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Why children perceive time slower than adults (bbc.com)
68 points by andsoitis 57 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 43 comments



Because working days don't count as living (days spent worrying also don't so being jobless hardly helps). Only secure spare time is life time. After all the chores you have to do besides your job, an average adult doesn't have much time to live. A day per week max. Even if you have full 2-day weekend for yourself you still need a day to recover a bit from the burnout before you can really live. This said, count how many days of life do kids get per annum and how much do adults get. Many don't get any.


Exactly this. Plus, when I was a kid, there were also other kids that had just as much time as me, and so I would hang out and actually do stuff all the time. Now, whenever I have some time off, chances are that no-one else has any time because everyone's busy with their own lives. So I'll just putter around instead of doing something that would possibly create a future memory worth keeping.


As a kid you have friends and no money. As an adult you have money and no friends.

This is tongue in cheek, it's just it's been on my mind a lot as all my close friends have families now. We have all the resources we wanted growing up but no time and no friends to play. =/


Having kids somewhat remedies that. I'm playing Super Mario World on an original SNES with my kids now.


This depends. As an adult your don't necessary "have money". You can only say you "have money" in a useful sense when you have spare money after paying for all the essentials. And this is far from being the case for every adult.


I really hate this aspect of adult living.


Being tired or exhausted from daily/weekly chores is definitely a thing people deal with, but let’s not start calling that “burnout”. Burnout is a much different thing that’s a profound sense of exhaustion that can take years to recover from, and it would be better if we don’t start diluting its meaning.


This depends. Some people just are tired, but some live burtn out, I mean like this[1]. In some cases even having much less real work to do, just because being much more sensitive to some specific stressors they have in their lives. Some burnt out, also some genuinely depressed people still manage being (even without proper medication) reasonably functional and live this way for decades. A 15-hour sleep followed by a day of doing nothing can be a relief even though you can't really recover any close to fully this quick.

I get your point and upvote though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461499


That very much resonates with my thoughts on the matter.

I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.

Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.


I believe having time to be bored (not by doing boring work but by doing nothing) is extremely important for mental health.


I’m a bit surprised how insightful this is. It’s reframed the way I think about this topic.


uh what?

kids go to school. that's hardly better than working. on the contrary, it's worse. i had a lot less freedom to do things the way i liked in school. i "lived" during holidays when i went traveling. once i started working, i was able to incorporate work into my life. i picked jobs that i actually wanted to do, where i would learn something interesting. where i had the freedom to structure my work as i wanted. where i had colleagues that i enjoyed working with. especially as a freelancer i have a lot of freedom. i also picked jobs in other countries, so every day i was learning about new cultures and ways of doing things not only in my free time but also at work. so while i had a full time job, i was also a full time traveler.

so for me the full day is part of life. balancing the priorities, and making the best out of every situation. even chores go into that. i enjoy cooking. i enjoy seeing a clean kitchen. chores are a part of making my home livable. and for most chores i can pick an audiobook or something else to listen to, making the time even more worthwhile.

if you think work and chores are not part of life then they will probably cause you more stress and you'll be in a situation that you can't get out of because you can't stop working and doing chores. on the other hand by incorporating those into living, i can detect things that really cause me stress and avoid them. i can fire bad customers and quit bad jobs. if work is not part of living then changing jobs won't help. if a chore is causing me stress, i find a different way of doing it, or for things like cleaning, maybe try to avoid that needing to be cleaned in the first place.

on the topic of the article: how fast i perceive time depends on how much of that time is spent experiencing something new.

i write a diary that is a reflection of that. days where nothing happens go by fast, and my diary is one paragraph. days that are filled with novel activities cause me to write more, sometimes a lot more.

children spend more time experiencing something new


From what I've seen, perception of time depends a lot on how much time one has experienced. Five years is a quarter of the time experienced by a 20 year old, but not even a tenth for a 60 year old.


I think it's not just proportion. There is a qualitative element. As we age, we have less and less 1st time of any experience and more nth time. So they become routine and less memorable.


This is what people always say because it seems like it would make sense. Not sure I’ve seen anything more concrete than that though.


The article has less reductive reasoning, definitely worth a read

I’m not convinced anybody is any closer at really quantifying this experience, but they tried to control for it


Paying attention to what time it is as things are happening is a wonderful way to counteract the "time flies" phenomenon. Likewise, looking at the clock less often is a wonderful way to make a dreary slog of a process feel like it didn't drag on as bad as it seemed.


Memory lossy compression, keeping us sane. Why on earth would evolution want us to remember last month what we did on 16th, when the day looked exactly same as 15th and 17th? What about same dates but 15 years ago? Absolutely meaningless.

Do novel new intense things in your life, at literally any age, and you will remember them very well, and the feeling of how much time passes will change dramatically, I call it personally 'adding decades of life felt'.

When I did my 2 stints of 3 months backpacking all over India (and a bit of Nepal) around age 30, I wasn't prepared. Every day completely different than previous one, no strict plan just massive Lonely planet book and return flight ticket in 3 months, no phone, no credit card (2008 and 2010).

After few weeks, I felt like I was on the road for 6 months. After 2 months... hard to describe by mere words - the entire life back home, didn't matter which part or when, felt like literal memory of a dream you had last week, very hazy, somehow it felt real since I went cca 1x a week into internet cafes to check emails and yes those were my parents writing back, but were they? It felt brutally distant, and Indian/Nepalese reality felt like the only truth, that always was and always will be. Literal different life with reborn moment somewhere on a plane there.

I managed to recreate exactly same experience on a second visit, 100% since I behaved in same fashion. Much shorter stint in Tanzania afterwards lasting 3 weeks achieved milder effect of it - say it felt like 3-6 months on the road, its not linear how it scales. Did Kilimanjaro for 1 week, Serengeti/Ngorongoro another one, and last week on Zanzibar (way before it became cheap european holiday destination). Again, the key was novelty.

