Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences. I believe our brains compress the information and an entire day that was much like the previous day can just feel like it sped by quickly. Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as you process a lot of new information.
This is my impression as well. Old people who have settled in a routine can tell what year and month it is, but probably have a harder time telling the day or weekday. For them, all days are weekends.
You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations certainly felt considerably shorter.
And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives. My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually matter.
I think I was unintentionally ageist, sorry. I'm fifty myself, it wasn't deliberate.
Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't flunk.
I'm 60. I'm learning to be sensitive about it, while also being aware that there are those that are younger who have insights I don't.
It's a partnership, and it works better when one tries to understand that roles evolve over time - for one's self and for others. Also understand that stereotypes of age (and many other things) are not a great way to go through life.
You weren't being "ageist". It's normal to assume that old people live at home and aren't out doing many things. It's also normal to assume that 16 year olds get acne.
Please don't let someone censor you for acting rationally.
I stand corrected. My main point was that people whose days are more or less identical tend to forget what day it is. The second part of my original comment even shows that it can happen to young people, so age is not the main cause.
Exactly. Young people can lose their teeth in one instant too, but that shouldn't stop us assuming that older people have less teeth. Heck, even teeth don't care how old you are and can be lost at any age.
I think you are misinterpreting OP's comment. They didn't say that old people aren't out doing many things, they said that it was normal to assume that old people aren't out doing many things. There is a difference.
I still think that OP is incorrect that this is evidence that previous comment is not ageist. Just because most people hold the same prejudice doesn't stop it being prejudice.
Back in the 1920's it would have been quite normal for white people to assume that black people (like myself) were inferior. Just because it was normal doesn't mean it wasn't racist.
>Back in the 1920's it would have been quite normal for white people to assume that black people (like myself) were inferior. Just because it was normal doesn't mean it wasn't racist.
Not the same. You can't measure inferiority. You can measure activities, time and age.
I mean, it's not age-ist. Age-related? Age-correlated? Age-esque? Yes, for sure. But "age-ist" brings with it a connotation of being derisive which is definitely not part of this conversation.
That's fine as long as it's ok to point out the negatives of youth.
But even that's not fine. Better to recognize we're all different, whether it be age, race, creed, orientation, cilantro/no-cilantro, whatever. VI vs EMACS tho - 'nother story.
JRPGs? The Persona series is quite interesting, good story telling; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 are both very good; NieR Automata is a great action RPG set in a dystopic future; the old school Zeldas, the original Phantasy Star...
I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of time.
Chrono Trigger is an excellent game! Maybe Chrono Cross (PS1) if you want to play a sequel.
Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play the previous ones.
My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined, but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many hours.
I've seen a different explanation. When you are 10 years old, a year of your life is 1/10th of your life. Relatively, it's a large portion. When you are 50 years old, a year of your life is a much smaller 1/50th portion of total memory, experiences, etc.
This is more intuitive, but I don't know that it makes it more compelling for me. I find the article's hypothesis a bit more interesting, since it's not exactly what one would expect.
> Alternatively, if you go on vacation or change your routine then time will slow down as you process a lot of new information.
Yeah...the first week of a new job feels like a month of the previous job. Four months into it now, and the weeks fly by.
While on vacation, the days feel long. Though once I get back, the week felt short. :-\
I worry about what retirement will be like. On one hand, all my time is free time. On the other, 10 years will probably fly by and I'll have no idea where it went.
This is the typical explanation, and it meshes very well with everyone's day to day experiences.
Vacations to unique places last forever. Never been? Spend 2 weeks in Japan and you'll remember it just as vividly as the best summer from your childhood. Every moment of every day will be long and filled with memories.
Debugging code every day? Yeah of course that's not memorable. Your brain is just tossing away repetitive data.
Feeling like life is going by way too quick? Have a kid. Every day with a baby is unique.
People with large families will have lived 200 subjective years by the time they are 70!
Other advice: Stop doing stuff you are good at. Every few years try to take a new job that you are specifically not good at. Companies that hire people who have succeeded at a lot of different things but not necessarily the thing they are hiring for are likely to be very good places to work. (FWIW my current workplace doesn't hire based on language or tools or background, we hire good people and assume they can pick up what we are doing).
