6 ms·

Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?

100 points by rantfoil 17y ago

henryl 17y ago
Could be that our memory just gets worse and worse. Kinda like how when you're knocked out for an operation, it feels like it goes by instantly.
- thras 17y ago
  Yes. Neural degeneration is my preferred explanation as well. Not the sort of thing people like to think about, though, so I doubt the theory will be too popular.
huhtenberg 17y ago
A simple answer they taught us in the high-school was that you always compare any time period to how long you have lived so far. The older you are the greater the divider.
- shorbaji 17y ago
  I agree. To elaborate:- A given duration of time pales away in comparison to one’s age as he/she grows older. For example, a 20-year-old sees a decade as half a lifetime. For the 100 year-old it counts as just 10%.
  - robotrout 17y ago
    I disagree. Just do this thought experiment. What seemed longer to you? Your senior year of high-school, or your freshman year of college? I bet the college was longer, even though by your logic, it should have been shorter.
    - huhtenberg 17y ago
      Frankly, I don't remember. They feel about the same. But I do have a memory of my parents leaving me with my grandma once and telling me they would be back in 3 hours. I was 3 or 4 at that time and I remember thinking how mind-bogglingly long these 3 hours felt when they said it.
      - drawkbox 17y ago
        Could be something with the ability to make choices and control of things. For instance when you are driving as a kid it is "are we there yet" but when you are in control you know how long it will take. Lots of waiting around for rides, parents, bells to ring when you are a kid.
    - FooBarWidget 17y ago
      College freshman year seems to be shorter to me.
    - shorbaji 17y ago
      Good point. I guess when one looks backwards - different years may seem to have passed quicker or slower than others. And, by the way, for me senior year high school seems the longer.
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      Senior year of high school felt longer for me. I buy the "you compare each experience to your previous experiences" argument. If new experiences happen at a constant rate, that works out to simple ratios of time, eg. senior year of high school was 1/17 of your life, freshman year of college was 1/18. But new experiences don't always happen at constant rates: some people open up much more in college than in high school. Hence it feels longer.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      For most people, those two years are so close together that the incremental fraction might not be perceptible even if the theory is correct.
      - raleec 17y ago
        Agreed. A better metric is a journey of constant distance, I've been making long journeys(4-6 or 8-10hrs) since early childhood. They definitely feel considerably shorter now. Of course, that doesn't clarify whether the discrepancy is because I've seen it before, or simply because of the ratio of distance/lifespan.
    - pkrumins 17y ago
      Both feel about the same.
- jonny_noog 17y ago
  This topic was never something that was discussed at any school I attended. But it is something that I have thought about independently and come to the same conclusion. My life up to the age of 5 seems subjectively longer to me in memory than my life from age 17 to now (I'm 30). I have always felt that at ages 0-5, I had a much shorter total life experience to compare the passage of time to, so it feels longer. I suspect that certain experiences occurring at certain periods also have a bearing. I find that some experiences tend to signal the beginning or end of different stages of my life and in some way I'm not fully able to describe, this seems to have some effect on my perception of time as I look back. But for me, there's definitely something in this comparing any time period to how long you have lived so far.
robotrout 17y ago
My view on this subject, which I've also devoted significant thought, is fairly close the authors, but without the whole anticipation/retrospection aspect. Our perception of the passage of time is, in my opinion, merely a summation of our memorable experiences. Our brain filters out some large percentage of it's input, to keep from being overloaded. It filters out what it's already familiar with. As a kid, you're not familiar with much. A yield sign is interesting, for example, and you notice it. Later, you see a yield sign, and can't even remember you saw it. If you travel to Australia, and the yield sign says "Give Way",you notice it again. That's why travel is so memorable. Your brain filters less when you're in unfamiliar territory filled with new perceptions. As we get older, unfamiliar things and new perceptions are fewer and fewer, so we're getting less input per unit time. Thus it seems that time is passing faster. My own philosophy, which I often forget to follow, is to optimize my perceived lifespan by doing as many unfamiliar things as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes I just want to get a hamburger instead.
- thorax 17y ago
  This is exactly what I feel, too, so I deleted my early comment because you summarize it so well. It feels like memory "diff" sizes more than anything else. As you get older fewer things change versus what you've experienced before, so fewer memories take root in that duration of time versus youth. And the memory samples are the tickrate by which we sense the passing of time. I think there may be a minor biological element to this, too. Because of this reduced need to remember new things rapidly, our brain optimizes in other areas and it can be more difficult to retain those things when you need to do so.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Yuk, why is everyone suggesting say-so theories without any suggestions for testing them? Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable. Instead, how about: In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds. This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable: For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group. For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.
andreyf 17y ago