I still remember so many events, people, places etc. from those trips like it happened yesterday. I came back different, and made changes in my life for better, much better. Looking back, it was literal life (re)defining moment. I don't think I can recreate it easily these days, it would have to be done without phone again. But going there into some luxury resort, none of that would happen, its not about distance but how far out of your comfort zone you push yourself out for a long period.


I think age has affect on the brain.

Primarily, if I had to guess, it’s simply what we’re experiencing that makes time feel slower or faster.

Having fun? Time goes by faster.

Boring class? Time goes by slower.

Up all night with a newborn? Those first couple of years feel like a long time.

When that newborn is older and now you’re playing video games, riding bikes, and having fun? The saying goes, “They grow up too fast.”


When you fall into a routine, you tend to compress all of the instances of that routine.


Because childhood is spent waiting to become an adult. Everything is forward looking with the desire to get to experience the next big thing, which gives the impression of a long wait. In the micro you can experience the same as an adult by standing in a long lineup waiting for something you want. That wait in line will feel like it takes forever. But, in the macro adults stop wanting the future to come.


i didn't have that feeling in my childhood at all. i feel this is a cultural problem. in some cultures children are not allowed to make their own experiences, and are told they have to wait until they are grown up. if that is your experience, you have my pity. and i want to scold your parents for denying you a happy childhood. i joined scouts and other groups as a kid, and we went hiking with a tent almost every holidays and 3-day weekends. when i was 15 i started traveling through europe on a bike alone. that's probably on the more extreme side of freedom, but i didn't have the impression that my classmates were longing to be grownup either.


Sorry to hear that your childhood had no hope for the future.

Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.


you may have misunderstood what i meant. i was talking about the idea that my life as a child is bad now and i have a vain hope that life will be better in the future when i am grown up.

my life was bad, and i missed out on many childhood experiences growing up, like i didn't have friends until i joined university. but i didn't know that it was bad. on the contrary i felt that eg not having friends protected from bad influences and the misbehavior i saw in my classmates. life was what it was and i had no idea it could be better.

and frankly, it was for the better. i felt that i had a happy childhood. hoping for a better future would have made my actual childhood experience worse.

it took me decades as an adult to even understand what i was missing and how it affected me. and the most important part, now that i understand that i can fix it and my life now is so much better than i could have even hoped for just a decade ago.

i don't see how children can have a hope for a better life unless they compare their life with that of other people or worse with what they see on tv. (we didn't have a tv, and we preferred it that way), which creates a false hope because you are not those other people and your life will never be like theirs.

only as an adult you can realistically understand which of the bad things in your life are in your power to fix. and in my opinion that is the time where you develop a hope for the future and start working on it.

it took me decades to understand the bad things, and i have more hope for my future now than i have ever had before


It is the repetition of life experiences.

Like how Christmas comes around slowly when you are a kid, but each year it speeds up a little because life has lost its new-ness. So then, your brain takes short cuts - like how when the first journey somewhere takes AGES, but after a few times, it feels a lot quicker (whilst being the same physical time)


It freakin speeds up every year, never stopping, almost exponentially!


Slows right down again when you’re elderly.


When I was little (according to my older siblings) I referred to any past event as happening "yesterday" and anything coming up as "tomorrow" even if it's next week or month.


Sounds metaphorical. Apparently you were a natural-born poet.


Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.


There’s clearly a relationship between the perception of time and memory formation. For example when undergoing heavy sedation, such as for surgery, the time between going under and coming to feels instant. Of course you’re a bit loopy thereafter, but the time when you’re forming absolutely no memories at all is a skip.


This is also my theory. For children, lots of stuff in their lives is new and noteworthy, so they're making new memories all the time. Therefore, time seems slower because they have so many data points to refer back to. I'm nearly 50 and so much of my daily life is routine and definitely _not _ noteworthy. The memories I form are much more sparse. Therefore, time seems to fly by, because there are much fewer data points to reference.


I distinctly remember my shock when I realized the "winter" was coming again. Previous year was thus my whole experienced life-time.

The winter 1956 was indeed difficult in Finland. Because of general strike and Hungarian Uprising elementary things like Milk and Kellog's Corn Flakes were in short supply.


Reminds me of my cat who, after his first experience with winter (hated it), gave me a look of complete and utter shock and disgust upon seeing that it was happening AGAIN, the following year.


I'd like to propose the idea of synaptic pruning.

The brain may have up to 50% less neurons in adulthood than in infancy.

A child is simply experiencing more stuff at each moment of time than adults.

Because, their brain is actually firing more neurons, many of which might be redundant executions. Hence.. the need for pruning.


8th grade is when time speeds up

that is when you become aware of the repetition and rhythm of life

further the less compressible life is the longer it seems

same job for 10 years feels fast since nothing happens, but different jobs every year (good or bad) makes time seem long since there’s so much to remember

also the less you sleep the less you feel alive


Reminds me of the saying, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage


>also the less you sleep the less you feel alive

N=1. Many, many years ago I gently started cutting my sleep down. I feel alive 19-20 hours a day, now.


You might be lowering how long you will tho, sleep is VERY important


Also interesting to check the arguments shared here (Why time speeds Up as you age):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx-3hS1n0v8


If I look back at my childhood I don't particularly have a feeling of time moving slower as a child. I have heard this so often but I don't have the same experience. Perhaps my memory is just too bad.


Article doesn't speak of brain waves, a childs brain waves are in an almost dream like state and absorb everything like a sponge.


Why do we keep seeing this topic?

It has to be due to how many HN readers are themselves children...




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