Our brains also filters lots of uninterested stuff automatically. When we’re young, many things are interesting. We spend lots of time processing them and it feels like time goes slowly as we have to “experience” these things fully. As we grew older, lots of things have been experienced and known. The brains recognize the known patterns and just filter them out. The brains are probably micro sleep all time while idling saving energy, and the time keeping is off.
A very simple example which i can replicate at any time, with the same result:
I have serious problems with memorizing places and can easily get lost anywhere where I haven't been yet. So, sometimes(knowing that i have a phone with gps in my pocket) I look at the map beforehand and try to go to some unknown place, on my own, in a limited time, like to a doctor appointment. And everytime it feels like it takes A LOT of time, like if I walked for 30 minutes when it was just 10. If I try it at the same place again, it will feel faster. Eventually, when I stop looking around and just go thinking about smth, like I usually do, it will feel like I walked for 5 minutes, when it actually was 20.
It will not work in the same way if the time won't be limited - I will be more relaxed.
People can spend years solving one problem in their mind and there are not many experiences in your mind until it generates smth you haven't thought about, and this doesn't happen often.
It's totally unscientific but in my opinion it's like when you are hiking a path you never did and when you reach your destination, you hike back. Going back always feels faster even if the pace is exactly the same, but you already know the path, you remember some rock, or that view, or those oaks. And your brain works less.
We have routines when we are small children just like we have when we are adults so it might be that as we grow older the brain is in power saving mode and that feels like going back through a path you already know.
I have the opposite experience when hiking- The way back usually feels like it takes forever. I think it’s because I’m seeing things I’ve already seen, so it’s not as exciting as it was when I saw it the first time on the way in. Same thing for roadtrips too, if I take the same route both ways.
If in the first year of life, you have 100% new experiences, 2nd year, 50% new experiences, etc, and reach an age of around 80, you'll have made half your life's experiences by the age of 20.
I think in retrospect we perceive time through our memories, less so by our momentary experience. If your memories have little variance, you'll feel like time has passed quickly. So if you work some factory job for 40 years, you may feel like life passed by in a blink of a moment.
Anecdotally, I've always felt that traveling to somewhere new feels like a longer experience than coming back from that place, unless the return trip has an emotional component to it (boredom, urgency, anxious to return). I tend to notice the details of the unfamiliar road more. On the way back, my mind has already cached that path.
Regarding vacation or trips in general for me it still feels going by fast and less special as I get older. I recon it has to do with that in the past vacations and trips would be planned for me (by my parents) so everything was a surprise and a discovery. Nowadays I have to plan everything for my family, so I do a lot of research regarding where to go, what to do, what will be most fun. So there is less of a surprise for me in case things do go as planned (like an attraction being closed or not as fun as it would seem). But this also means there is less room for me to be surprised and discover.
Time seeming to speed up isn't a visual phenomena! I don't see people walking faster. People are not talking faster.
It is in recall of recent times, not in the moment, that we feel like time is going by faster.
And your point explains that.
We tend to have fewer memories of recent time, because we had fewer unique experiences relative to when we were young and almost every day was full of new experiences and new things to learn.
I'll definitely agree with this, I'd advise anyone who's not tied down to routinely go on vacations, and even consider moving.
Staying in old routines is comfortable, but to use myself as an example if I just stayed in la complaining about how horrible the city is, I'm robbing myself of a fuller life.
My plan right now is to move abroad for at least a few months or so. I really need to change up things
> Another hunch that I have is that as you get older you tend to have less unique experiences
I have read that explanation several times on different websites, but I don't agree. Had a lot of new and unique things happening to me in the past decade (kids, moving, new job, new country,...). Times still flew. I have talked to friends about this and they have noticed the same thing.
I don't buy the "novelty" thing, either. Between high school and an evening job, about three of those years were the most regimented of my life, and high school definitely wasn't providing enough novelty, in any way, to make up for it. Yet those years felt extremely slow compared to now. I feel like I blink and a season's gone. Fall or Summer used to feel so long back then. And Winter, practically eternal. Now it's like, "wait, didn't Summer just start? Why are the leaves all turning?"
Some time around IIRC 25, the effect really started to take off, and it's never gotten better, no matter how much my life is shaken up.