Yuk, why doesn't it bother anyone that this is proposing a say-so theory without any suggestions for testing it? Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable. Instead, how about: In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds. This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable: For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group. For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
vinutheraj 17y ago
Hmm I can certainly buy this explanation. From the perspective of a child(me as a child) every day is nearly always an anticipation, because nearly everyday you have school and every morning I would wake up hoping its not a working day, only to be disappointed ~70% of the time. And every week I would be hoping for the weekend to arrive. I would keep dreaming about the time I will be allowed to drive, the first time I can taste alcohol, etc. Well looking back at all the weekends and my first drive and my first sip of alcohol, it all seems to have gone so fast :(!
drawkbox 17y ago
It might be the theory of relativity in action or even a scale thing (physically and logically). When you are a kid walking it takes twice as many steps. Just like when you learn something new you have to iterate over documentation and tests/result/feedback loops more, seemingly taking longer. I saw something that I can't find right now, about compounding exponential age or relative perception of age in that when you are 1-10, 10-30, and 30-60 these are all thirds of your life, seemingly. So 1-10, 10-30 and 30-60 all feel about the same length of time. Maybe there is some sort of memory filtering system that contributes to that.
- Flankk 17y ago
  The passage of time could be compared relative to your current lifespan, as you said. I don't see how the theory of relativity applies here. Also, if tasks take longer to accomplish wouldn't time appear to pass faster, not slower?
quizbiz 17y ago
I would be very interested in techniques used to make lengths time feel slower. Productive but stretched out. To what extent can we control our perception of time?
jonsen 17y ago
Well it just might be that time actually goes faster. I.e. the dimension of time accellerates.
- frossie 17y ago
  Eh? That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying that radioactive nuclei decay slower near old people?
  - jonsen 17y ago
    Yes, it's called gerontactivity ;) No, I meant if time as such speeds up causing all events to happen faster and faster. Young and old would experience the same "speed" of time and feel that "speed" accelerating with age.
lisper 17y ago
The definitive work on this subject was done by T.L. Freeman in 1983: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=932040&displaytype=linkview&lastnode_id=932040 http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=932040&displayty... Originally published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. :-)
grandalf 17y ago
My explanation is a bit different: I propose that what happens is that as people age they get better at avoiding boredom. Also, youth is boring compared with adulthood. Consider grades K-6 where most students have little choice of what subjects to learn about, are often in the care of a single teacher for most of the day, and whose assignments involve lots of repetition (math drills, handwriting drills, spelling drills). This is just plain boring, and so the mind works hard to avoid boredom by daydreaming, planning, etc... but still struggles to stave off boredom. As we age we get more choice about what we want to do, and life gets a bit more dramatic and less boring. I recall being bored during recess in grade school b/c I really didn't like tag or four square. Put a mixed gender group of adults together and who knows what might happen. So the increasing speed of the passage of time is a result both of life becoming less boring and also of the learned ability to minimize boredom. I read articles on my phone when waiting in line or when riding the muni. In general most of my work and leisure time is highly focused to avoid boredom and thus just flies by. Occasionally I have a reminder of how slowly time can pass -- such as when sitting in a waiting room with no reading material or poor quality reading material, etc.
4n00n 17y ago
The relative term is called tangential acceleration.
iterationx 17y ago
I think its because tasks take longer as an adult. For example to accomplish something as a child takes a few hours, homework for example. But to accomplish something significant as an adult could take months or years, like software. So I think we appear to have less time because we can only get 4 significant tasks accomplished a year instead of say 100.
jasonkester 17y ago
I copy/pasted this from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685811, so apologies if it sounds familiar: I notice a huge difference in how much "stuff" happens in my life when I'm traveling vs. when I have a job. Home life is measured in weeks and months, and when you ask somebody what's new, they'll say "not much" and maybe tell you what they did last weekend. Or the weekend before that. Road life is measured in hours. I'll find myself telling somebody a story of this amazing thing that happened earlier on my trip, possibly in another country, and suddenly realize that it was only 3 days ago. A month of travelling compresses so much life into such a short span that it's really strange checking in with friends back in the world that can account for that same month with a single sentence. There are times when life in the 'states can approximate that (the first weeks of a new startup for instance), but it's so easy to drop back into steady state where life is measured in calendar time.
kqr2 17y ago
My take: As we become older, we become more aware of our mortality, in other words, time is running out; therefore time seems to go by faster just like it does when you procrastinate right before a deadline. If we were immortal, I wonder if we would continue to perceive that times go by faster?
tybris 17y ago
Because our lives tend to become less interesting (as in: new experiences) over time.
helveticaman 17y ago
Thank goodness. Highschool and elementary are shitty times for nerds.

