world into the brain. As in a hourglass, near the end the flow is weaker (learning is much slower as an adult than as a child), and the same amount of physical time corresponds to much less sand (subjective time).

m0llusk 3y ago

This sounds highly rational and also comes across to me as completely wrong. I have maintained a fairly tight circle of friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. One of the patterns that stands out very strongly is the high variability in the perception of time. Those who have settled into a routine such as a relationship that endures and work that remains highly similar even if the company and title change tend to experience this time flying by effect strongly. Others who have had major complications to deal with like relationships coming and going, medical problems, big changes to location, fundamental changes in work situation and so on end to have a critical time slowing effect. Coming to grips with big changes and getting settled again requires a lot of attention and work and does not allow for a relaxed grip on life events. Try getting mugged, dumped, fired, sick, and then moving somewhere unfamiliar and you might find this time passing faster effect disappears, if only until adjustments are made. This implies the whole effect may be about how humans must focus when pushed but then tend to zoom out and ease up when ongoing attempts to steady themselves are successful. Reminds me of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/).

user90131313 3y ago

No mention of energy? I think energy plays a big role because your movement and energy literally becomes less and less each year. At 80 you don't have much energy, forget about any other thing

davis 3y ago

We've known this for over a decade at least https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flie...

karaterobot 3y ago

It would be interesting to know when the subjective midpoint of your life is. I mean, if you lived to 80, and time seemed to speed up as you get older, is the subjective middle of your lifespan more like age 35, or more like age 25? I recognize it's impossible to answer this question from inside a life, but I have wondered it many times.

airocker 3y ago

According to this book: https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power-of-time-perception-jean-paul-zogby/1142895269 https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power... , it basically happens because the number of snapshots you encode per second goes down. Snapshots are visual cues that we encode. The best example is that if we are watching a fan start, after a certain speed, we cannot tell how many wings are there on the fan. We are not snapshotting fast enough. Younger people can probably tell the number of wings on a faster fan :). Various things slow down this snapshotting in our brain, and the best antidote is to get in the zone and do things with immense attention.

nerder92 3y ago

One very simple explanation I’ve read is that time perception (as time itself) is relative. Time goes slower when you are a child because your perception of time is relative to the totality of time you’ve experienced. So for instance, when you go from 1 to 2yrs old, it’s double the amount of your entire life, but from 80 to 81 it’s just a small fraction. Not sure if this has been proven or is even possible to prove.

eep_social 3y ago
On top of this, the totality of your experience also grows with time. To a four year old, many day-to-day experiences are fresh and new. By the time they’re thirty, there are far fewer such events on any given day.
awb 3y ago
That makes sense to me. Also, if you think about memory recall, it takes a second to recall a memory. So you have the ability to traverse time at a rate of (Your Current Age - Age of Your Earliest Memory) / 1 second So maybe it’s also the feeling that looking back in time feels faster (more time has elapsed relative to the speed of memory recall) as you get older.
LorenDB 3y ago
I also tend to view it this way.
osmsucks 3y ago
Came here to write the same thing :)
themagician 3y ago
“Life is short and life is long, but not in that order.” https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4 https://youtu.be/SNgyEmYyQF4
bibliotekka 3y ago
I thought I watched a Vsauce video that debunked this idea. Instead they suggested it was the fact that adults have fewer novel experiences than children. In other words, have lots of new experiences and time seems to extend. Something about the brain storing "same" in some kind of compressed time memory slot. Oh yeah, found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E

nerevarthelame 3y ago

This is a lot of speculation about the brain and how memories are recorded, by someone with no apparent training on the subject, and with no sources cited. Maybe they're right. But I'd prefer more reliable sources, which other commenters here have provided.

black_13 3y ago

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hosh 3y ago

In my early and mid 30s, as a result of visionary experiences, my experience of "lived time" changed. In general, moments lasts a lot longer. This doesn't really have to do with the brain becoming a better prediction machine so much as how mindful and present you are in the moment. While it is true that doing the same things over and over creates habits (ruts) of the mind, the practice of mindfulness reverses this. These days (in my early 40s), when I spar with swords, time stretches out by a lot. Especially during tournaments.

NoPicklez 3y ago

I remember discussing this in Psychology about a decade ago. Supposedly it's quite a bit to do with routine and not having new experiences.

iwontberude 3y ago

Seems like time goes the same for me. I don’t ever do the same thing each day, I don’t keep a routine or show up consistently and sort of follow my interests and they change constantly. This makes me utterly incompatible with most people but I kind of like this more, I want to enjoy life as it comes. I am in no rush.

Olumde 3y ago

I wonder if prisoners feel the same way. I think time seems to pass by quickly because as we get older we get busier with family, work, children, spouse, friends, a few side interests etc.

seydor 3y ago

Does it? Not if you switch away from the 9-5 routine. Daily work makes life feel fast, as do routines of all kinds, family kids etc. Switching to on-demand employment leaves a ton of opportunities for our attention to drift away and travel. It s true that novelty is rewarding. When mice are placed in a novel environment, their neurons become more excitable, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with subjective perception of time

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simonblack 3y ago

A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen. You think that's fast? Just wait till you're over 75!

BenFranklin100 3y ago

My advice: Start a company. Every day is a new adventure.

archsurface 3y ago

I came here to see what the 60 somethings have to say - the comments are from 30 somethings. The 30 somethings feeling old are in for a ride.

erererereere 3y ago

This post is extremely speculative and the author stretches the CS analogies way, way too far, but the gist is reasonably accurate. Time does pass faster on average as you get older because our brain doesn't bother to record repeated experiences. But guess what? That means that all you have to do to make time pass more slowly is bring more novelty into your life. I can say from personal experience that the year I spent living abroad seemed to go on forever. Every single day was filled with new experiences. There was a huge amount of continuous novelty and learning and growth. It was really nice. I need to move to a new country again.

munchler 3y ago

I think long periods of time are experienced logarithmically, with a base of around 2. So the period from, say, 10 to 20 years is comparable to the period from 20 to 40 years, and then 40 to 80 years. The seasons really start to zoom by at my age. (I'm in my late 50's.)

novia 3y ago

Recently I've been listening to the song "Time and I" by Jukebox the Ghost on this very topic.

RunawayGalaxy 3y ago

The concept of tolerance is most often used in the context of drugs, but it applies here too.

rayrey 3y ago

My father in law opined that life is a toilet paper roll. It spins faster towards the end

WuxiFingerHold 3y ago

This touches the personal topic of life choices and I find many posts here inspiring. I'm striving for not causing harm to others, avoiding things that lead to ill mental states like compulsion or anger, seeking things that lead to healthy mental states like calmness and focus. This seems to be a boring life from the outside, but doesn't feel like that to me. Maybe because I've got enough challenges. Time perception is not important to me.

jerrygoyal 3y ago

Dopamine also plays a role in the perception of time. Basically, high dopamine gives more processing power it means you get higher frame rates so time feels slower. similarly, low dopamine leads to time flying quickly. Moreover, the speed at which we blink eyes also affects the perception of time. (Learned this in one huberman podcast)

ddmf 3y ago

I always thought it was because it's a ratio of how long we've been here, at 10 a year is an eternity, it's 10% of your life - you could do so much during the 6 weeks of summer holiday. At 48 a year is just over 2% of your life, it's so fast almost supersonic.