[EDIT] and on shorter time scales, back then, tell me I've got an hour? Fuck yeah! Enough time to do several things! Now it's like... ugh, barely enough to even start something. Guess I'll putter and tidy the house until it's up, which'll feel like about ten minutes from now.
Another way to look at it: by the time you graduate high school, you will have spent 1/4 of your life there. By the time you are 40, 10 years is 1/4 of your life. By the time you are 80, 20 years is 1/4 of your life.
The relative portions of your life get longer the longer you live.
That's another way to look at it, sure, but it still doesn't seem to explain anything about why perception of time speeds up with age. That's true, but why does it matter?
It's all anecdotal, but having been full time RVing for several months now after selling our house time has slowed to a crawl. Before we sold our house the days flew past at 100mph. It's amazing how little control we can exert on our own perception of the flow of time.
The original article is inaccessible for me but it depends on the experimental protocol.
What "speeds up"? Looking at a clock ticking doing nothing? Eating breakfast? Waiting in line? Watching a movie? An international flight? Memories of a typical work/school day? Memories of a two week vacation? And relative to what? You can't say something "speeds up" without a reference.
For example you can ask : "What feels the longest, a day at Disneyland, or the 8h drive to get there?". And you will probably get different answers based on the context.
Our body doesn't have a single clock, and BTW, neither do computers, so the transmission delay between neurons and the amount of new experiences can each explain a different kind of "speed up".
I also think this is a quite reasonable. For some work on this beyond anecdotal evidence, see https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... . The authors' main finding (in rats and humans) is that the perception of the intensity of a stimulus relates to the perception of its duration, i.e. more intense stimuli are perceived as longer lasting. A speculation beyond the specific study would be that more intense experience generally (perhaps due to the saliency of more unique life events) could lead to a slowed down perception of time.
That's my theory too. In your first 20-30 years there are so many new things to keep your mind busy. Different schools, driver's license, first car, first time seeing a movie, first time seeing a concert, first relationships, first break up, moving out, travel, first job, children and so on. At some point it all becomes a repeat. I feel a lot of movies are just a repeat of what I have seen 30 years ago. Same for music. I can go to India for the fifth time but it's not the same excitement and amount of new experiences as the first time.
I don't know how to get out of this. I can't think of any truly new things to do. Maybe I could go to jail or win Wimbledon? These would be truly new :-)
Learn something completely unfamiliar to you. Something you are going to start off terrible at.
Even better, an activity where the community surrounding it is also vastly different than your typical friends circle. Know a bunch of engineers? Dive into painting or sculpting.
Find a way to twist your brain in a painful new direction.
That makes a ton of sense. The process of dissimulation that we go through as children just to be able to map language to our environment sounds like this. Once an experience is categorized we likely don't have the CPU spin up on the next similar experience. Business as usual. No need to make a note in memory about it.
This is my favourite theory and I liken it to this for those who have driven alot.
The first trip on a new road or a road not travelled for a very long time always feels like it takes the longest. The more you travel that same road often the faster the journey feels. At least to a certain point.
Anecdotally, I've seen this happen on a very small scale.
The first time I drive down a road it seems longer than subsequent times. Once parts of the road become familiar the time it takes to get down the road seems shorter.
Also with increasing responsibilities of childcare and work you don't really even get time to be bored. I get max 2-3 hours per day for "myself" and half of that means just doing doing chores.
As someone who moved to a country where I didn’t speak the language, then changed jobs twice and then moved to a third country I can honestly state the year went by just as fast.
This is why I was enjoying living overseas in different countries because there were so many new experiences some frustrating some good but it did feel like time was moving slower.
I have long believed the same. I also experience this when taking a long drive to a new destination - it seems to take longer to get there than it does to return home.
There is a simpler layman's explanation for this one. As you get older every second of your life starts being a smaller percentage of your overall experience.
When you a 2 years old, 1 hour is 1/17520 of your life.
When you are 50 years old, 1 hour is 1/438000 of your life.
This doesn't provide an actual mechanism though. You'd need evidence that our perception of time is dependent on that ratio and then show us a mechanism for it. On the other hand, the article gives a possible mechanism for a different theory.
The proposed mechanism is that all recalled long-term memories (older than this week) are weighted independently of recency, so as you get older more of your memories are from the past years than the latest year, so the latest year seems less substantial.