100 points by rantfoil 17y ago

Could be that our memory just gets worse and worse. Kinda like how when you're knocked out for an operation, it feels like it goes by instantly.

thras 17y ago
Yes. Neural degeneration is my preferred explanation as well. Not the sort of thing people like to think about, though, so I doubt the theory will be too popular.

huhtenberg 17y ago

A simple answer they taught us in the high-school was that you always compare any time period to how long you have lived so far. The older you are the greater the divider.

shorbaji 17y ago
I agree. To elaborate:- A given duration of time pales away in comparison to one’s age as he/she grows older. For example, a 20-year-old sees a decade as half a lifetime. For the 100 year-old it counts as just 10%.
- robotrout 17y ago
  I disagree. Just do this thought experiment. What seemed longer to you? Your senior year of high-school, or your freshman year of college? I bet the college was longer, even though by your logic, it should have been shorter.
  - huhtenberg 17y ago
    Frankly, I don't remember. They feel about the same. But I do have a memory of my parents leaving me with my grandma once and telling me they would be back in 3 hours. I was 3 or 4 at that time and I remember thinking how mind-bogglingly long these 3 hours felt when they said it.
    - drawkbox 17y ago
      Could be something with the ability to make choices and control of things. For instance when you are driving as a kid it is "are we there yet" but when you are in control you know how long it will take. Lots of waiting around for rides, parents, bells to ring when you are a kid.
  - FooBarWidget 17y ago
    College freshman year seems to be shorter to me.
  - shorbaji 17y ago
    Good point. I guess when one looks backwards - different years may seem to have passed quicker or slower than others. And, by the way, for me senior year high school seems the longer.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Senior year of high school felt longer for me. I buy the "you compare each experience to your previous experiences" argument. If new experiences happen at a constant rate, that works out to simple ratios of time, eg. senior year of high school was 1/17 of your life, freshman year of college was 1/18. But new experiences don't always happen at constant rates: some people open up much more in college than in high school. Hence it feels longer.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    For most people, those two years are so close together that the incremental fraction might not be perceptible even if the theory is correct.
    - raleec 17y ago
      Agreed. A better metric is a journey of constant distance, I've been making long journeys(4-6 or 8-10hrs) since early childhood. They definitely feel considerably shorter now. Of course, that doesn't clarify whether the discrepancy is because I've seen it before, or simply because of the ratio of distance/lifespan.
  - pkrumins 17y ago
    Both feel about the same.
jonny_noog 17y ago
This topic was never something that was discussed at any school I attended. But it is something that I have thought about independently and come to the same conclusion. My life up to the age of 5 seems subjectively longer to me in memory than my life from age 17 to now (I'm 30). I have always felt that at ages 0-5, I had a much shorter total life experience to compare the passage of time to, so it feels longer. I suspect that certain experiences occurring at certain periods also have a bearing. I find that some experiences tend to signal the beginning or end of different stages of my life and in some way I'm not fully able to describe, this seems to have some effect on my perception of time as I look back. But for me, there's definitely something in this comparing any time period to how long you have lived so far.

robotrout 17y ago

My view on this subject, which I've also devoted significant thought, is fairly close the authors, but without the whole anticipation/retrospection aspect. Our perception of the passage of time is, in my opinion, merely a summation of our memorable experiences. Our brain filters out some large percentage of it's input, to keep from being overloaded. It filters out what it's already familiar with. As a kid, you're not familiar with much. A yield sign is interesting, for example, and you notice it. Later, you see a yield sign, and can't even remember you saw it. If you travel to Australia, and the yield sign says "Give Way",you notice it again. That's why travel is so memorable. Your brain filters less when you're in unfamiliar territory filled with new perceptions. As we get older, unfamiliar things and new perceptions are fewer and fewer, so we're getting less input per unit time. Thus it seems that time is passing faster. My own philosophy, which I often forget to follow, is to optimize my perceived lifespan by doing as many unfamiliar things as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes I just want to get a hamburger instead.

thorax 17y ago
This is exactly what I feel, too, so I deleted my early comment because you summarize it so well. It feels like memory "diff" sizes more than anything else. As you get older fewer things change versus what you've experienced before, so fewer memories take root in that duration of time versus youth. And the memory samples are the tickrate by which we sense the passing of time. I think there may be a minor biological element to this, too. Because of this reduced need to remember new things rapidly, our brain optimizes in other areas and it can be more difficult to retain those things when you need to do so.
andreyf 17y ago
Yuk, why is everyone suggesting say-so theories without any suggestions for testing them? Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable. Instead, how about: In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds. This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable: For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group. For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.