This is just more elaboration of the hypothesis. It doesn't actually explain anything neurologically. What's the implementation? How do you plan to test for it?
The article doesn’t explain it neurologically either other than saying “more brain connections means long time to traverse the brain” which is just a bunch of handwaving.
I actually disagree with your novel example. When I read a novel, the first half of the book is building up to the second half. There's so much uncompressed information that I take in. Learning the characters, learning the environment, etc. While I read the same WPM, the second half FEELS faster to me because now I'm on to the good stuff and the details are behind me. I'm over the hump.
I agree with your theory much more than that of the article. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always had the same theory so maybe it’s just confirmation bias.
At any rate, I’m old and I can confirm that the speeding up isn’t just a myth.
Right, and as a long term participant in this realm, I can definitely say that the speeding up is far greater than any cognitive decline I’ve had so far. To be sure - since it’s certainly possible that one wouldn’t notice one’s own decline, I do online courses periodically to 1) learn new stuff and 2) assure myself that the decline isn’t yet too severe.
> I can definitely say that the speeding up is far greater than any cognitive decline I’ve had so far.
"Cognitive decline" is probably the wrong way to think about it. Your cognition changes as you age.
When you're young, you're inundated with lots of information. You can process that information quickly, but you don't know which signals are important.
As you age, you learn what information is important, and what can be filtered out. So even if you're slower, your brain can work more efficiently. It also knows how to take shortcuts.
...at least, that's what I remember reading in my college Psychology textbook five years ago, and it jives with the current article.
I think a lot depends on what timescales you consider to be "speeded up". I don't think the perception that a huge amount of stuff happens between the ages of 16 and 18 and seems like it was only last week between the ages of 30 and 35 has much to do with cognitive decline. Feelings of WTF it's two hours later and I feel like I've only been editing for 10 minutes and just need 10 minutes more, likely are linked to cognitive decline, but I'm young enough to only have that feeling when I'm really, really tired, and I sometimes had it when I was 20 too...
I think I'm wired with the potential to eat more than I burn because the opposite is dangerous (long-term) and its hard to anticipate future burn when I eat.
There would need to be a lot of food 'abundance' for the negative effects of this to ever come to fruition to the point of influencing evolution, and fixing the brain malfunction.
I've heard this on HN before and it seems less likely than an actual neuroscientific interpretation - we don't perceive time in a fractional sense on a moment-to-moment basis.
I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in batch of 100 hours.
The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates and I'm not back to my kid self, it feels that I have tremendously more time now than a few years ago.
I suspect that it's tied to how much present you manage to be.
When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.
I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff, like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time seems to pass slowly.
In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many things and then looking at the clock, it hasn't moved much. This sensation increases when I meditate a lot.
I agree with this completely. As I get older, a much more significant amount of my time is spent on the future. Planning for social events, planning when to do housework or chores, planning projects for work. I think you also do more long-term planning at work as you get older. When I was 22, three months seemed like a long time for a project and a long way away for events. Now I know a quarter (12 weeks) is not much time at all, and getting event invitations for a year in advance seems normal, and time slips by in between.
To your point, meditation helps me quite a bit (along with long cardio and limiting media consumption)
Sit for 5 minutes and try to count to 10 incrementing on the exhale. If you notice yourself thinking of something other than your body sensations like the breath or the counting, start from 1.
There are a lot of different meditation techniques and teachers, and they are as different as are sports and coaches: your body gets exercise, but that's the only common ground. But here it's the mind.
I can only tell you what I have done, the cost and benefit I personally experienced. I cannot make recommendations as it would be utter B.S.
I'm pretty good with my brain, but my attention was lacking to say the least. In search for a solution, I tried meditation on my own. I read books, and tried to sit down by myself.
I failed. Repeatedly.
Frustrated by what was the first time not being good with my head, I ask my doctor, who I knew was a Buddhist doing meditations retreats in caves, to help me find a teacher.
I insisted I wanted meditation only. No mantra or singing. No mythology or holly texts. No prayer or God. No offering, ritual or altar.
She told me the closest thing to what I was looking for was a course of "Vipassana Meditation, in the tradition of S.N Goenka".
It's a meditation technique that you learn during a 10 days courses. Shorter periods are NOT available as a beginner, and the 10 days are really necessary. I advice strongly against quitting in the middle of a course, for your own mental health, even if you believe you can. Once your are in it, you should finish.
You _will_ want to quit. Almost everybody does. Sometimes, I still do on the first day, when I start a new course.
The 10 days are not devoid of mysticism, religious undertone, etc. but they do teach you a technique that can be practiced as an atheist, or a practitioner of another religion, with minimal fuss. Keep in mind, though, that if you are scientifically inclined, the 10 days will grind your gears in many ways. After so long, it still triggers me sometimes, but I've being involved with those people quite deeply now, and I find solace in the fact they are benevolent and dedicated to helping.
I actually lived a year in one of the (numerous, almost 200 in the world) meditation centers, I dated one their accountant (!), and being part of a lot of their activities. They are just regular human beings, with the good, and the bad, but they really want to help, and they do. The accounting books are clean too ^^
The course is free, and you don't need to pay for the teaching, nor the accommodation, or the food. Ever. They will regularly remind you they need donation, and even tell you it's good for you :) I do donate, but it is completely optional, and some people never give anything. It's considered perfectly ok.
As for the 10 days course, it is _hard_. The discipline is strict:
- waking up at 4 am
- no food after 12
- you put any distracting object in a safe you can't access before the end, including your phone, books, wallets or notebooks
- you can't talk, do much exercise
- you meditate 10 hours a day
The hardest part is not the silence, the food or the sleep though. It's the meditation. Provided you practice correctly, it will be extremely challenging. Boredom, physical discomfort or pain, distress, depression, break down, sadness, etc. are only a fraction of the things you may, or may not have to face. And that's only what you can put words on, which is, to my surprise, only a very tiny part of the experience.
The cost, hence, is high.
It's even higher if you decide it's worth it for you to carry on with it daily. It takes time, and effort.
Also, it's a slow process. A steady one, mind you. My life has changed in ways I believe would have not been possible otherwise. Some progresses fade without practice. Some gains are for life even if you stop.
But I've been at it for some time now, and I will continue for the rest of my life. The trade off proved worth it for me.
The most obvious benefits that I personally experienced:
- my social, love and professional life have completely shifted. I had what looked like autistic traits, but they have melted. I'm considered an extrovert now.
- I am happier. It was not a straight transformation. I had depressive periods. But the trend on 15 years is that, all in all, I'm much, much happier than when I started. This by itself makes the technique worth it, as it leads you, little by little, to decouple happiness from circumstances.
- I know myself better. This means I accept myself more as I am, I have less illusion about myself, and also I live my life according to that knowledge, instead of hitting an invisible wall. If I'd share what I learned with you, you would think it's trivial, obvious things. But making them yours make all the difference.
- I'm more productive. It's a small detail compared to the rest, but a nice boost.
- I am more at peace with the suffering of our human condition. Less afraid of death, less angry with people destroying things, less depressed by the state of society. I forgive a lot now. Including myself. I'm ok hurting people too, which is strange to say, and not what you think would be the result of meditation.
In fact, I became less minimalist and more materialist with time. I don't look the stereotype of a wise, zen person. Also, some areas in my life I desperately wanted to work on didn't move at all. I eat too much, I still get angry for some things that are so superficial in retrospect. So be careful with expectations.
You can find more information about this particular technique and the related courses here:
I've been pracitising meditation for nearly 10 years, and I also experience this effect.
I think the more you meditate, the more you unlearn precious patterns, memories, etc. that were clogging up your brain. Then you have more time to experience the present moment, and your brain has more capacity to process what's going on now rather than what happened to you previously.
Just to add another data point: I've been meditating for 8 years now. I did a 10-day vipassana course 3 years ago. I meditate everyday (usually using Sam Harris' app, but not always).
As much as I'd like to agree with you, I'm not sure I can, i.e. I can't say that time seems to pass less quickly since I've started meditating regularly.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I have a 3-year-old son (i.e. I always feel like I should have more time, even when I consciously plan to not do anything)? Maybe I don't meditate "the right way"? Or maybe I'm just not a good judge of how I perceive time. I don't know.