andreyf 17y ago

Yuk, why doesn't it bother anyone that this is proposing a say-so theory without any suggestions for testing it? Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable. Instead, how about: In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds. This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable: For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group. For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

vinutheraj 17y ago

Hmm I can certainly buy this explanation. From the perspective of a child(me as a child) every day is nearly always an anticipation, because nearly everyday you have school and every morning I would wake up hoping its not a working day, only to be disappointed ~70% of the time. And every week I would be hoping for the weekend to arrive. I would keep dreaming about the time I will be allowed to drive, the first time I can taste alcohol, etc. Well looking back at all the weekends and my first drive and my first sip of alcohol, it all seems to have gone so fast :(!

drawkbox 17y ago

It might be the theory of relativity in action or even a scale thing (physically and logically). When you are a kid walking it takes twice as many steps. Just like when you learn something new you have to iterate over documentation and tests/result/feedback loops more, seemingly taking longer. I saw something that I can't find right now, about compounding exponential age or relative perception of age in that when you are 1-10, 10-30, and 30-60 these are all thirds of your life, seemingly. So 1-10, 10-30 and 30-60 all feel about the same length of time. Maybe there is some sort of memory filtering system that contributes to that.

Flankk 17y ago
The passage of time could be compared relative to your current lifespan, as you said. I don't see how the theory of relativity applies here. Also, if tasks take longer to accomplish wouldn't time appear to pass faster, not slower?

quizbiz 17y ago

I would be very interested in techniques used to make lengths time feel slower. Productive but stretched out. To what extent can we control our perception of time?

jonsen 17y ago

Well it just might be that time actually goes faster. I.e. the dimension of time accellerates.

frossie 17y ago
Eh? That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying that radioactive nuclei decay slower near old people?
- jonsen 17y ago
  Yes, it's called gerontactivity ;) No, I meant if time as such speeds up causing all events to happen faster and faster. Young and old would experience the same "speed" of time and feel that "speed" accelerating with age.

lisper 17y ago

The definitive work on this subject was done by T.L. Freeman in 1983: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=932040&displaytype=linkview&lastnode_id=932040 http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=932040&displayty... Originally published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. :-)

grandalf 17y ago

My explanation is a bit different: I propose that what happens is that as people age they get better at avoiding boredom. Also, youth is boring compared with adulthood. Consider grades K-6 where most students have little choice of what subjects to learn about, are often in the care of a single teacher for most of the day, and whose assignments involve lots of repetition (math drills, handwriting drills, spelling drills). This is just plain boring, and so the mind works hard to avoid boredom by daydreaming, planning, etc... but still struggles to stave off boredom. As we age we get more choice about what we want to do, and life gets a bit more dramatic and less boring. I recall being bored during recess in grade school b/c I really didn't like tag or four square. Put a mixed gender group of adults together and who knows what might happen. So the increasing speed of the passage of time is a result both of life becoming less boring and also of the learned ability to minimize boredom. I read articles on my phone when waiting in line or when riding the muni. In general most of my work and leisure time is highly focused to avoid boredom and thus just flies by. Occasionally I have a reminder of how slowly time can pass -- such as when sitting in a waiting room with no reading material or poor quality reading material, etc.

4n00n 17y ago

The relative term is called tangential acceleration.

iterationx 17y ago

I think its because tasks take longer as an adult. For example to accomplish something as a child takes a few hours, homework for example. But to accomplish something significant as an adult could take months or years, like software. So I think we appear to have less time because we can only get 4 significant tasks accomplished a year instead of say 100.

jasonkester 17y ago

I copy/pasted this from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685811, so apologies if it sounds familiar: I notice a huge difference in how much "stuff" happens in my life when I'm traveling vs. when I have a job. Home life is measured in weeks and months, and when you ask somebody what's new, they'll say "not much" and maybe tell you what they did last weekend. Or the weekend before that. Road life is measured in hours. I'll find myself telling somebody a story of this amazing thing that happened earlier on my trip, possibly in another country, and suddenly realize that it was only 3 days ago. A month of travelling compresses so much life into such a short span that it's really strange checking in with friends back in the world that can account for that same month with a single sentence. There are times when life in the 'states can approximate that (the first weeks of a new startup for instance), but it's so easy to drop back into steady state where life is measured in calendar time.

kqr2 17y ago

My take: As we become older, we become more aware of our mortality, in other words, time is running out; therefore time seems to go by faster just like it does when you procrastinate right before a deadline. If we were immortal, I wonder if we would continue to perceive that times go by faster?

tybris 17y ago

Because our lives tend to become less interesting (as in: new experiences) over time.

helveticaman 17y ago

Thank goodness. Highschool and elementary are shitty times for nerds.