I could be completely wrong, time passing is a very subjective experience after all, and humans are very keen on creating theories based on impressions.
I would add I started experiencing time slowing down once I did a one year stay at a Vipassana center. I also meditate 2 hours a day now. My first 10 years of meditation, I didn't felt it.
I wish I could find the time to meditate for more than 10-20 minutes everyday. But between family, sleep, exercise, work, hobbies, friends, etc., it's difficult to do it, unless I sacrifice something else. It seems like it's part of the problem: feeling that you have too many things to do will lead to the impression that time passes too quickly.
But I can definitely believe that the more you meditate, the more you will experience things differently. My 10-day vipassana course was already an intense experience compared to meditating 10-20 minutes every day!
Not to mention you should cook, buy fresh food, stay informed, be politically active, learn new things, keep your house clean, recycle, do health checks up, get a hair cut, but don't use your car for everything and spend some time in nature. Don't forget to read, meet new people, get to zero inbox and fix your shower curtain.
Exactly. It never ends. :) Life is all about prioritizing things. And probably compassion/self-compassion (i.e. don't be so harsh with yourself and other people - which helps with priorities, BTW).
Does it really? To me time speeds up when I am not doing new things. When I do new things time goes as slow now as it did 20 years ago. Just pull up your life by its roots and time slows down to a crawl, then as you get used to your new life it gradually speeds up towards infinity, so you just repeat this process to perceptually live longer.
This is a completely vapid article. The headline implies an answer. This short article starts with "nobody knows" and ends with "one guy's random idea is...".
OP here. The co-ordinates for why I posted it were, I was wondering whether time perception change is a thing, searched, recognized the author's name from some of his other work, coupled with the harvard source, and am interested in what others think about the topic.
The perception is pretty plausibly an information processing phenomenon, and there are mechanisms for that, so pro thinkers addressing it seemed interesting enough to share. If it brings down the level of discussion, I would of course apologize.
I really don't feel this at all. I am constantly doing new things, constantly learning things, and time feels like it stretches on forever. I'm over 40, so this isn't the effect of me just starting my career.
10 years ago feels 10 years ago, and this effect of time speeding up just doesn't register with me.
I am at 30 and the last year has felt just as long as 2011 did for me. I've been seeing these articles and comments about time speeding up since my teens and I am still waiting for it to happen to me. I am inclined to think the perception of time is tied to routine or behaviour and ageing is merely a confounder. This would explain the lack of time dilation for me - my life is still somewhat unstable and filled with novelty, so I don't really forget large chunks of time doing routine stuff.
The paper referenced in the article seems to be at [1]. Its not in a scientific journal and had only has one author, who is a professor of mechanical engineering [2]. I'm not a neurologist or a professor of anything, but this all seems more like a pet a theory than something based on scientific evidence.
The reason why we imagine time pass faster when we get older is related to how we experience and remember events during life.
As events excite us, the perception of that particular Time-Event is short but since we were fully engaged at that time, we remember it more in detail and thus taking longer. Vis versa, time spend in boredom is perceived as passing slowly but since nothing out of the ordinary is happening, we remember it as a quick period with nit much detail.
Couple that with the exciting youth and dreadful routine as an adult, your life in your older ages becomes repetitive plus, depending on how much knowledge you like to consume,feels easier to predict and thus by default less exciting. Experience kills the novelty and partially the excitement, resulting in the opinion that when you wake up one morning feeling like the past 5 years have passt with a blink of an eye, that time flies by.
I think that hobbies besides your daily routine can help you battle that feeling of lost years.
On the other hand I found something else helpful: you gotta figure out your calibration of your routine:novelty ratio. If you are a person that likes 60% novelty and 40% routine but you are stuck in a job that is very repetitive or doesn't leave you with enough energy after work, you'll end up earlier in that "life is passing too quickly category".
But if you somewhat can adjust your life to that calibration then you experience the right amount of novelty that makes you feel that life takes exactly as long as needed.
As we get older, life becomes more routine. Fewer unique experiences = less space taken up in memory = later years appear to have moved faster in retrospect.
I've always assumed part of it is more relative. Meaning: When I'm 5, 10 years old seems like a lifetime away... because it is. Going from 5 to 6 is, relatively speaking, the same as going from 50 to 60. I assume my brain has so much to look back on as I'm older to compare against that 1 year just "feels" like less now.
With that said, I'm sure there's a million explanations. And all of them are probably, at least somewhat, true.
I would have expected better especially from Harvard, it's already known why. Subjective time is measured in terms of biological impact events.
Basically the more novel experiences you have the slower time seems to pass for you, the less novel (interesting) stuff you do the faster time passes because there's no markers.
This stuff has been known for literally decades now.
The novel experiences explanation is very interesting but I'd wonder whether novel ideas constitute experiences, or are experiences something that requires more action or something else?
Anecdotally, I've been sitting in the same house for 20 months of the pandemic and have a diminished sense of time, and while in that time I've taken up music and new instruments, written volumes, transformed physically (weight loss), kept up regular highly intense physical hobbies, added and removed clients/jobs, worked in vastly different fields.
However, I've always pursued novelty, and I'd wonder if this accepted explanation would indicate that the brain is now just bored of novelty, or if something about these things were not sufficiently novel experiences, and where does that sufficiency land?
I discovered one thing about my hearing that, I think, implies the same thing this article is talking about. When we hear a quick sequence of distinct sounds, like a ringing bell for instance, depending on how fast one sound follows the other we may be aware of each individual sound or perceive everything as a blur. Now what I observed is that the threshold between “individual sounds” and “blurry” is determined by the brain, not by the physics of sound. Our brains have a “clock speed” which limits the “sample rate” for our perception of reality.
I suspect that the internal clock slows down as we age. That wouldn’t affect our perception of the speed of physical events, because those are relative to each other, but it would reduce the ratio of physical events per “clock cycles”, giving us the sensation of a shrinking of the time dimension. The past becomes more “blurry”, so to speak.
Age might result in neural complexities, but this can apparently be tampered with to some extent.
When you watch a movie for the first time, it seems to last longer than when you watch it a second time. It seems to me that as our brain is processing new information our perception of time is dilated.
As we grow older, we have to learn less about the world and consequently time is perceived as quicker. I suspect this is why during a drug induced euphoria the experience seems like it can last an eternity and time ceases to exist. Our brain is processing and adapting to the stimuli much as we were doing in our youth.
There are of course two different perceptions of time. Current and retrospective. Some days can seem to last forever, but by the end of the week you end up feeling like the week went by very fast. The opposite is true, as well as a mix of both.
If our perception of events are in relation to our past experiences, that could also explain this phenomenon. For example let's say you think back to that carefree, fun summer when you were five years old and marvel at how long that seemed to last, compared to the summer at age thirty that you barely remember. Well that 3-month summer made up 3 / (5 x 12) or 5% of your life at age five but only 3 / ( 30 x 12) or 0.8% of your life at age thirty, so the memory from age five would be 6x more salient (ignoring other factors like uniqueness of experience, how "present" you are, visual information processing, etc). Or maybe you were just on a real bender that summer you turned 30.
edit: just realized emreb has a similar comment after reading further down the thread!
The hypothesis that our brain "slows down" does not really require a biological / chemical / physical explanation to be proven correct.
All it takes it looking at how fast folks take to [solve problems / write an essay / read through a book / grok a new concept / learn a new skill] after a certain age.
This is certainly measurable and IMO rather easy to, if only when applying it to yourself when you're past your prime (I know I am).
And jumping from that rather easy to establish fact to a perception of time going faster is not exactly a stretch.
In short ... unless they've invented new ways to measure the deterioration of the brain with age and accurately correlate it with information processing capabilities, I'm not seeing much of an insight from this article.
I'm curious to know how time passes for those who can't/couldn't see..
I always assumed time passing rapidly had to do with novelty, when you are a child, everything is novel, as you get older, situations become less novel and aren't "remembered".
Just like people can have variations in inner voice or mental imagery, I wonder if different people perceive the flow of time differently. For me, I feel like I have a weak long term memory. Things from my childhood are pretty much gone and and it takes quite a lot of effort to recall things from even a few months ago. I also have no problem slowing down and having a fresh experience of a familiar thing. A few minutes sometimes can stretch out and feel like much longer. And when I do some very new, like go to a new country, I can have a childlike experience of each day stretching on and on and a month seeming like a year.
What I've speculated is that perception of time is relative to how much you've experienced, i.e. how long you've been alive.
When you're a child, a week seems like a long time, because you haven't lived very many weeks. A year seems like an eternity, because relatively few have passed.
As more of these increasingly large time units get behind you, years, then decades... you have a firsthand understanding of what living their respective durations feels like.
It's like by living you're calibrating your ability to measure time properly, and then you die.
Does the rate of speed up at least level off at some point or does it just keep accelerating? I'd hate to think the last few years of my life go by in what I currently perceive as a few months.
IMHO, in middle age there's more to do and worry about. For example, I took off today and the morning was over before I knew it. That's because I spent an hour trying to make sure that my insurance agent is not gouging me by getting other insurance quotes and then trying to bring my premium down by increasing deductible. Spent some time going over property tax statement and HOA notice that rates are going to go up again. I had to none of these things when I was younger.
Let's see. I am a dad to two kids, a husband, with a day job as a software engineer, but working on my side project when the wife and kids have gone to bed. (yes I'm on HN now but I'm going to fire up gedit soon -- trust me.) I don't even know what free time means any more.
Back when I was a seven years old I had not a care in the world, was often bored. Time passed slooowly. I was sure my eighth birthday would never arrive. I turned 50 in June.
I've thought about this phenomenon a good bit as I get older. My hypothesis is that the older you get periods of time take up smaller and smaller fractions of your life span, and therefore seem to pass more quickly.
When you are 10 years old a year is a large fraction of the total time you have been alive so it feels much longer than when you are 60 and that same year is only 1/60 of your life.
edit: reading further down I see I'm not the only one who had this same idea :)
I don't see anyone in this thread discussing sleep.
At least anecdotally, I know a lot of people who get worse sleep as they get older. Sleep quality is, if I'm not mistaken, at least indirectly correlated with memory. So it seems reasonable to believe, in addition to everything else people are saying here, that one possible reason time flies by is that we don't get the sleep to make those memories stick.
This explanation misses a lot. When I watch an advert a second time, it seems to pass a lot faster than the first watch. My brain however has not changed at all. It seems that novelty is the main factor causing the perceived slowdown of time and that lack of novelty (less things surprise me as I age) makes time seem to pass more quickly. This also explains why staycations pass a lot faster than a trip somewhere new.
If "longer signal processing ways" are the cause for the perceived speed up of time, then every minute, every hour would feel shorter, wouldn't it? This isn't what most people are experiencing as they age though - single days pass just as fast (or slow) as they did back in the days. But it's the months and years that feel like on fast forward.
Interesting view, I thought it happens as with computers, that your memory gets saturated with wast amount of things and emotions, so your CPU with age starts getting slower, and as it slows down as your brain does not work as fast as when we were young, we perceive time as it appear to pass faster.
But it seems according article my perception was wrong ...
I think time speeds up as we grow older because we constantly and subconsciously make predictions. If we subjectively measure time by the flow of unexpected events, as we age, fewer of our predictions are wrong, so there are fewer such events, which speeds up time. New experiences and places slow it down again.
I like to think of it kind of like how time machine saves to hard disk. If there aren't any changes than there isn't a lot of disk space used (in our case as adults there isn't much long term memory put down, therefore time feels faster).
> As we age, he argues, the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increases
I thought the number of neural connections decreased throughout most of life? They surge in babies and teenagers, but are otherwise declining most of the time.
I always just thought it was down to a unit of time relative to your age. So as a 1 year old a year represent your entire life, so seems really long. As a 40 year old a year is just a fraction of your life, so seems much less significant.
Dunno about that. I'm a bit over 30 and feel like I'm 80 mentally (physically I'm as fit as I was in my 20's and still as energetic). I was always told that time perception would speed up but it really hasn't.
If true, how do you fight this without actually going on more unique experiences?
I like to think there are some weird swirly images or static noise I can watch/listen to while going about my life that will "novelize" everything. hah.
The easiest explanation is that when I am 1 year old, my second year is twice as long as I've ever lived. If you feel time in relation to anything, like the article suggests, this is an easier jump.
I know there have been multiple threads on this general theme in the past, but time has sped up enough that I can't remember what they were, and it's not the easiest thing to search for. Anybody?
